DEMOCRACY REGRESSION AND AUTOCRACY DIFFUSION: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The unprovoked Russian aggression on Ukraine underscores the gravity of the global shift toward autocracy and serves as a stark reminder of the real threat autocratic states pose to democracies. It underscores the urgency and importance of a deeper analysis of these changes, particularly crucial to policymakers and scholars forecasting how to counteract the upsurge of autocracy while promoting worldwide democratization. Given the lack of large-scale, multi-country quantitative assessments of these trends, this chapter presents a conceptual framework of the diffusion of democratic backsliding and autocracy rise. The framework underlines the combined impact of evolving national politics that provide the fertile ground for aggrandizing democratically elected leaders’ power that leads to democracy backsliding, together with factors of diffusion that lie outside national influences, such as autocratic impositions, countries’ networking, prior experience with autocracy, and role-modeling of regressing democracies. Understanding the complex interplay of national conditions jointly with diffusion factors is vital to an adequate understanding of the causes of the global rise of autocracy and its consequences on the world’s sustainable future.