Introduction

Summary

As explained in Chapter 1, state institutions are inevitably transformed into sites of regime contestation between democratic and autocratic forces when democratic backsliding is threatened or underway. That is especially the case in social and political contexts where exclusionary forms of majoritarian rule or ethnonationalism contest liberal and pluralist civil societies. The challenge for scholars is to identify the conditions under which key institutional sites serve as bastions of democratic accountability and resilience, and how and when these sites can be neutralized or even transformed into weapons of autocratization. Often referred to as “referee institutions” (such as constitutional courts and electoral commissions) and tools of horizontal accountability for checking executive aggrandizement (including ombudsman, investigative bureaus, and information commissions), key state agencies must be sufficiently capacious and nonpartisan to serve as guardrails in times of democratic contestation and regime uncertainty.