Where is the conference being held?

The conference will take place in Vienna, AUT.

What is the primary focus of this event?

The event focuses on 'Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today', examining the factors contributing to authoritarian shifts.

When does the conference take place?

The conference is scheduled from May twenty-fourth to May twenty-sixth.

Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today

Name: Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today
Start: 2027-05-24T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-05-26T00:00:00Z
Location: Vienna

May 24–26, 2027Vienna, AustriaIn-person

Registration open

This conference, held in Vienna, AUT, focuses on the conditions that lead to and sustain authoritarian turns, both historically and in contemporary contexts. It aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of the pressures democracies face, drawing insights from various disciplines and global experiences. The event seeks to foster critical discussion on the mechanisms and factors contributing to shifts away from democratic governance.

Committees & topics

Topics
The Global State of Democracy: Erosion and Resilience · Authoritarianism: Old Forms and New Variants · Economic Liberalism and Its Political Consequences · Political Authoritarianism: Mechanisms of Capture · Constitutional Fragility and the Rule of Law · Political Collapse: From Crisis to Regime Breakdown · Technological Developments and the Future of Political Order · Politico-Economic Developments: Inequality, Crisis, and Regime Type

Why it matters

The global political landscape is increasingly marked by challenges to democratic norms and institutions. Understanding the 'authoritarian turn' is crucial for policymakers, academics, and civil society, as it directly impacts international relations, human rights, and global stability. This conference offers a platform to analyze these complex dynamics, moving beyond superficial observations to delve into underlying causes and historical parallels.

The insights gained from such discussions can inform strategies for strengthening democratic resilience and countering authoritarian trends. By examining both historical precedents and current manifestations, participants can develop a more nuanced perspective on how societies transition towards or away from democratic rule. This comparative approach is vital for identifying common patterns and unique contextual factors that drive these political shifts.

How to prepare

To effectively engage with the themes of this conference, participants should consider undertaking a “dynamic analysis” of political systems currently experiencing democratic backsliding or authoritarian consolidation. This involves not just identifying symptoms but understanding the historical, economic, and social conditions that enable such transitions. A key aspect of preparation would be to research specific case studies, focusing on the interplay of internal and external pressures.

Furthermore, understanding the various “hidden stakeholders” in political transitions is essential. Often, the actors driving or resisting authoritarian turns are not immediately apparent, and their motivations and influence require careful mapping. Engaging with frameworks such as the “stakeholder mapping workshop” can provide valuable tools for dissecting complex political environments and identifying leverage points for democratic advocacy or intervention.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Austria

As the host nation, AUT provides a neutral and academically robust setting for critical discussions on global democratic trends.

Role in topic

AUT offers a stable democratic context from which to observe and analyze global challenges to democracy, fostering an environment conducive to scholarly exchange on sensitive political topics.

Russia

Represents a prominent example of a state that has undergone a significant authoritarian consolidation, offering a case study for the conference's themes.

Role in topic

The trajectory of RUS provides a critical contemporary example for examining the conditions and mechanisms of an authoritarian turn, particularly concerning state control and political opposition.

China

Illustrates a long-standing authoritarian system that has adapted and modernized, presenting a distinct model for analysis.

Role in topic

CHN serves as a crucial case for understanding the resilience and evolution of authoritarian governance, especially in the context of economic development and technological control.

United States

A mature democracy that has recently experienced internal pressures and challenges to its democratic institutions, offering a perspective on democratic resilience.

Role in topic

The recent political polarization and institutional stress in USA provide a contemporary example of how even established democracies can face significant internal challenges that test their foundational principles.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

The Global State of Democracy: Erosion and Resilience

Democracy as a system of competitive elections, individual rights, and constrained executive power expanded rapidly after 1945 and again following the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989-1991, a wave Samuel Huntington termed the 'third wave' of democratization. By the mid-2000s, however, indices such as Freedom House, V-Dem, and the Economist Intelligence Unit began registering sustained democratic regression, with backsliding visible in established democracies (United States, Hungary, Israel) and consolidating ones (Turkey, India, Brazil, the Philippines) alike. The 2008 financial crisis, the migration politics of the mid-2010s, and the COVID-19 pandemic each accelerated public distrust in liberal institutions. Today roughly two-thirds of the world's population lives under regimes V-Dem classifies as autocratizing or autocratic. The debate is no longer whether democracy is in retreat but why: scholars point to economic dislocation, the hollowing out of party systems, polarization amplified by digital media, and the strategic learning of would-be autocrats who dismantle checks through legal rather than overtly coercive means. This committee examines the structural conditions under which democracy persists or fails, drawing on both interwar precedents and twenty-first century cases.

