Shandana Khan Mohmand1 and Marjoke Oosterom2 3
This article draws on original contributions by scholars of democracy from around the world – from the global North and the global South – to unpack contemporary dynamics and processes of autocratisation, resistance, and democratisation, and to centre the political action of citizens as voters and as mobilisers within these. The articles in this issue of the IDS Bulletin cover a diverse range of countries, from some of the most dramatic regressors of recent years, to places that have seen major increases in support for far-right leaders and parties, and regions where citizens are actively pushing back against decades of autocratising rule. This article looks across these to ask whether recent autocratisation patterns are explained in part by the shifting political calculus of voters around the world, and what patterns of resistance are emerging in contemporary political contestation that are pushing back against the backslide.
Autocratisation, backsliding, democratisation, elections, resistance, citizen action, voting behaviour, democracy aid, far-right parties.
Thirty years ago, a group of scholars came together to write a special issue of the IDS Bulletin titled ‘Towards Democratic Governance’ (Robinson 1995). At the time, various states were heading towards democracy as part of an ongoing ‘third wave’ of democratisation (Huntington 1991) that started in southern Europe in the 1970s. The Berlin Wall had fallen, the Soviet Union was dismantled, and Fukuyama had recently declared the end of history (Fukuyama 1989, 1992). There was excitement about donors and civil society actors pulling together to help consolidate and support emerging democracies, and this constituted the main theme of the IDS Bulletin issue. Democracy was no longer the question – the focus was on enhancing democratic governance that would deliver to citizens. In 2025, the world looks decidedly different than 30 years ago for at least three reasons.
First, we are firmly amid a third wave of autocratisation – the first wave being in the inter-world wars period; and the second over the 1960s and 1970s, until the third wave of democratisation set in after 1974 (Lührmann and Lindberg 2019). The latest V-Dem report on the state of democracy presents a grim picture, suggesting that we have erased democratic gains for the individual citizen, taking us back to 1985 levels, and have about the same number of democracies now as we did in 1996 (Nord et al. 2025). There are now more countries that are electoral or closed autocracies than there are democracies, and liberal democracies represent the smallest regime type, with just 29 countries classified as such.4 Further, the third wave of autocratisation has affected every part of the world, including North America and Western Europe, and is thus a truly global phenomenon.
Second, there are questions around aid for democracy support in both donor and recipient countries. It is early days still, but after 2025’s dramatic aid cuts in the United States (US) and in Europe, donor support for democracy building and protection is retreating quickly. Democracy support was not simply about donors pushing an externally driven pro-democracy agenda with governments – it supported governance reforms, and networks of domestic actors working for democracy, such as civil society and research organisations, and even universities. The 2023 State of Democracy report lists ‘international democracy support and protection’ as one of the key reasons that smaller countries have been able to democratise over the past decade (Papada et al. 2023: 5). The cuts may imply a ‘triple whammy’ for pro-democracy efforts around the world: a simultaneous reduction of external pressures on autocratic (and autocratising) regimes; of national pro-democracy mobilisation efforts by civil society groups, especially in protecting minorities and human rights; and of research and advocacy on the links between democracy, justice, and wellbeing. The latter is essential to build counter-narratives that can highlight that ‘whenever regimes do make a difference, lives under dictatorships are miserable’ (Przeworski et al. 2000: 12). As spaces for research shrink, so will evidence-informed arguments against authoritarian regimes.
Third is the role of citizen action in this wave of autocratisation. Democracy has regressed in terms of both contestation and inclusiveness (Dahl 1971) – there is a growing consolidation of power in the hands of the executive and measures to limit opposition, while civic and political rights and freedoms are constrained. The negative impact of this regression on citizens is significant and well documented. Yet, even as autocratising regimes work to limit the power of citizens, many of these regimes have come to power through elections in which voters came out to vote for leaders promising the autocratic measures that they implemented once in power. In his contribution to this issue, Carothers calls them ‘elected but anti-democratic leaders’ (this IDS Bulletin, p21). Citizens, as voters and in the streets, have played a major role in this current wave of autocratisation,5 organising both for and against leaders with populist and/or autocratic tendencies, and contributing in the process to another phenomenon that informs the contemporary political landscape: polarisation (Lorch 2021; Rostbøll 2024). Civil society and citizen action seem deeply polarised over key policy issues such as sexual and reproductive rights and health, gender equality, affirmative action, climate change, and regulation of the private sector.
