Populism and Democratic Backsliding in the Context of a Fragmenting Global Order

In the past decade, democratic backsliding has transitioned from isolated incidents to a widespread global phenomenon. Contemporary democratic decline is increasingly driven by elected officials who undermine courts, electoral commissions, media, and civil society while maintaining procedural legitimacy, rather than solely resulting from coups or the suspension of constitutional rule. Populist movements across the political spectrum have leveraged economic anxiety, cultural grievances, and institutional distrust to justify this erosion. This panel will analyze the mechanisms, drivers, and comparative trajectories of populism as both a symptom and a catalyst of democratic decline, situating the phenomenon within broader debates on the backlash against globalization, geopolitical realignment, and the crisis of the liberal international order.
The panel will commence with conceptual and theoretical frameworks, including distinctions between populism as a “thin-centered ideology,” illiberalism, and authoritarian consolidation. It will critically evaluate the use of the V-Dem and Freedom House indices to measure democratic backsliding, emphasizing their methodological limitations. Comparative analyses will investigate political trajectories in some cases to assess whether democratic decline follows a common pattern or varies according to regime type, institutional design, and initial political conditions.
The panel will also investigate the economic foundations of populist support, including deindustrialization, inequality, economic insecurity, and the “left-behind” thesis, alongside cultural-backlash explanations. It will examine the geopolitics of populism, with particular focus on foreign-policy alignments, sovereignty discourse, and multilateral engagement. Additionally, the discussion will address media, disinformation, digital sovereignty, and the influence of platform algorithms in intensifying polarization and undermining shared epistemic foundations. The panel will conclude by evaluating democratic resilience and recovery through judicial resistance, civil society mobilization, electoral corrections, and other forms of institutional opposition that can challenge or reverse democratic decline.