The democratic gap: a staged theory of democratic erosion

Democratic erosion is often described as a gradual process of institutional decline under a legal façade. Yet we still lack the conceptual and empirical tools to distinguish different forms of erosion itself: democracies that are persistently displaced from consolidation, democracies undergoing systematic institutional dismantling, and democracies beginning to recover. Addressing this gap, this article develops a staged theory of democratic erosion centred on the democratic gap: the distance between a country's observed democratic trajectory and the path of consolidation its prior development had made plausible. The framework distinguishes mild erosion, when shocks, distributive vulnerabilities, and diffusion produce a persistent but reversible gap; severe erosion, when polarization and institutional alignment allow political actors to reproduce and expand that gap through sequenced attacks on constraints; and recovery, when surviving institutional constraints narrow the gap before erosion becomes self-reinforcing. Using country-year data from V-Dem and complementary covariates, the article classifies trajectories through historical and synthetic benchmarks. The results show that mild erosion is associated with systemic diffusion and nonlinear inequality, severe erosion with polarization, and recovery with more benchmark-sensitive institutional configurations. Democratic backsliding is therefore not a single process of decline, but a sequence of interrupted accumulation, internal differentiation, and possible correction.