In this issue of the IDS Bulletin, we look at democracy’s prospects as lying along fault lines drawn between citizens and their political actions in support of or in opposition to democratising or autocratising parties and leaders. While there is nothing new about a politically divided citizenry, political action demands re-examination in this moment to understand what has shifted us towards a more autocratic, rather than democratic, world. The various articles in this issue look at how people engage with democracy – their basis for voting for certain leaders, how and what they contest, and the ideas and narratives that underlie these behaviours. While dynamics of democratic backsliding and autocratisation involve diverse domestic actors and often draw on nationalist or nativist sentiment, fault lines may be transnationally defined and transmitted, with an important role for social media.
Drawn from the global North and the global South, the authors of this issue represent a mix between original contributors to the 1995 issue and new authors located in the countries that they are analysing. Across them, they cover many parts of the world, from some of the most dramatic regressors of recent years (such as India, the Philippines, and USA), to places that have seen major increases in support for far-right leaders and parties (such as Brazil and Europe), and regions where citizens are actively pushing back against decades of autocratising rule (Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan).
This IDS Bulletin recognises that democracy is currently truly contested everywhere and is not simply a ‘development issue’. The articles help unpack two interrelated foundational questions about citizens’ political action. A first set of concerns taken up by the articles in this issue coalesce around the question of whether recent democratic backsliding and autocratisation are explained by the shifting political calculus of voters around the world. A second set of concerns is around the contemporary nature of political contestation that is pushing back against the backslide – what form this is taking and what patterns can be identified.
Together, they suggest that even as elections deliver victories for autocratising leaders, citizens continue to organise around more democratic and liberal ideas that keep the electoral space competitive. Underlying these articles is an exercise in hope: exploring why people vote and mobilise as they do, will help us understand how to contribute more effectively to efforts at reversing the current autocratising trend, collectively and globally.
The rest of this article proceeds as follows. Section 2 explores the shifting political calculus of voters, corresponding with the first set of concerns above. Section 3 looks at the contemporary nature of contestation and resistance, taking up the second set of concerns above. Section 4 concludes.
A big question about what explains voters’ recent tendency to support autocratising leaders is the extent to which this is a reaction against governments not delivering on development promises. Leonard (this IDS Bulletin) points to deteriorating standards and increasing costs of living as the reason behind the magnitude of Donald Trump’s victory in 2024. America’s ‘distributional crisis’ has meant that its ‘middle class has joined the ranks of its working poor’ (p103) and punished the incumbent Democratic Party in the process (see also Gianolla 2025). Mano and Sardenberg (this IDS Bulletin) highlight a similar voting calculus at play in Jair Bolsonaro’s election to the presidency in Brazil in 2018. These arguments contribute to a wider literature about the pursuit of neoliberal policies turning voters to parties on the right (a contradiction in itself) made in seminal work, such as that by Norris and Inglehart (2019). Yet, Carothers and Hartnett (2024) point to evidence from 12 countries to argue that there is little support for the ‘democracy-not-delivering’ argument, and that backsliding occurs because of the anti-democratic behaviours and preferences of political elites, not citizens. One way to reconcile this debate, perhaps, is to think not about the overall development trends or the issues most present in the minds of voters at each election, but about shifts in the political calculus of voters brought on by precarious contexts and realignments between voters and political parties on the left and the right.
This IDS Bulletin seeks to understand democracy’s prospects by unifying analysis of autocratisation and citizen action in the global North and South, suggesting that they have more in common than one often assumes. For example, the political calculus that Leonard (this IDS Bulletin) suggests won Donald Trump his second term in the US has much in common with the dynamics that Aiyar (this IDS Bulletin) suggests are at work in Indian elections that have kept Narendra Modi in power for three terms. Yet, the contributions to this issue also highlight the need to interpret the literature on autocratisation – much of it focused on the US and European experiences – within the context of the global South. Without suggesting that there is a common history across this region, it is possible to demarcate two contextual conditions that inform the more precarious democratic experience of the global South.
