https://orcid.org/0009-0007-1665-362X
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ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, the pendulum of regime change across the world has swung dramatically from democratization to autocratization. There has been much contention and debate about the extent, variation, and causes surrounding these processes. This special issue turns the spotlight away from regime change and political elites towards societal agents, particularly societal agents who mobilize and resist against autocratization unfolding within democratic and authoritarian regimes. In this introductory article, we review and critique the literature on autocratization studies, and introduce our concept of “agents of resistance.” We argue that agents of resistance can develop and engage in repertoires against autocratization under any regime type. Specifically, the contributions in this special issue highlight seemingly mundane repertoires of resistance, and how they can grow through cumulative interactions among societal agents, and between societal agents and the state. Scholars should recognize the full spectrum of resistance and both their liberal and illiberal elements to better assess the impact on global trends of democratization or autocratization. Finally, this article discusses some methodological trends with regards to the existing literature, and introduces the contributions that compose this special issue.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful for comments and feedback from the editors of Democratization Aurel Croissant and Jeffrey Haynes. We would also like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all the participants and discussants at the special issue workshop, particularly, Aries Arugay, Aurel Croissant, Jean Hong, Paul Hutchcroft, Steven Oliver, Tom Pepinsky, Ho Ming Sho, Ardeth Thawnghmung, and Forrest Zhang.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Croissant and Haynes, “Democratic Regression in Asia,” 3; Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century.
2 Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century, 31.
3 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding.”
4 Ding and Slater, “Democratic Decoupling.”
5 Cleary and Öztürk, “When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown?”
6 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding”; Coppedge, “Eroding Regimes”; Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome Change: Coming to Terms with Democratic Backsliding.”
7 Gerschewski, “Erosion or Decay?”
8 Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective.”
9 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization is Here,” 1096.
10 Cassani and Tomini, “Reversing Regimes and Concepts,” 277.
11 Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective,” 39.
12 Yew and Zhu, “Innovative Autocrats?”; Ding and Slater, “Democratic Decoupling.”
13 Glasius, “What Authoritarianism Is … and Is Not,” 523.
14 Curato and Fossati, “Authoritarian Innovations,” 1012.
15 See the American Political Science Association Annual Conference 2023 Panel on “PS Roundtable on Democratic Backsliding” at https://tinyurl.com/2aes9s2n, last accessed on September 25, 2023. This roundtable is motivated by the paper by Little and Meng, “Measuring Democratic Backsliding,” which argues that there is no global trend of democratic backsliding.
16 Truong and Vu, The Dragon’s Underbelly.
17 Ricks, “Thailand’s 2019 Vote,” 444.
18 Tan and Preece, “Democratic Backsliding in Illiberal Singapore”; Abdullah, “‘New Normal’ No More.”
19 Weiss, “Is Malaysian Democracy Backsliding or Merely Staying Put?”
20 Cruz, “Duterte Bowing out with High Ratings.”
21 Garrido, “The Ground for the Illiberal Turn in the Philippines”; Kasuya and Calimbahin, “Democratic Backsliding in the Philippines”
22 Power and Warburton, Democracy in Indonesia: From Stagnation to Regression?
23 Shin and Moon, “South Korea After Impeachment”; Shin, “Korean Democracy is Sinking under the Guise of the Rule of Law.”
24 Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding”; Gandhi, “The Institutional Roots of Democratic Backsliding”; Hunter, “Social Media, Disinformation, and Democracy”; Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die; Mietzner, “Sources of Resistance to Democratic Decline”; Pepinsky, “Southeast Asia”; Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies”; Svolik, “Polarization versus Democracy”; Svolik, “When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue”; Waldner and Lust, “Unwelcome Change.”
25 O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule; Reuter and Gandhi, “Economic Performance and Elite Defection from Hegemonic Parties”; Reuter and Szakonyi, “Elite Defection under Autocracy.”
26 Bhasin and Gandhi, “Timing and Targeting of State Repression in Authoritarian Elections”; Lee, Defect or Defend; Shen-Bayh, “Strategies of Repression.”
27 Riedl et al., “Authoritarian-Led Democratization”; Slater and Wong, “The Strength to Concede.”
28 Tomini, Gibril, and Bochev, “Standing up Against Autocratization Across Political Regimes.”
29 Ibid.
30 Cleary and Öztürk, “When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown?”; Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins”; Laebens and Lührmann, “What Halts Democratic Erosion?”; Lührmann, “Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence”; Thompson, “Pushback after Backsliding?”
31 Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins”; Trantidis, “Building an Authoritarian Regime”; Cleary and Öztürk, “When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown?”; Lührmann, “Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence”; Bernhard et al., “Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection”; Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
32 Svolik, “When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue”; Graham and Svolik, “Democracy in America?”; Arbatli and Rosenberg, “United We Stand, Divided We Rule.”
33 Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
34 Bolleyer, “Civil Society, Crisis Exposure, and Resistance Strategies.”
35 Alagappa, Civil Society and Political Change in Asia; Way, “Civil Society and Democratization.”
36 Bernhard et al., “Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection”; Rakner, “Don’t Touch My Constitution!”; Pospieszna and Pietrzyk-Reeves, “Responses of Polish NGOs Engaged in Democracy Promotion to Shrinking Civic Space”; VonDoepp, “Resisting Democratic Backsliding.”
