How Little and Meng’s Objective Approach Fails in Democracies

Abstract

Little and Meng (L&M) (2023) question the prevailing narrative of widespread democratic backsliding by showing that various objective indicators of democracy are flat over time. However, because recent democratic decline is concentrated in democracies, the objective indicators can accurately test for backsliding only if they can track democratic quality within democracies. This response article shows that they cannot, for conceptual and empirical reasons. The indicators generally can distinguish democracies from autocracies but are blind to variation in quality within democracies. L&M, therefore, are showing that one form of variation in democracy is stagnant but are systematically missing the very type of variation that has most informed current warnings about backsliding.