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100 Foreign Aff. 174 (2021)
Voters against Democracy: The Roots of Autocratic Resurgence

handle is hein.journals/fora100 and id is 624 raw text is: Voters Against Democracy The Roots of Autocratic Resurgence Pippa Norris Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World BY STEPHAN HAGGARD AND ROBERT KAUFMAN. Cambridge University Press, 2021, 102 pp. At the heart of his inaugural address, delivered just two weeks after a violent mob sacked the U.S. Capitol, President Joe Biden claimed that the transfer of power reflected American democracy's victory over the forces of insurrection, chaos, and intolerance. At this hour, my friends, democracy has prevailed, he said in a speech that used the term democracy more than any of his predecessors' inaugural addresses. A month later, he revisited the theme at the Munich Security Conference, where he repudiated the America first policies of former President Donald Trump and committed to protecting human rights around the world. Democracy doesn't happen by accident, he said. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it. And in the contest between PIPPA NORRIS is Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School and the author, with Ronald Inglehart, of Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritar- ian Populism. authoritarianism and democracy, the United States was, after a brief hiatus, again on the right side of history. Amer- ica is back, Biden claimed. But it's hard to be so optimistic about liberal democracy. The world has moved on from the heady days of the so-called third wave of democratization, which started in Greece, Portugal, and Spain in the 1970s, spread through Latin America in the 1980s, and acceler- ated in eastern Europe in the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nowadays, the news is much grimmer. The Arab Spring ended in renewed repression in Egypt and Syria. During the last decade, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping have tightened their grip on power. Massive street protests in Belarus, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and Russia have been met with violent repression. Illiberalism is rising in Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro, in Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and in the Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte. Even in long-standing liberal democracies, including the United States, authoritar- ian populist leaders have risen to power. In their new book, Backsliding, Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman aim to explain today's democratic regress. Their study makes a stimulat- ing contribution to the growing work on backsliding, seeking to identify leading cases around the world and describe their causes. Haggard and Kaufman emphasize the role played by governing elites, arguing that backslid- ing commonly occurs when leaders gradually dismantle checks and balances with the complicity of legislative elites. In so doing, however, the authors 174 FOREIGN AFFAIRS