37 Mietzner, “Sources of Resistance to Democratic Decline”; Jezierska, “Coming out of the Liberal Closet”; Lorch, “Elite Capture, Civil Society and Democratic Backsliding in Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines.”
38 Lührmann, “Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence.”
39 See Horatanakun, “The Network Origin of Thailand’s Youth Movement.”
40 See Ong and Syazwi. “Civil Society Collective Action Under Authoritarianism.”
41 See Thawnghmung and Paw, “‘Agents’ of the State or Society?”
42 See Fossati, “Illiberal Resistance to Democratic Backsliding.”
43 See Lee, Defect or Defend.
44 Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution.
45 McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, The Dynamics of Contention.
46 Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance.
47 Stinchcombe, “Review of The Contentious French,” 1248.
48 Truong, “Opposition Repertoires Under Authoritarian Rule”; Shum, “When Voting Turnout Becomes Contentious Repertoire.”
49 Slater and Ziblatt, “The Enduring Indispensability of the Controlled Comparison.”
50 Thompson, “Pushback after Backsliding?”
51 Laebens and Lührmann, “What Halts Democratic Erosion?”
52 Gamboa, “Opposition at the Margins.”
53 Croissant and Kim, “Keeping Autocrats at Bay.”
54 Cleary and Öztürk, “When Does Backsliding Lead to Breakdown?”; Lorch, “Elite Capture, Civil Society and Democratic Backsliding in Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines”; Rakner, “Don’t Touch My Constitution!”; VonDoepp, “Resisting Democratic Backsliding”; Trantidis, “Building an Authoritarian Regime”; Thompson and Cheng, “Transgressing Taboos.”
55 Arbatli and Rosenberg, “United We Stand, Divided We Rule”; Grömping, “Agents of Resistance and Revival?”; Sato and Arce, “Resistance to Populism”; Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies”; Bernhard et al., “Parties, Civil Society, and the Deterrence of Democratic Defection.”
56 Pepinsky, “The Return of the Single-Country Study.”
57 Carey et al., “Who Will Defend Democracy?”
58 Tung and Kasuya, “Resisting Autocratization.”
59 Svolik, “When Polarization Trumps Civic Virtue.”
60 Aspinall et al., “Elites, Masses, and Democratic Decline in Indonesia.”
61 Mietzner, “Sources of Resistance to Democratic Decline.”
62 Ryan and Tran, “Democratic Backsliding Disrupted”; Tang and Cheng, “Affective Solidarity”; Bee, “The Civic and Political Participation of Young People in a Context of Heightened Authoritarianism”; Erçetin and Boyraz, “How to Struggle with Exclusionary Right-Wing Populism”; Jezierska, “Coming out of the Liberal Closet.”
63 Gamboa,“Opposition at the Margins.”
64 Gerring, “Mere Description.”
65 Morgenbesser and Weiss, “Survive and Thrive.”
66 Irgil et al., “Field Research”; Mosley, Interview Research in Political Science; Kapiszewski, MacLean, and Read, Field Research in Political Science.
67 Horatanakun, “The Network Origin of Thailand’s Youth Movement.”
68 Ong and Syazwi, “Civil Society Collective Action Under Authoritarianism.”
69 Thawnghmung and Paw, “‘Agents’ of the State or Society?”
70 Truong and Trinh, “Agrarian Agitations.”
71 Fossati, “Illiberal Resistance to Democratic Backsliding.”
72 Lee, “Protectors of Liberal Democracy or Defenders of Past Authoritarianism?”
73 Lero, “Is Community Service an Act of Political Resistance?”
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Notes on contributors
Nhu Truong
Nhu Truong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Public Affairs at Denison University, and is a Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholars Network Fellow and a Rosenberg Institute Scholar. Truong specializes in the study of authoritarian politics and social resistance in Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia. Her research maps the shifting parameters of repressiveness-responsiveness in authoritarian regimes and illuminates the contentious dynamics of people's resistance particularly in Vietnam, China, and Cambodia. Truong has published in the Journal of East Asian Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, and with Cambridge University Press, and is a co-editor of The Dragon's Underbelly: Dynamics and Dilemmas of Vietnam's Economy and Politics.
Elvin Ong
Elvin Ong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore, and is a Singapore SSRC Social Science and Humanities Research Fellow. He researches democratization in East and Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the role of opposition parties. His first monograph, Opposing Power: Building Opposition Alliances in Electoral Autocracies, was published by the University of Michigan Press, Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies book series in 2022.
Maggie Shum
Maggie Shum is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College. Her research interests include transnational contentious politics, social movement, and diasporas politics. Her works focus on how diasporas (re)construct their collective identity abroad, and how they navigate the dual loyalty - concerns for the homeland and their well-being in the host country, with a focus on Hong Kong diasporas in the US. Her academic works were published in the Journal of Asian and African Studies, Japanese Journal of Political Science, and Local Development and Society.