State, Society, and the Politics of Democratic Backsliding

Abstract

Recent scholarship on democratic backsliding has focused on measuring its global prevalence and identifying the causal processes and mechanisms that produce or inhibit backsliding around the world. But many of the political dynamics that motivate both scholarly and popular concern about the state of democracy are about the desired model of society and the proper role of the state rather than about electoral democracy. This manuscript examines pluralist, populist, corporatist, and integralist models of state-society relations, conceptualizing them with reference to normative models of the modern state and beliefs about the nature of society, and using them to identify distinct varieties of democratic backsliding and axes of conflict within backsliders. Treating conflict over the social ontology of the modern state as "democratic backsliding" obscures a deeper politics of state-society relations, and how those politics independently shape regime contestation in contemporary electoral regimes.

Keywords: democratic backsliding, elections, democracy, corporatism, integralism, populism, social ontology, state, society