Public Policy and Democratic Backsliding

This panel is anchored in a central question: how do autocratic governments reshape public policy processes, and what does this reveal about the dynamics of contemporary democratic backsliding? While democratic erosion has received growing scholarly attention, the panel advances the debate by placing public policy, rather than political institutions alone, at the center of the analysis. Democratic backsliding is understood not only as a political or constitutional process but also as a policy-driven phenomenon, unfolding through the reconfiguration, weakening, or elimination of policy arrangements and the institutions that sustain them. The panel examines how policymaking changes under autocratic and illiberal governments, where political survival may take precedence over institutional continuity and problem-solving. Policies can be strategically dismantled through material retrenchment, including budget cuts and institutional restructuring, as well as discursive strategies that delegitimize expertise, science, and minority rights. These processes can also erode policy capacities by weakening bureaucratic autonomy, politicizing administrative structures, and undermining accountability mechanisms. Importantly, such transformations often occur incrementally, preserving the formal appearance of democratic institutions while hollowing out their substantive functioning. The distinctive contribution of the panel lies in bridging democratic backsliding and policy process research. It develops an integrative framework for examining how autocratic governments operate within policy subsystems and how policy, institutional, and implementation changes interact. It also extends policy dismantling approaches by examining strategies such as non-decision, symbolic action, active dismantling, and institutional hardball, as well as other practices that undermine the pluralist foundations of policymaking. By bringing together research across countries and policy subsystems, the panel seeks to identify both common mechanisms and context-specific variations in how democratic backsliding reshapes policymaking. Ultimately, the panel shifts attention from whether democratic backsliding occurs to how it is operationalized through the state, its institutions, and policy processes. It conceptualizes policies as both targets and instruments of political transformation and examines how governance arrangements, administrative routines, state capacities, decision-making, and implementation are reconfigured under autocratic and illiberal governments. By combining theoretical, comparative, and empirical perspectives, the panel seeks to advance the study of the intersection between politics and public policy and illuminate the long-term institutional, administrative, and societal consequences of democratic backsliding.