This article examines the prevalence and patterns of self-censorship in Sweden - widely regarded as one of the world's leading democracies - against the backdrop of global autocratization. While self-censorship is often studied in authoritarian contexts, we explore its occurrence in a democratic setting that has almost no formal constraints on free expression. Drawing on original survey data, we identify the individual-level factors associated with self-censorship, and we assess its variation across social contexts and issue areas. We find that self-censorship is both widespread and politically patterned. It is most common among individuals on the political right - especially sympathizers with the Sweden Democrats - as well as among persons who perceive immigration as a threat, who have low interpersonal or institutional trust, and who are strongly interested in politics. Self-censorship is most prevalent on social media, but it is also found in workplaces, educational settings, and personal relationships. The topic of immigration and integration is the one most often avoided, reflecting the polarized nature of public discourse on this question in Sweden. These results highlight how informal pressures - not just formal censorship - can narrow public discourse and suppress dissent, with potential consequences for democratic resilience and pluralism.
In an era of deepening autocratization, understanding how civil society actors contest and reconfigure civic space is increasingly relevant. Existing conceptualisations of civic space tend to privilege pro-democratic and exclude "uncivil" actors, and assume a unidirectional "shrinking" of civic space during autocratization. This article synthesizes recent refinements in civic space scholarship into a coherent analytical concept for studying the actions, strategies, and relations of civil society across regime types. The concept redirects attention from normative questions about who belongs to civil society to how civic space is configured, contested, and by whom. It rests on three assumptions: civic space is never fully closed; its boundaries are constantly reconfigured through contestation; and it is co-produced through the interaction between state and civil society and among civil society actors themselves. Operationalized through four dimensions - access, voice, resources, security - the empirical utility of the civic space concept is illustrated by applying it to the case of the Polish trade union Solidarno & sacute;& cacute;, tracing its trajectory across four decades and two regime types. The analysis demonstrates the concept's capacity to reveal dynamics that normative frameworks tend to overlook, including how a single civil society actor may contribute to both expansion and restriction of civic space.
Legitimacy is a foundational concept in political science typically measured through surveys assessing citizen perceptions of political institutions. However, the validity of existing measures is often assumed rather than tested, especially in hybrid regimes where institutional capture blurs distinctions between office and office-holder. Drawing on original semi-structured interviews with Serbian citizens, we find that conflation - the inability to separate office and office-holder - was high for questions on input side institutions such as trust in the president, the prime minister and the parliament, lower for output side institutions, such as the police, court and the tax authority, and most varied between respondents for general system questions. Our analysis suggests two main reasons for this pattern: first, citizens' evaluations of elected institutions rely more heavily on mediated information sources (e.g. TV, internet, print media), whereas views of bureaucratic institutions are often grounded in direct personal experience; second, respondents showed a weaker understanding of democratic principles than of expectations around public service delivery. These findings highlight potential item bias both between respondents within a hybrid regime and in cross-regime comparisons, calling into question the comparability and validity of standard legitimacy measures in European hybrid regimes.
This article analyzes how religious radical groups strategically moderate their behaviour in response to international constraints, prioritizing pragmatic survival and compliance over ideological purity in pursuit of legitimacy. The central question asks under what conditions pragmatic considerations override ideational factors in shaping the behaviour of such actors in their quest for and exercise of power. The article argues that international isolation and sanctions create incentives for moderation as groups seek survival, legitimacy, and security. This multi-pronged pressure creates tension between power and ideology, particularly in contexts of regime change. The analysis explores how the international system influences moderation, resulting in staged and conditional international recognition. Employing Hayat Tahrir al-Shaam (HTS) as a case-study, the article suggests that its moderation rewarded the former radical group with gradual international acceptance during the post-civil war state-building process in Syria.
This article offers six main findings about the state of democracy in the world. First, for the statistically average global citizen, the level of democracy in 2025 has reverted to 1978 levels. Second, autocracies now outnumber democracies (92 to 87) and are home to 74% of the world's population. Third, freedom of expression is the worst-affected aspect, worsening in 44 countries over the last decade. Fourth, 44 countries are currently autocratizing, representing 41% of the world's population and 39% of global GDP, while only 18 are democratizing. Fifth, the systematic analysis of the cumulative effects of the third wave of autocratization shows that 85 countries - almost half of the world - were autocratizing at some point since 2000. Three-quarters of them are worse in terms of democracy by 2025. Sixth, comprehensively analyzing the ongoing autocratization in the USA, this article highlights a dramatic 24% decline in liberal democracy during the first year of the second Trump presidency, reverting to 1965 levels. This represents the most rapid dismantling of democracy in modern history, marked by a concentration of power in the presidency, undermining civil rights and the rule of law, and the suppression of dissent and the media.
Autocratization and democratic backsliding raise pressing questions about how democratic resilience and fragility affect the stability and reliability of foreign policy in electoral democracies. This article examines that relationship in South Korea through a paired case study of the 2015 "Comfort Women" Agreement and the 2023 Forced Labor Agreement with Japan, both concluded under conservative administrations. Drawing on democratic resilience theory and the V-DEM accountability framework, it conceptualizes weak democratic constraint as the erosion of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal accountability under conditions of executive aggrandizement. The analysis shows how South Korea's limited "onset resilience" and high democratic fragility enabled exclusive, informal diplomacy that systematically bypassed legislative, judicial, and societal checks, generating inconsistent and erratic foreign policy outcomes. By linking autocratization trajectories to international strategy, the study argues that the sustainability and reliability of international commitments are fundamentally linked to the robustness of domestic accountability. It thus highlights how democratic erosion engenders foreign policy volatility, posing broader risks for stable foreign relations while recursively exacerbating the underlying process of democratic erosion.
Much is known about how authoritarian leaders consolidate power, yet less is understood about how citizens perceive electoral accountability in systems where presidents cannot seek reelection. The Philippines, with its single six-year presidential term, offers a crucial setting for examining this paradox. This study examines how citizens, especially those with authoritarian predispositions, interpret elections as mechanisms of government responsiveness despite the absence of direct presidential sanctioning. Using nationally representative data from the 2018 and 2021 Asian Barometer Survey, we find that authoritarian-leaning individuals are significantly more likely to believe that elections enhance government responsiveness. To contextualize these attitudes, the study also examines elite dynamics in the 2019 and 2025 Philippine midterm elections. The 2019 midterms showed strong elite consolidation, with Duterte-endorsed candidates dominating the Senate and national contests. By contrast, the 2025 midterms revealed fragmentation, as several Marcos-backed candidates lost while Duterte-aligned figures remained resilient. These outcomes suggest that midterms do not insulate presidents; even without reelection, they can reshape coalition dynamics, constrain legislative manoeuvering, and signal shifts in elite alignment. Elections in single-term presidential systems thus serve dual functions: they reinforce order-oriented meanings valued by authoritarian-leaning citizens while enabling limited accountability through the sanctioning of presidential allies and factions.
