Democratic erosion and its international implications: how governments in eroding democracies shift their foreign policy behaviour

Democratic erosion constitutes the most relevant path of democratic regression since 1990. In this gradual process, legally elected incumbents follow an illiberal and antidemocratic agenda, dismantling democratic institutions and norms. While most studies so far concentrate on the domestic conditions, the implications of democratic erosion on the international level only recently attracted academic interest. This paper contributes to this emerging field by capturing how governments of eroding democracies translate their domestic transformative agenda to international politics. For doing so, I examine the voting behavior in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which is particularly adequate for observing governments' foreign policy preferences. I conduct a difference-in-differences analysis relying on the Episodes of Regime Transformation dataset and the UNGA Voting dataset. Two illustrative cases (Venezuela and Hungary) offer an additional in-depth perspective. The study shows that governments of eroding democracies differ in their foreign policy behavior from non-eroding democracies, and that they deviate in two regards: from the country's previous international alignment and from the “Western” consensus regarding the liberal international order. These findings make an important contribution to the understanding of the internal-external nexus of democratic erosion and for policymakers who need to deal with the emerging challengers in eroding democracies.