Examining the effects of democratic backsliding on human rights conditions

Abstract

What is the link between democratic backsliding and human rights? Existing literature has focused almost exclusively on the effect of increasing democratic features on improvements in human rights. In contrast, we know less regarding the impact of decreasing democracy (i.e., democratic backsliding) on a state’s human rights conditions. With the growing influence of antidemocratic movements in many democracies recently, it is imperative that we explore the relationship between democratic backsliding and human rights conditions. We suspect that democratic backsliding has a substantial negative impact on human rights conditions. We posit that countries experiencing a period of democratic backsliding will also experience human rights violations to a greater degree. Additionally, we maintain that the scale of the backsliding matters, wherein states experiencing more democratic backsliding also experience more substantial reductions in human rights conditions. In testing these assertions, we find strong empirical support using a range of data sources and model specifications.

Notes

1 We define democratic backsliding as “any change of a political community’s formal or informal rules which reduces that community’s ability to guarantee the freedom of choice, freedom from tyranny, or equality in freedom” (Jee et al., 2022, p. 755).

2 We use Jee et al.’s (2022) definition of democracy, also. Accordingly, in this view, democratic governance seeks to achieve three freedoms, including freedom of choice, freedom from tyranny, and equality in freedom (pp. 760–761). To proxy democracy, we use a number of accepted measures of democracy including Polity V’s Polity2 and V-Dem’s Polyarchy.

3 We use Fariss (2014) and Fariss et al. (2020) Human Rights Protection Scores as a proxy for human rights. This measure includes the physical integrity rights of states by year. As a result, we use physical integrity rights and human rights interchangeably throughout the manuscript. In our online appendix, we employ a number of other accepted proxies of human rights, including Cingranelli-Richards Human Rights dataset and the Political Terror Scale as robustness checks.

4 Whether the world is experiencing a period of democratic backsliding is the subject of much debate in the literature currently (see Bermeo, 2022; Boese et al., 2021). For instance, the recently concluded American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting in 2023 featured a roundtable composed of many notable scholars (many of them cited in this manuscript) debating the controversies surrounding democratic backsliding in the current world.

5 The Polity scale is a regime-type scale ranging from −10 (consolidated autocracy) to 10 (consolidated democracy). Typically, states are considered full democracies when scoring 6 or above, and full autocracies when scoring −6 and below. States in between are called anocracies and have mixed democratic/autocratic features (Marshall & Gurr, 2020).

6 In some contrast to this view, Yu (2016) argued that human rights violations are less likely to emerge under democratic states, but that democratic states will be less likely to eliminate preexisting low-level human rights violations as well.

7 As shown in the online appendix, our key results are robust even when we do not include a lagged dependent variable.

8 As mentioned, some scholars have contested the linear effect of democracy on human rights practices and suggested that states’ respect for human rights improves only when they have reached a certain threshold (e.g., Bueno de Mesquita et al., 2005; Davenport & Armstrong, 2004). In our robustness tests, we test for these arguments and show that our results remain similar and significant. Also, in robustness tests found in the online appendix, we show that our main results for the importance of democratic backsliding are also robust to the inclusion of a squared Polity2 measure.

9 Despite higher economic development levels, we acknowledge that some economically developed countries, especially those in the Middle East, may have lower respect for human rights. We address this issue empirically in the robustness tests.

10 Using the CIRI Human Rights physical integrity rights index, democratic backsliding is predicted to result in a .545 drop in score (from 4.95 to 4.405). The drop is similar to the predicted drop in physical integrity rights from the start of a civil conflict.

11 Our online appendix will be available upon publication with our with our replication materials available at JHR's Harvard Dataverse site and is available by request now from the authors.

12 We join CIRI with CIRIGHTS to increase our total yearly coverage (Mark et al., 2022). The temporal coverage of CIRI and CIRIGHTS ranges from 1982 to 2017, which resulted in fewer observations. Similarly, using the PTS score, we are able to have the years 1977 to 2020 in our analyses, resulting in reduced observations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bimal Adhikari

Bimal Adhikari is an Assistant Professor in the Political Science and International Relations Department at Nazarbayev University. His research interests include international institutions, foreign policy, and human rights.

Jeffrey King

Jeffrey King is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the Department of International Studies at American University of Sharjah. His research mainly focuses on the intersection between political economy and human rights.

Amanda Murdie

Amanda Murdie is the Georgia Athletic Association Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia. Her research focuses on international NGOs, human rights and security, and interventions.