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Building strong executives and weak institutions: How European integration contributes to democratic backsliding

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Abstract

Although the European Union (EU) is considered unrivaled in its democracy promoting abilities, democracy is being challenged within its borders. Over the last decade, Hungary’s ruling party has debilitated or eliminated liberal democratic institutions; similar trends have emerged in Poland and other new democracies in the EU. What explains these surprising cases of democratic backsliding? Researchers have identified the limits of conditionality and the EU’s inability to counteract backsliding. However, given the EU’s extensive role in democracy building in its member states, it is critical to also consider the EU as an initial source of backsliding. This paper argues that the EU’s post-Maastricht policy structure, accession process, and membership requirements have made democratic backsliding more likely in new democracies by simultaneously increasing executive power and limiting states’ domestic policy space, which stunts institutional development. This combination of factors creates opportunities for executives to manipulate already weak institutions to increase their power, and democratic backsliding becomes more likely. A comparative analysis that combines typical and control cases provides support for this argument. These findings extend beyond the EU to contribute to emerging research on the limits of international democracy promotion and the related long-term effects that international organizations have on domestic democratic institutional development.

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Data Availibility Statement

The datasets generated and analyzed by the author for the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Indeed, the ongoing global democratic recession underscores the need to revise this approach as more new democracies succumb to backsliding driven by powerful elected leaders that are surrounded by institutions too weak to guard against executive aggrandizement.

  2. It is important to note that not all agree an emphasis on non-economic issues is inherently antithetical to programmatic party competition. According to Rovny (2014), ethnicity is a salient cleavage around which party competition has developed in some post-communist states. These ethnic-based parties are more likely to compete over policies related to rights and liberties. This suggests that ethnic-based parties might be one tool to overcome a limited domestic policy space in that they provide an alternative societal cleavage, outside of pure identity politics, along which to structure politics. I consider this as a source of domestic variation that might account for cases of non-backsliding among the 2004 accession states, as discussed in Section 6 below.

  3. Since populism tends to be inherently opposed to liberal democracy, the goals of populists often involve the altering or dismantling of liberal democratic institutions; in other words, they advocate processes characteristic of democratic backsliding. As such, populism is a common characteristic of states experiencing democratic backsliding, but the presence of populist parties alone is insufficient to categorize a case as one of backsliding.

  4. The liberal democracy index measures the extent to which a country constitutionally protects individual and minority rights, exhibits strong rule of law, an independent judiciary, and checks on executive power (Coppedge et al., 2021) and is commonly used in the literature to operationalize backsliding (Jee, Lueders & Myrick, 2022).

  5. Cianetti, Dawson, and Hanley (2018) and other EU scholars have called for researchers to look beyond Hungary and Poland to understand regime trajectories in post-communist Europe, arguing these two cases are not representative of the post-communist democratic experience, which is perhaps better characterized by instances of relatively stable but low-quality democracy. While this point is well taken, Hungary and Poland are quintessential examples of the ongoing global trend of democratic backsliding (e.g., Luhrmann and Lindberg , 2019; Haggard and Kaufman , 2021). Since this paper is focused on exploring the extent to which democracy promotion by IOs makes backsliding more likely (Meyerrose, 2020) in a specific context —the EU— rather than explaining democratic outcomes in post-communist states specifically, focusing on these two cases provides important generalizable leverage.

  6. These plots start in 1975, which roughly corresponds to Spain and Portugal’s transitions to democracy, and end in 2003, which marks 17 years after these states’ accession to the EU. I use this 17-year cutoff for the sake of consistency: these same variables, plotted again for Hungary and Poland below, are available through 2021 at the time of writing, which is 17 years after Hungary and Poland joined the EU.

  7. Although Spain’s indicator for "legislature investigates executive" is relatively low, it does nevertheless increase following accession, which suggests that factors other than EU accession and membership may account for its overall levels along this particular measure of executive power.

  8. In Figs. 3 and 4, it is important to note that the comparison between Spain and Portugal, on the one hand, and Hungary and Poland on the other, is more of a question of change, rather than levels. While we might expect Spain and Portugal to have overall better developed democratic institutions than Hungary and Poland due to the varying regime legacies and different modes of democratization, ultimately what is of interest for my argument is to determine if EU involvement led to any changes in the strength or quality of domestic democratic institutions. If we see declines in institutional quality in Hungary and Poland following EU accession, and no comparable declines in Spain and Portugal, this would suggest support for the argument that more extensive EU requirements impacted domestic institutional development in Hungary and Poland.

  9. Although the European Parliament voted in 2017 and 2018 to sanction Poland and Hungary, respectively, for their undemocratic turns to date only financial sanctions have been levied against these backsliding regimes.

  10. Vachudova (2008) also finds that political parties in post-communist Europe adopted platforms aligned with EU requirements during the pre-accession phase, converging on right-leaning economic policies, such as a free market economy, and libertarian social issues, including support for human and minority rights. Vachudova (2008) views this pre-accession convergence as positive, since it disadvantaged the formation of illiberal political parties. I take her argument one step further, contending that, although EU policy mandates curtailed illiberalism in the pre-accession phase, they made illiberal policies more prevalent in the post-accession period. This is because pre-accession convergence produced underdeveloped party systems, which in turn created an opening for populist politicians and parties focused on identity-based issues to gain an electoral foothold among disaffected voters. Indeed, Vachudova (2008) finds that, when the parameters for party competition broadened following accession, more parties began adopting nationalistic and other culturally conservative policies (Vachudova, 2008).

  11. There are no significant ethnic minorities in Hungary, Poland, or the Czech Republic (Rovny, 2014).

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge valuable feedback from Richard Clark, Daniela Donno, R. Daniel Kelemen, Austin Knuppe, Marcus Kurtz, Reed Kurtz, Jana Lipps, Ellen Lust, Helen Milner, William Minozzi, Irfan Nooruddin, Paul Poast, Amanda Robinson, Andrew Rosenberg, Dan Slater, Alexander Thompson, Duy Trinh, Sara Watson, Natasha Wunsch, the reviewers and editor at ROIO, contributors at PEIO, MPSA, and ISA conferences, as well as participants in workshops at the Ohio State University and Princeton University.

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    Anna M. Meyerrose

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Meyerrose, A.M. Building strong executives and weak institutions: How European integration contributes to democratic backsliding. Rev Int Organ 19, 307–343 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-023-09507-2

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