2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition

Concerns about democratic backsliding have intensified over the past two decades, with indices from V-Dem, Freedom House, and the Economist Intelligence Unit all recording a sustained global decline in the quality of democratic governance since around 2006. The pattern is no longer confined to fragile or transitional states: established democracies have experienced erosion of judicial independence, capture of electoral institutions, restrictions on press freedom, and the normalization of executive overreach. Hungary's transformation into what Prime Minister Viktor Orbán himself termed an 'illiberal democracy,' the constitutional crises in Poland under PiS, Turkey's post-2016 consolidation under President Erdoğan, and the contested 2020 U.S. election and January 6th Capitol attack have become reference cases in a growing comparative literature on autocratization. The core dispute centers on both diagnosis and remedy. Scholars debate whether the principal threat is exogenous — foreign interference, disinformation campaigns, and transnational authoritarian networks linking Moscow, Beijing, and their partners — or endogenous, rooted in rising inequality, polarization, declining trust in institutions, and the structural effects of social media on public discourse. Related debates concern whether democratic decline proceeds primarily through dramatic ruptures (coups, stolen elections) or through incremental, legalistic 'autocratic legalism' that hollows institutions while preserving democratic form. Responses range from militant-democracy measures (party bans, disqualification of antidemocratic candidates) to institutional reforms such as proportional representation, independent electoral commissions, and stronger anti-corruption frameworks. Today the agenda has shifted from understanding backsliding to actively rebuilding. The Summit for Democracy process launched in 2021, EU rule-of-law conditionality on cohesion funds, and renewed attention to civic education and local democratic resilience reflect this turn. Yet 2024's record election year produced mixed signals: incumbents fell in several democracies, Poland reversed course after PiS's defeat, but elsewhere illiberal forces consolidated or advanced. The political-science community is increasingly asked not only to explain decline but to specify which interventions — constitutional, electoral, economic, or cultural — can durably restore democratic practice.