External Democracy Promotion in Time of Democratic Crisis: Linkage, Leverage, and Domestic Actors’ Diversionary Behaviours

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the literature on External Democracy Promotion (EDP) expanded exponentially. Despite widely supported conclusions on EDP (in)effectiveness in fostering democratization and preventing democratic backsliding are still lacking, the literature has generated sophisticated explanations of these processes. Among them, Levitsky and Way’s (L&W’s) linkage and leverage theory stands out as one of the most influential. According to Tolstrup, however, their underestimation of domestic agency constitutes a crucial lacuna, which he proposes to fill through the concept of “Gatekeeping Elite” that underlines a significant impact of local actors on the linkage dimension and, consequently, on EDP (in)effectiveness. I believe that Tolstrup’s intuition can be further developed, expanding even more the explanatory power of L&W’s theory. I claim that domestic actors may exert a crucial influence also on the leverage dimension, thanks to “diversionary behaviours” that local elites may use to change external actors’ interests and preferences, persuading them to limit their democratizing pressures and thus reduce their own vulnerability to EDP processes. To assess the plausibility of this claim, I perform a congruence analysis on the recent and crucial case of autocratization in Serbia (EU candidate country), which is not fully explained by the aforementioned models.