QoG lunch seminar with Jan Teorell and Per Andersson

Abstract: After three waves of democratization since the 19th century, the world has over the course of the last decade, according to most observers, undergone a process of democratic erosion (aka ''backsliding''). While numerous theories have been proposed for what explains this recent trend -- ranging from financial crises, declining popular support for democracy and growing socio-economic inequality, to the rise of China and an ''authoritarian international'' -- surprisingly few attempts have actually been made to put these proposals to the test. This is the purpose of this paper. Out of a large set of suspected causes that can be divined from the extant literature and tested in cross-country regressions, we only find evidence for two statistically significant predictors of democratic decline between 2012--2022: country size and corruption. Whereas the former does not offer much of an explanation in itself, the latter is robust to a host of controls and alternative measurement. Our interpretation is that the main driver of democratic erosion in the 21st century is a performance crisis of the modern state.