Multilevel Democratic Decoupling: The Territorial Dimension of Backsliding and Contemporary Regime Change

Javier Pérez Sandoval
Kellogg Visiting Fellow

Regimes do not change consistently across territorial levels. We have made progress in understanding national backsliding and subnational regimes; but barring a few exceptions, these research strands have not engaged in a thorough dialogue. To bridge this gap, Pérez Sandoval contends that when democracy advances in one territorial level, but erodes in another, we observe multilevel democratic decoupling. Using global data from the Varieties of Democracy project, he examines the 1990-2022 period, showing that the proportion of decoupled cases jumped from 20% in the 1990s, to 42% in the first decade of the 21st century. Exploring Italy, South Africa, India, and the United States, he illustrates recent patterns of territorially (de)coupled regime change, and suggests courts may play an important role in enabling it. Given that regimes across territorial levels are moving in separate directions, looking exclusively at national-level change will be gradually less informative about citizens’ experiences on the ground.

Register