Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis: Research and Practice

Reshaping Public Policy under Democratic Backsliding: A Comparative Perspective

This proposed special issue is anchored in a central intellectual question: how do autocratic governments reshape public policy processes, and what does this reveal about the dynamics of contemporary democratic backsliding? While a growing body of literature has documented the rise of democratic erosion worldwide (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018), this SI is proposed to advance the debate by placing public policy, rather than political institutions alone, at the core of the analysis.

Democratic backsliding is not only a political or constitutional process but also a deeply policy-driven phenomenon, unfolding through the reconfiguration, weakening, or elimination of existing policy arrangements and their sustaining institutions (Bauer & Becker, 2020; Peters & Pierre, 2019; Yesilkagit, 2018; Bauer et al., 2021; Oliveira & Fernandez, 2021; Morais & Gomide, 2024). In this way, this special issue will engage with a set of significant and timely issues.

First, it addresses the transformation of policymaking under autocratic government, where elected leaders increasingly prioritize political survival over institutional continuity and problem-solving capacity (Bauer & Becker, 2020; Bauer et al., 2021; Morais & Gomide, 2024). In these contexts, policies are not merely adjusted but strategically dismantled through a combination of material retrenchment, such as budget cuts and institutional restructuring, and discursive delegitimization, including attacks on expertise, science, and minority rights. Second, the collection will speak to broader concerns about the erosion of policy capacities, including the weakening of bureaucratic autonomy, the politicization of administrative structures, the degradation of accountability mechanisms, and disregard for policy advisory systems. Third, it will contribute to understanding how these processes unfold incrementally, often preserving the formal appearance of democratic institutions while hollowing out their substantive functioning (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

The distinctive added value of this special issue can lie in its integrative, comparative, and policy-centered approach. Theoretically, it will bridge two bodies of literature that are often treated separately: democratic backsliding and policy process research (Weible, 2023). By doing so, it advances a more comprehensive framework for analyzing how autocratic government operates within policy subsystems, highlighting the interplay between policy change, institutional change, and implementation dynamics (Fernandez, 2026; Lynch & Cassimiro, 2022; Urbinati, 2019). Conceptually, it expands on classic approaches to policy dismantling (Bauer et al., 2012; Bauer & Knill, 2014) and new approaches on institutional hardball (Morais & Gomide, 2024)  by examining how strategies such as non-decision, symbolic action, active dismantling are deployed in contemporary autocratic contexts, either by engaging in institutional hardball tactics or by mobilizing other strategies that subvert the pluralist tenants of the public policy process (Fernandez & Maia, 2026; Morais & Gomide, 2024).

Empirically, the special issue will promote comparative insights across countries and policy subsystems, allowing for the identification of both common patterns and context-specific variations. This comparative dimension is crucial for moving beyond single-case analyses and building a more generalizable understanding of how changes in the democratic policy process can operate as a mechanism to further democratic backsliding.

Finally, the collection will contribute to the field by shifting the analytical focus from whether backsliding occurs to how it is operationalized through the state, its institutions, and the policy process. In doing so, it addresses a significant gap in contemporary scholarship, given that the field of public policy has shown limited engagement with the ways democratic backsliding reshapes fundamental assumptions about policymaking, implementation, and processes of institutional change. It highlights the role of policies as both targets and instruments of political transformation, demonstrating how governance arrangements, administrative routines, and policy tools are actively reconfigured. In doing so, it opens new avenues for research on the intersection between politics and policy and provides a framework for understanding the long-term institutional and societal consequences of autocratic and illiberal governments. More broadly, it advances new analytical ways at the intersection of politics and public policy, offering a framework for examining the long-term institutional, administrative, and societal consequences of democratic backsliding.

We welcome contributions that engage with the analytical agenda proposed by this special issue, particularly studies examining how democratic backsliding reshapes public policy and the policy process. We especially encourage theoretical, comparative, and empirical work exploring the following questions:

1. Through which mechanisms do autocratic and illiberal governments transform policy-making processes, state capacities, implementation dynamics, and institutional arrangements?
2. How are the democratic and pluralistic premises of the policy process impacted and transformed by illiberal autocratic leaders?
3. What are the effects of democratic backsliding on policy advisory systems and on their roles in the policymaking process?
4. How does democratic backsliding affect policy capacities at the individual, organizational, and systemic levels?
5. How do autocratic and illiberal governments use policy dismantling, institutional hardball, and policy instruments to advance and consolidate democratic backsliding?
6. How does democratic backsliding reshape bureaucratic autonomy, discretion, and the role of public officials in the policy process?
7. Are some policy subsystems more vulnerable to democratic backsliding than others? If so, how do these differences shape patterns of policy change across countries and contexts?
8. How do bureaucracies, civil society actors, policy networks, and other policy agents resist, mitigate, or adapt to attempts by autocratic and illiberal governments to radically transform public policies and policy processes?

(contact Guest Editors for list of references)