Distributional Foundations of Democratic Backsliding: Five Lessons from the Americas

The United States (US) is the world’s oldest living constitutional democracy. It is backsliding. The proximate cause of this is the electoral viability of populist political outsiders who seek to circumvent or dismantle institutional constraints on executive power. This article explores the process by which democratic elections produced such backsliding, drawing empirical and theoretical insights from Latin America. It argues that distributional politics related to a middle-class living wage crisis are responsible for the political crisis facing US democracy. Central to this dynamic is a decades-long political consensus among the two leading political parties regarding neoliberalism. This consensus weakened the party system, eroding its social moorings by forcing working-class voters to look outside of the political establishment for credible alternatives. The article concludes that the only two pathways available to US democracy at this critical juncture are a Polanyian counter-movement towards a new social-democratic order, or a tragic descent into neo-patrimonialism.