Autocratization

Autocratization is the mirror image of democratization: any substantial decline in the institutional requirements of electoral democracy, such as free and fair elections, freedom of expression and association, and checks on the executive. The term covers democratic backsliding within democracies, democratic breakdown into autocracy, and the deepening of autocracy in regimes that were already autocratic.

Anna Lührmann and Staffan I. Lindberg (2019) argued that a third wave of autocratization, after those of the interwar years and of the 1960s–70s, began in the mid-1990s. What distinguishes it, they argue, is its mode: rather than military coups or the suspension of constitutions, elected incumbents gradually hollow out institutions using legal or quasi-legal means, such as capturing courts and electoral bodies, restricting the media and civil society, and changing electoral rules. Because each step can be presented as lawful, the process is harder to recognise and to resist. The V-Dem Institute tracks episodes of autocratization and distinguishes 'stand-alone' autocratizers from 'bell-turns', where a period of democratization is followed by reversal.

• The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 lists 44 countries as autocratizing at the end of 2025, nearly a quarter of all countries, including ten newly identified that year; among the new cases are Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United Kingdom.
• The same report records the United States losing its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in more than 50 years, and says that for the average global citizen the level of democracy is back to where it was in 1978.
• Hungary under Viktor Orbán after 2010 is a widely studied case of incumbent-led autocratization; in 2022 the European Parliament called it a 'hybrid regime of electoral autocracy'. Orbán's Fidesz lost the April 2026 election.

Some scholars argue that expert-coded indices overstate backsliding because coders' standards rise over time or react to political rhetoric, and that objective indicators such as electoral turnover show more stability. Others question whether cases as different as the United States and Nicaragua belong in one category. Defenders reply that the indices are cross-checked against many coders and that early, incremental erosion is exactly what objective indicators miss.

The concept has shifted research from transitions to democracy towards how democracies decline. Its main empirical claim, that the number of autocratizing countries has reached a historic high, rests on V-Dem data and is contested in degree, but the pattern of executive aggrandizement by elected leaders is well documented across many cases.