Key players

Authoritarianism: Old Forms and New Variants

Authoritarianism in its twentieth-century forms — fascist, communist, and bureaucratic-military — relied on mass parties, ideological mobilization, and overt repression. The interwar collapse of European democracies in Italy (1922), Germany (1933), and Spain (1939), as well as Latin American military takeovers from the 1960s through the 1980s, established the classical typologies still used by scholars such as Juan Linz and Guillermo O'Donnell. After 1989 these regimes appeared to be in terminal decline. Contemporary authoritarianism, by contrast, is often 'competitive' or 'electoral' (Levitsky and Way): rulers retain elections, courts, and parliaments but hollow out their independence. Russia under Vladimir Putin, China under Xi Jinping's recentralization, Hungary under Viktor Orbán, and Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro illustrate distinct pathways — personalist, party-led, and hybrid. These regimes increasingly cooperate, sharing surveillance technology, sanctions-evasion practices, and narratives challenging liberal universalism. Understanding how authoritarian rule is built and sustained is central to anticipating the conditions of the present 'authoritarian turn.'

Key players

Economic Liberalism and Its Political Consequences

Economic liberalism — the doctrine of open markets, free trade, deregulation, and constrained state intervention — became the dominant global paradigm after the Bretton Woods system's evolution and especially after the 1980s 'Washington Consensus.' It accompanied the third wave of democratization and was widely believed to be mutually reinforcing with political freedom, an assumption codified in works like Francis Fukuyama's 'End of History' (1992). Globalization between 1990 and 2008 produced unprecedented poverty reduction, particularly in Asia, but also widening intra-country inequality and the deindustrialization of regions in North America and Europe. The 2008 financial crisis fractured the consensus. Austerity politics in Europe, the China shock in Western labor markets, and rising perceptions of elite capture created openings for populist and nationalist movements that explicitly link liberal economics to democratic decay. Today even mainstream policy debates — industrial policy in the United States and EU, supply-chain 'de-risking' from China, and reassessments by the IMF — reflect a partial retreat from orthodox liberalism. The committee examines whether economic liberalism enables or undermines democratic stability under contemporary conditions.

Key players

Political Authoritarianism: Mechanisms of Capture

Political authoritarianism today rarely arrives through coups or revolutions. Instead, as Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Kim Lane Scheppele have documented, elected leaders progressively capture the institutions designed to constrain them: packing constitutional courts (Hungary 2010-2013, Poland 2015-2023), redrawing electoral rules, criminalizing opposition figures, capturing public broadcasters, and weaponizing tax and regulatory agencies against critics. The toolkit is portable and increasingly studied as a coherent playbook. The pattern has appeared across regime types and regions: Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's consolidation after the 2016 coup attempt; Narendra Modi's pressures on media, civil society, and federal institutions; Nayib Bukele's suspension of constitutional norms in El Salvador alongside high public approval; and Donald Trump's contestation of the 2020 U.S. election results. Crucially, these processes often retain majoritarian legitimacy, complicating external responses. This committee dissects the sequencing of institutional capture and the points at which democratic actors can still credibly resist.

Key players

Constitutional Fragility and the Rule of Law

Constitutions are widely assumed to be the durable backbone of democratic government, yet comparative research by Tom Ginsburg and others shows that the median national constitution lasts only about 17 years. Fragility arises from multiple sources: ambiguous emergency clauses, weak judicial independence, low amendment thresholds, and norms that depend on elite forbearance rather than legal text. Weimar Germany remains the canonical warning — a technically liberal 1919 constitution whose Article 48 emergency powers facilitated Hitler's 1933 consolidation. Contemporary cases reveal how constitutional engineering both protects and erodes democracy. Hungary's 2011 Fundamental Law, Venezuela's 1999 Bolivarian Constitution, and Russia's 2020 amendments illustrate constitutions being rewritten to entrench incumbents. Conversely, Chile's failed 2022 and 2023 constitutional referenda, South Africa's 1996 settlement, and Kenya's 2010 charter show how constitutional moments can stabilize or polarize. The committee considers what design features and political conditions allow constitutional orders to absorb stress without breaking.

Key players

Political Collapse: From Crisis to Regime Breakdown

Political collapse — the breakdown of effective state authority or the abrupt end of a regime type — has historically followed identifiable patterns: military defeat (Germany 1918, 1945), revolutionary mobilization (Russia 1917, Iran 1979), elite defection (Soviet Union 1991), or compounding economic and legitimacy crises (Weimar Germany, contemporary Lebanon and Venezuela). The interwar collapse of European democracies remains the most studied case, with scholars identifying hyperinflation, paramilitarism, party-system fragmentation, and elite collusion with anti-system forces as key accelerants. In the twenty-first century, collapse takes new forms. Afghanistan's 2021 state implosion, Sudan's 2023 war between rival generals, Lebanon's prolonged institutional paralysis, Myanmar's 2021 coup and ensuing civil war, and Haiti's effective loss of central authority all show how the international community struggles to prevent or respond to such breakdowns. The committee examines warning indicators — fiscal exhaustion, security-sector fragmentation, legitimacy collapse — and the differing trajectories of states that recover versus those that fragment further.

