Laura Gamboa – författare

In the past two decades, democratically elected executives across the world have used their popularity to push for legislation that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and undermines political rights and civil liberties. Using and abusing institutions and institutional reform, some executives have transformed their countries' democracies into competitive authoritarian regimes. Others, however, have failed to erode democracy. What explains these different outcomes? Resisting Backsliding answers this question. With a focus on the cases of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, the book shows that the strategies and goals of the opposition are key to understanding why some executives successfully erode democracy and others do not. By highlighting the role of the opposition, this book emphasizes the importance of agency for understanding democratic backsliding and shows that even weak oppositions can defeat strong potential autocrats.

In the past two decades, democratically elected executives across the world have used their popularity to push for legislation that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and undermines political rights and civil liberties. Using and abusing institutions and institutional reform, some executives have transformed their countries' democracies into competitive authoritarian regimes. Others, however, have failed to erode democracy. What explains these different outcomes? Resisting Backsliding answers this question. With a focus on the cases of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, the book shows that the strategies and goals of the opposition are key to understanding why some executives successfully erode democracy and others do not. By highlighting the role of the opposition, this book emphasizes the importance of agency for understanding democratic backsliding and shows that even weak oppositions can defeat strong potential autocrats.

This Element seeks to unpack the varied modalities of democratic erosion in Latin America by proposing a novel analytical framework that breaks down backsliding episodes into their constituent parts: (1) the actors that promote autocratization and those that resist it, (2) the strategies that autocratizers and oppositions employ, (3) the arenas of contention in which they struggle over democratic norms and institutions, and (4) the objectives that these different actors pursue in the promotion of or resistance to democratic erosion. This framework is applied to five contemporary cases that reflect a new, diversified wave of democratic erosion, including El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and Honduras. Through comparative analysis, we derive preliminary insights on the kinds of strategies pursued by different constellations of autocratizers and opposition actors, in hopes of stimulating future avenues of research and contributing to scholar and practitioner efforts to reverse alarming autocratic trends in the region.