The first is that of colonial pasts. Democracies that emerged post-colonisation were disadvantaged by three elements of their colonial experience: extractive state apparatuses; an undeveloped polity in terms of state–citizen interdependence; and constructed and codified social differentiation categories, such as race in the case of Brazil, caste in India, and ethnicity across Africa (Dirks 2001; Mamdani 2001; Khan Mohmand 2019; Smith 1996). Together, these meant that democratisation efforts were often led by insulated, extractive states that delivered to citizens through targeted, patronage-based identity politics (Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001; Lee and Paine 2024). Many such states have since lingered in the categories of ‘electoral democracies’ or ‘electoral autocracies’,6 unable to consolidate democratic gains even as governments came and went through successive elections.
Various contributions to this IDS Bulletin highlight the difficult, uneven, and non-linear democratic pathways of countries such as Brazil (Mano and Sardenberg), India (Aiyar), or Nigeria (Khalafallah, Ojewale and Oosterom). They add to classic studies of democratic transitions that established the messiness of these processes, such as by Hagopian and Mainwaring (2005), Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán (2014), and O’Donnell, Schmitter and Whitehead (1986), but the incompleteness of democratic consolidation has rarely been analysed as a factor that can condition people’s experience of and response to democracy.
Carothers argues in this IDS Bulletin that the challenge of ‘making a positive case for democracy to sceptical and alienated citizens frustrated by their experience of several decades of troubled democratic transition requires new narratives and methods’ (p22) from democracy-promoting actors. Mid-level democracies can be dangerous spaces: moderate levels of democracy are often tainted by high levels of corruption, violent conflicts, meagre economic outcomes, and deficient delivery of public goods (Harding 2020; Jetter, Agudelo and Hasan 2015; McMann et al. 2020). It is also often difficult to determine the direction of travel of such regimes, a point that Jenkins and Goetz (this IDS Bulletin, p57) make when they point out the ambiguous nature of political developments in the Philippines to highlight the challenges that confront any effort to determine the direction of a country’s regime trajectory. We argue that seemingly democracy-restoring developments can obscure political dynamics and long-term institutional weaknesses that can undermine the rule of law.
The second contextual condition is that of multi-ethnic societies with high rates of poverty. A political consequence of this is that unlike in the global North, political parties in the global South are rarely intelligible along neat left–right spectrums. Parties on either side of the divide here are vocal on redistributive agendas, promising poverty reduction and social protection, and they may also not differ in the extent to which they implement these policies when in power. This is politically expedient – not only is poverty usually the most salient issue in these countries, but the poor are the largest demographic group and often vote more than the rich (Ahuja and Chhibber 2012; Kasara and Suryanarayan 2015; Kuenzi and Lambright 2010; Kumar 2009). Redistributive policies thus represent a constant across the political spectrum in the global South and are not very useful for distinguishing between voter bases. Instead, parties and leaders must find other grounds on which to appeal to voters, and they often find that a distinguishing heuristic lies in the politics (or narratives) of recognition.
The dynamics of economically struggling, ‘in-between’ regimes – the ‘electoral democracies’ or ‘electoral autocracies’ of the world – create rich spaces for populist narrative building, especially by leaders that promise a better future or even a return to a more glorious past. While these contextual conditions can explain a longer struggle with populist leaders and authoritarian tendencies in parts of the global South, they may also be able to explain why, as democratic institutions weaken or economic conditions become more precarious around the world, including in the North, voters might find populist narratives more appealing.
Caiani and Eren (this IDS Bulletin) draw our attention in their article on Europe to what they call unifying ‘frames’ – ‘wokeism’ is one particularly powerful ‘master frame’ that has been used by far-right groups in Europe to consolidate support across national borders. There are other ‘frames’ highlighted in the articles of this issue that project leaders as saviours or build nativist agendas that blame some ‘other’ for hardships – immigrants across the global North; Muslims in India and elsewhere; or sexual minorities in Brazil. Other populist frames of the right wing, such as Donald Trump’s ‘America First’, focus on a rollback of foreign aid and state bureaucracies. Carothers (this IDS Bulletin) points out, ‘US conservatives have long evinced deep scepticism about the value of aid, seeing it as an international extension of the idea of domestic welfare programmes that they strongly dislike’ (pp23–4).