Key players

Technological Developments and the Future of Political Order

Information technology has reshaped politics at every stage of its diffusion. The early internet was widely theorized as inherently democratizing — a view popularized during the 2010-2011 Arab uprisings. The subsequent decade demonstrated that the same tools enable mass surveillance, algorithmic amplification of extremism, foreign interference (documented in U.S. 2016, French 2017, and other elections), and the suppression of dissent. China's social credit pilots and integrated surveillance in Xinjiang, alongside the global export of Chinese and Israeli monitoring systems, have established what Shoshana Zuboff and others describe as new infrastructures of control. Generative AI, deployed at scale since 2022-2023, intensifies these dynamics: synthetic media erode evidentiary trust, micro-targeted persuasion becomes cheaper, and large-language models can be tuned for censorship or propaganda. At the same time, encryption, civic-tech platforms, and open-source intelligence give pro-democracy actors new capacities. The 2024 EU AI Act, the U.S. Executive Order on AI, and the UN Global Digital Compact (2024) mark early attempts at governance. The committee weighs whether technology is, on net, accelerating the authoritarian turn or providing the tools to reverse it.

Key players

Politico-Economic Developments: Inequality, Crisis, and Regime Type

The relationship between economic conditions and regime type has been a central preoccupation since Seymour Martin Lipset's 1959 argument that economic development underpins democracy. The interwar period showed the inverse: the 1929 crash and the depression that followed destroyed several European democracies within four years. Postwar reconstruction, embedded liberalism, and the welfare state stabilized Western democracies, while developmental authoritarianisms in East Asia later challenged the assumed linearity between growth and freedom. The contemporary picture is more complex. Since 2008, slow growth, rising wealth inequality (documented by Piketty and the World Inequality Lab), housing-cost crises, and post-pandemic inflation have coincided with populist surges across the political spectrum. Energy shocks following Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and Chinese industrial overcapacity in green technologies have reopened debates over industrial policy, sanctions, and economic statecraft. The committee analyzes how distributional outcomes, fiscal capacity, and exposure to global shocks shape whether democratic or authoritarian coalitions consolidate in this decade.

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Austria May 2027

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today

May 24–26, 2027Vienna, AustriaIn-person

Registration open

Committees & topics

Topics
The Global State of Democracy: Erosion and Resilience · Authoritarianism: Old Forms and New Variants · Economic Liberalism and Its Political Consequences · Political Authoritarianism: Mechanisms of Capture · Constitutional Fragility and the Rule of Law · Political Collapse: From Crisis to Regime Breakdown · Technological Developments and the Future of Political Order · Politico-Economic Developments: Inequality, Crisis, and Regime Type

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Austria

As the host nation, AUT provides a neutral and academically robust setting for critical discussions on global democratic trends.

Role in topic

AUT offers a stable democratic context from which to observe and analyze global challenges to democracy, fostering an environment conducive to scholarly exchange on sensitive political topics.

Russia

Represents a prominent example of a state that has undergone a significant authoritarian consolidation, offering a case study for the conference's themes.

Role in topic

The trajectory of RUS provides a critical contemporary example for examining the conditions and mechanisms of an authoritarian turn, particularly concerning state control and political opposition.

China

Illustrates a long-standing authoritarian system that has adapted and modernized, presenting a distinct model for analysis.

Role in topic

CHN serves as a crucial case for understanding the resilience and evolution of authoritarian governance, especially in the context of economic development and technological control.

United States

A mature democracy that has recently experienced internal pressures and challenges to its democratic institutions, offering a perspective on democratic resilience.

Role in topic

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

The Global State of Democracy: Erosion and Resilience

Key players

Authoritarianism: Old Forms and New Variants

Key players

Economic Liberalism and Its Political Consequences

Key players

Political Authoritarianism: Mechanisms of Capture

Key players

Constitutional Fragility and the Rule of Law

Key players

Political Collapse: From Crisis to Regime Breakdown

Key players

Technological Developments and the Future of Political Order

Key players

Politico-Economic Developments: Inequality, Crisis, and Regime Type

Key players

Resources

News, lessons, and country profiles to prep for Democracy Under Pressure: Conditions of the Authoritarian Turn Yesterday and Today.

Recent reporting to ground your prep

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis 2026

West Bengal Voter Deletion Crisis

Delimitation Based on 2011 Census

Supreme Court Upholds Election Commission Dis

Lessons

Bite-sized lessons to build the basics

Hidden Stakeholders

Engagement Strategies

Dynamic Analysis

Stakeholder Mapping Workshop

Courses

Guided courses that go deeper on the topic

Advanced Negotiation

Multilateral Negotiation

Policy Brief Writing

Conflict Resolution

Austria May 2027

By committee

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions

Committees & topics

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Topics & background

Resources

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Frequently asked questions