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Why some elected autocrats fail: democratic vulnerability in Latin America
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DOI：10.1080/13510347.2026.2663025.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
The literature on democratic backsliding offers conflicting assessments of democratic vulnerability. A central source of this disagreement is the failure to distinguish between illiberal rhetoric and illiberal attempts, on the one hand, and democratic erosion and democratic breakdown, on the other. Building on this distinction, we argue that democratic vulnerability to illiberal actions by elected leaders depends primarily on two factors: the inherited strength of institutions in constraining executive overreach and the degree of internal unity within the incumbent’s party or coalition. While pluralistic party competition and a robust civil society can provide important safeguards, what ultimately determines how far illiberal strategies advance is the legacy of effective institutional checks on the executive and the extent to which an autocratic-leaning leader commands unified partisan loyalty. We provide evidence for this argument through a mixed-methods design combining a statistical analysis of democratic backsliding in Latin America from 1978 to 2024 with four case studies—Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro, Colombia under Álvaro Uribe, Ecuador under Rafael Correa, and a paired comparison of Argentina under Carlos Menem and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner – tracing the mechanisms behind successful and unsuccessful illiberal initiatives.
Keywords:
democratic vulnerability
democratic erosion
institutional legacies
partisan loyalty
Latin America
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