Political support and democratic backsliding trends. The strange case of Central and Eastern European countries

ABSTRACT

During the last decade, democratic backsliding (DB) has become a worrying phenomenon worldwide. This article addresses this topic by focusing on Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). An overview of the literature on DB in this region has identified a relevant lacuna: the lack of attention to the role political support indicators (democratic satisfaction, government trust) may play in DB processes. Testing several hypotheses through different random regression models applied to CEE countries for the period 2005–2021, an unexpected puzzle emerges: contrary to the expectations, we find that a greater government trust contributes to DB. Building on several consolidated findings of the system support theory and the classic democratisation literature, we address this puzzle, identifying temporal phases, mechanisms and causal relations and stressing the relevance of interaction processes among a complex set of causal factors to explain DB processes in CEE.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic backsliding
• populism
• satisfaction with democracy
• trust in government
• Central and Eastern Europe

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Through a quantitative analysis including all European cases, Vittori (2022), for example, confirms the influence of populist actors in DB processes.

2. The lack of liberal-democratic values by CEE elites has been highlighted by numerous authors (i.e. Innes 2014).

3. We aggregate who is fairly and very satisfied.

4. It expresses the percentage of citizens that trust the government.

5. The test shows a Prob>chi2 = 0.2233.

6. Only in Table 5 (model 3) the sign between crisis and Db is positive.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia [SFRH/BPD/101442/2014, UID/SIC/50013/2013] and the University of Catania [PIAno di inCEntivi per la RIcerca di Ateneo 2020/2022].