In their response to “Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding,” Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni defend the proposition that democracies’ failure to deliver is a primary cause of democratic backsliding. Yet evidence that poor economic performance correlates with citizen dissatisfaction with democracy falls short as an explanation of backsliding. Democracy has persisted in some faltering economies while eroding in various strong economies. Moreover, the leaders driving the rise of electoral autocracy were often elected promising to reform, not dismantle, democracy. A focus on the methods and motivations of such leaders, and the failure of existing guardrails to constrain them, remains essential to explaining democracy backsliding.
We greatly appreciate the thoughtful reply by Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann, and Beatriz Magaloni to our recent essay in these pages, “Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding,” and welcome the spirit of nuanced debate it embodies. Coming to analytical terms with the widespread contemporary scourge of democratic backsliding, as well as the encouraging presence of ongoing democratic resilience in many countries, is a challenge for political observers and analysts. It is particularly difficult and important to find the right balance between “supply-side” and “demand-side” explanations of backsliding.
In their response, Fukuyama, Dann, and Magaloni look at a large number of cases, backsliding and non-backsliding alike, “to determine whether performance is an antecedent condition with no genuine effect.” Yet we did not say that economic performance has no explanatory effect, only a partial one. As we argued, the thesis that democracy not delivering is the cause of backsliding “has some explanatory power in certain cases, but little in others. Even where the thesis does apply, it involves considerable empirical complexity and requires nuanced interpretation.” We stand by that statement.
The inadequacy of economic performance as a central explanation of backsliding, in our view, only comes into sharper relief when one widens the lens to look at cases of backsliding and non-backsliding together. Consider, for example, the case of the United States and four of its closest economic and sociocultural peers — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Within the group, the United States had the strongest economic growth in 2020–24, with a higher average GDP per capita growth rate across those years than any of the other countries.1 All five countries experienced a surge of inflation in 2022, with peaks in the range of 7 to 11 percent. Yet only the United States is experiencing serious democratic tremors and what many observers worry is a process of incipient democratic backsliding. We believe that this fact should prompt a broad inquiry into the causes of U.S. democratic problems — and the lack of similarly serious problems in the others — rather than an insistence on economic performance as the primary causal factor. And we hold the same view for many of the other important cases of backsliding that we examined whose economic performance was strong in the years leading up to their periods of backsliding.
Fukuyama, Dann, and Magaloni offer a data-rich argument to establish that poor economic performance corrodes citizens’ support for and trust in democracy. Yet we urge caution about overreliance on public-opinion surveys to quantify voters’ perceptions of and “satisfaction with democracy.” As Larry Bartels notes in Democracy Erodes from the Top, “the focus on public opinion as a barometer for democratic functioning is itself fundamentally misguided.”2 This is in no small part due to measurement error, as there is no singular definition of democracy that voters agree upon.
We were surprised that Fukuyama, Dann, and Magaloni did not go beyond their aforementioned conclusion to more directly address the main question raised in our essay: Why is backsliding occurring in many countries? The authors note that some democracies with poor economic performance are the least trusting of their governments, such as Greece, Italy, Japan, and Spain. Yet these are all cases where backsliding has not occurred.
In fact, our respondents’ only effort to draw a causal link between low citizen support for democracy and backsliding comes in their statement that “when poor economic management leads to major crises, the public often loses faith in incumbents and the political system as a whole, sometimes manifesting in . . . voting for anti-institutional outsiders.” Yet many leaders who have driven backsliding were not anti-institutional outsiders at the time of their election. When Viktor Orbán became prime minister in 2010, he was head of one of Hungary’s largest political parties and had previously served as prime minister. When Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina became president in 2009, she likewise led one of the main political parties in her country and had served as prime minister in the 1990s. Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan had been active in politics his whole adult life and served as mayor of Istanbul prior to becoming prime minister in 2003. Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu was a longtime politician and had served both as leader of the opposition and as prime minister for four years in the 1990s before returning as prime minister in 2009.
As we argued in our essay — an argument that Fukuyama, Dann, and Magaloni do not address — the voters electing the world leaders who subsequently took their countries down the road of electoral autocracy were in many cases choosing well-known, experienced political figures who were promising to reform democracy, not dismantle it. We continue to believe that understanding why and how such leaders decided to push against democratic constraints on their power once in office — and why those constraints failed to contain them — should be at the heart of understanding the dispiriting spread of democratic backsliding around the world, in strong and weak economic performers alike.
NOTES
1. According to data from World Economics, from 2020 through 2024, the United States had an average annual GDP per capita growth rate of 1.9 percent. Australia’s annual average was 0.92 percent, New Zealand’s was 0.42 percent, the United Kingdom’s was 0.3 percent, and Canada’s was -0.18 percent.
2. Larry M. Bartels, Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens, and the Challenge of Populism in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), 3.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press
Image Credit: Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images