Most literature on democratic backsliding in liberal democracies focuses on the erosion of democratic rights and institutions. Less systematic attention has been paid to how pro-democratic actors can respond to illiberal threats, especially in the short term. This paper lays the foundations for a research agenda on the conditions under which illiberals can be successfully countered. It discusses the use of formal, informal, and mobilization strategies in different scenarios, with illiberals in power (resistance) or in opposition (containment and prevention), focusing on how the different timing of intervention against illiberals exposes pro-democratic actors to different tradeoffs and dilemmas. It articulates how early intervention against illiberals may have a higher chance of success in different scenario and on how diffusion can make the related tradeoffs easier to navigate in some circumstances. Finally, the paper outlines specific priorities for empirical research and lays out how these are addressed in the articles in this volume.
Political
elites in new democracies typically confront the problem of how to
mitigate the destabilizing potential of large masses of alienated
voters who might oppose the new regime, either because they are still
ideologically linked to the past authoritarian regime or because they
associate the democratic transition with the loss of material resources
and social prestige. The dilemmas associated with this situation are
well known: preventing the reorganization of radical
“successor parties” might increase
voters’ alienation and sow the seeds of more instability,
while allowing such organizations to compete freely might entail costs
in terms of government stability and effectiveness in the shorter term.
Attracting disaffected individuals under the banners of moderate
parties with the promise of policy concessions on their most pressing
material demands is often considered an effective strategy
in enlarging
the social bases of the new regime. Using a subnational design, the
paper explores the impact of these choices on the development of the
extreme right in West Germany during the first decade of the Federal
Republic.
Variation in the
political inclusion or marginalization of the extreme right in Western
European democracies is typically explained by focusing on ideational
factors, in particular processes of “political
learning”,
and the “politics of memory” —broadly
speaking,
whether the public debate is dominated by the rejection of the
country’s Fascist past, or whether ambiguity prevails. This
paper
argues that the emergence of public norms legitimizing the political
marginalization of the extreme right is endogenous to whether the
extreme right is illegalized in the aftermath of the democratic
transition. In turn, this outcome is not driven by how key collective
actors and decision-makers view the Fascist past, but by their expected
short-term gains in access to governmental power and policy influence.
The paper elaborates these theoretical propositions and tests them with
newly collected archival and quantitative evidence on post-war Italy.
The argument has implications for the analysis of the marginalization
or inclusion of the extreme right in comparable cases, and for a more
nuanced understanding of the role of public norms in establishing the
boundaries of legitimate dissent in liberal democracies.