The use of propaganda by populist or autocratic leaders is not new, but the increase in the use of misinformation as a repertoire of political action, mostly through social media platforms, is perhaps a distinguishing feature of our contemporary moment. Moore (this IDS Bulletin) points out in his contribution, ‘It has been convincingly demonstrated that we are moving into an era of spin dictators and informational autocracy, where ‘authoritarian’ rulers stay in power less through coercion and more by manipulating information and keeping us confused and divided (Guriev and Treisman 2019). This raises the prospect that… in the future, we may find it much harder to distinguish democracies from autocracies’ (p40, emphasis in original). A generous interpretation of recent voting trends might argue that perhaps voters in much of the world are already having a hard time distinguishing between these.
Lipset and Rokkan (1967) tell us that the alignment between parties and voters works along two dimensions – economic and sociocultural – and as contexts change in terms of these dimensions, voters may realign between parties. This is visible in many contributions to this issue: more precarious economic conditions around the world, especially in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008, seem to be a visible part of voters’ shifting party allegiances. Mano and Sardenberg (this IDS Bulletin) argue that the combination of ‘structural elements – … economic crisis alongside intensified exploitation and, consequently, the precarity of life – has produced a crisis scenario’ (p127) that helped precipitate the shift of electoral support to Bolsonaro in 2018.
But much of the current realignment of voters appears to be on more sociocultural and affective grounds. Possibly the most salient fault line in the contemporary moment is a sociocultural divide on multiculturalism, both in terms of its desirability and its definition. In some places, such as on the African continent, sociocultural divides – and political mobilisation that draws on this – continues to be shaped by ethnic identity (Cheeseman 2018). In other places, newer dynamics are visible. For example, while religious identity has divided voters over most of the past century, its affective appeal seems to have grown in Brazil (Mano and Sardenberg), across Europe (Caiani and Eren), in India (Aiyar), and in the USA (Leonard) in the hands of populist far-right leaders. Elsewhere, such as in the global North, immigration, gender, and racial and sexual identities are now the most salient political divisors.
The fact that dividing lines across political parties are now drawn more visibly on the politics of identity and recognition, rather than redistribution, shows up across several contributions. Mano and Sardenberg (this IDS Bulletin) argue that the left-wing Workers’ Party’s (PT) 2022 win was enabled by ‘an increase in the participation of women, black people, indigenous people, and LGBTQIA+ individuals in institutional politics’ (p127). Leonard (this IDS Bulletin) asks in his contribution on the US: ‘What would happen if political candidates from opposing parties start agreeing with one another about the economy’s “big questions”?’ (p106). He answers this by looking at Thomas Frank’s (2004) book on how Kansas, ‘once a bedrock of the American left became a haven for right-wing politics’ (Leonard, this IDS Bulletin, p106), pointing out that the ‘pro-market’ and conservative-on-welfare convergence between the Republican and Democratic parties during the 1990s forced ‘politicians on both sides of the aisle to differentiate themselves based on social issues like family values, abortion access, and LGBTQ rights, rather than economic issues’ (p107).
This increasingly centrist, weak-on-redistribution stance has been visible in leftist parties globally. In a recent book, Snegovaya argues that in Hungary and Poland, ‘left parties followed the examples of Western social democratic parties, alienating working-class supporters and creating opportunities for the populist right to pander to the left’s dissatisfied constituents’ (2024: 32). At the same time, parties on the right introduced genuinely redistributive agendas, along with populist or nativist narratives that appealed to working-class voters for other, cultural reasons.
Parties of all shades in the global North and South seem to be converging on the politics of redistribution and differentiating instead on the politics of recognition. Fraser pointed to this shift all the way back in 1995: ‘Cultural recognition displaces socioeconomic redistribution as the remedy for injustice and the goal of political struggle’, arguing that our challenge is to develop ‘a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality’ (Fraser 1995: 68–9, emphasis in the original). This seems to have been demonstrated in Brazil, where Mano and Sardenberg (this IDS Bulletin) point out that, in 2022, ‘For the first time, trans women have been elected to parliament, mostly by left-wing parties, advocating for causes not only related to recognition struggles but also to redistributive agendas’ (p127).
Snegovaya (2024) points out that in Eastern Europe, where leftist parties did not cede space on redistribution, such as in Czechia and Slovakia, an ascendancy of the right is not visible. It seems that despite the broad appeal of nativist narratives that pull voters to the right, a large part of the story is that leftist parties’ weakening stance on redistribution has actively pushed people out of the left.
Where we have landed is a polarised politics of recognition that alienates more conservative working-class groups on one side, and builds off nativist, hyper-masculine, saviour politics on the other, which has facilitated the contemporary third wave of autocratisation (De 2020; Szebeni and Salojärvi 2022). Be this as it may, Weyland (2024) provides a note of hope by reminding us that there are many attempts at autocratisation that have not succeeded across the world. Perhaps another way to look at this are the ways in which citizens push back against autocratising tendencies that threaten to limit their rights and freedoms. We turn to this next.
Compared with the vast body of scholarship that seeks to explain the contemporary trends and patterns in autocratisation across liberal and illiberal regimes, a relatively smaller but fast-growing body of research has addressed resistance to autocratisation (Tomini, Gibril and Bochev 2023; Truong, Ong and Shum 2024; Van Lit, van Ham and Meijers 2024; Yabanci, Akkoyunlu and Öktem 2025). Tomini et al. (2023: 121) define resistance against autocratisation as ‘any activity, or combination of activities, taken by a changing set of often interconnected and interacting actors who, regardless of the motivations, attempt at slowing down, stopping, or reverting the actions of the actors responsible for the process of autocratization’. This IDS Bulletin, particularly the articles by Khalafallah, Ojewale and Oosterom on the African context, and by Aiyar on India, addresses contemporary manifestations of resistance against backsliding and autocratisation. Caiani and Eren (this IDS Bulletin) illustrate transnational forms of resistance enabled by social media, while Jenkins and Goetz (this IDS Bulletin) recall the People’s Power revolution that ended Ferdinand Marcos’ dictatorship in the Philippines in 1986.
Khalafallah et al. (this IDS Bulletin) demonstrate how the decision of Senegal’s former president, Macky Sall, to postpone the 2024 national elections was met with mass protest, in which urban youth played a pivotal role. The Constitutional Council overturned his decision and ordered elections to be held soon, which happened in March 2024. Moreover, as a result of the protests and also pressure from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the government released political prisoners.
Aiyar (this IDS Bulletin) underscores how the 2024 elections in India show particularly hopeful signs of the population wanting a more inclusive democracy as support for the ruling Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) decreased, forcing it to form a coalition government. She writes how ‘concerns over India’s democratic erosion… found their way into electoral chatter deep in the hinterlands’ (p78), with diverse groups of citizens expressing concerns over the BJP’s practices as ‘tanashahi’ (dictatorship), and especially members of Dalit communities feeling anxious about their constitutional rights. These grass-roots narratives on identity and inclusion countered the BJP’s emphasis on economic development and prosperity (carried out mostly without redistribution). For the political opposition, the risk that the BJP’s dominance would lead to constitutional amendments became a rallying point. Thus, elections still matter in broader dynamics of resistance to autocratic actors, though often not in isolation from other resistance actors and dynamics.
The contributions to this issue remind us that autocratisation is a dialectic process: it needs to be understood in interaction with the actors and institutions that (fail to) oppose it. They also reflect a broader debate in the literature, which has increasingly recognised that collective strategies and alliances across different types of actors, and across institutional, political, and social domains, can contribute successfully towards resistance against autocratisation (Laebens and Lührman 2023; Lewin 2021; Tomini et al. 2023; Truong et al. 2024; Yabanci 2024). There is a need to discern patterns in resistance, as strategies aimed at ‘redemocratisation’ in liberal democracies affected by backsliding may be different from resistance strategies in stable electoral autocracies or in those facing intensifying autocratisation (Cheeseman et al. 2024).
The 2023 State of Democracy report highlighted eight7 countries where democracies ‘bounced back’, restored after a period of autocratisation. The commonalities between these countries included the presence of and interaction between multiple resistance actors and processes, including popular mobilisation; a judiciary that reversed the concentration of power in the executive; and elections (Papada et al. 2023). Similar patterns were observed in countries that democratised after a period of autocratisation (a ‘U-turn’), according to the 2025 State of Democracy report (ibid: 28), which again notes the important roles of protests and elections, and highlights how strides towards freedom of expression seem to be important across many current processes of democratisation (Nord et al. 2025: 35). However, except for Brazil, the number of countries that have managed to counter and, to some degree, reverse autocratisation is relatively small, whereas autocratisation has occurred in countries with large populations and economies, and with significant regional influence (ibid.). Moreover, there is growing (but perhaps not enough) awareness about the kind of strategies that may be counterproductive: aggressive tactics by opposition parties have exacerbated democratic breakdown, while more moderate actions have successfully countered autocratisation (Cleary and Öztürk 2020; Korkmaz 2024).
With elections and episodes of mass protests capturing media attention, more diverse and especially smaller and subtle forms of resistance in society get overlooked, which we turn to next.
As Aiyar’s contribution to this IDS Bulletin demonstrates, discontent over the BJP’s autocratic practices – that could be aggravated if their vote share increased – percolated in the local, everyday lives of Indian citizens. Noting the multiple sites of democratic resilience, Aiyar talks of the everyday discourses that spread on the ground. Particularly where states are repressive, resistance actors ‘develop and engage in mundane and cumulative repertoires of resistance against autocratization prevalent in both democratic and authoritarian regimes’ (Truong et al. 2024: 514).
The importance of having a ‘democratic stock’ – prior experience with democracy – has often been explained in terms of the effectiveness of accountability institutions (Edgell et al. 2020). However, everyday democratic practices may well contribute to building and protecting democratic stock at the grass roots, and these practices may include the conversations on inclusion that various minority groups in India bring into the public sphere. Moreover, certain societal responses to autocracy and autocratisation are not merely about resistance: they may reflect important political imaginaries. Khalafallah et al. (this IDS Bulletin) identify how engagement in protest and online debates offered young Sudanese the opportunity to connect across diverse parts of the country and imagine alternatives to the centralised governance structures they had inherited from the colonial era. Their resistance led to the downfall of President Omar al-Bashir but did not produce a lasting democratic transition. Nonetheless, Yabanci et al. (2025: 102) remind us that autocratisation is always dynamic, and grass-roots actors may keep democratic demands alive and, eventually, reach out across domains to resuscitate democratic practice. This may well be the case for Sudanese youth, who continue to have hope for democracy in the face of repression.
While these contributions foreground the role of citizen action, the 1995 issue of the IDS Bulletin was written at a time when significant levels of aid funding were aimed at ‘building’ formal civil society and a plethora of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) emerged: a phenomena the 1995 IDS Bulletin critically examined (Carothers 1995; Robinson 1995). The role of NGOs in democratic governance was to hold government actors accountable, educate the citizenry, and enhance citizen representation by organising citizen participation or by acting as intermediaries, while their own legitimacy and accountability were sometimes in question (Houtzager and Lavalle 2010).
Robinson, in this issue of the IDS Bulletin, addresses how African governments have constrained civil society and media actors, and maps civil society responses, with aid declining. Robinson notes the alliances of formal NGOs with certain protest movements. However, due to budget cuts by the US and several European governments, while these governments prefer to spend their available funds on humanitarian relief rather than development aid, this means that there will be far fewer resources for resistance actors to build alliances. Yet, evidence points towards collaborations between different actors and institutions having higher chances of pushing back against autocratisation and possibly reverting it. For instance, comparing Türkiye and Hungary, Yabanci (2024) finds that civic opposition is more resilient where there is rapport between political opposition parties and civil society actors, and where civic actors bring multiple grievances together and effectively balance online and street-level action. For Poland, Marczewski (2025) highlights the role of get-out-to-vote campaigns in 2023 that were organised not by political parties but by formal and informal civic initiatives. A broad desire for change proved to be a driver among all generations, as discontent over post-pandemic economic issues, border security, and particular agricultural policies, prompted a high turnout, and the populist right-wing Law and Justice government lost to the political opposition (Szczerbiak 2023).
The significant role of social media in both processes of autocratisation and resistance is another radically different situation since the publication of the 1995 IDS Bulletin issue. In their article on African youth and protests in this IDS Bulletin, Khalafalla et al. demonstrate how social media enabled the mobilisation of different groups in protests that occurred in very different regimes: in Nigeria, Senegal, and Sudan. In their article, Caiani and Eren (this IDS Bulletin) show how both right-wing and democracy activists use social media and the internet to mobilise transnationally, noting how social media enabled the diffusion of right-wing ideas. The internet is thus used by both democratic and autocratic actors and movements, enabling their transnational mobilisation and diffusion of ideas. This adds to existing scholarship on more formalised civil society and media organisations, which relates how they incorporate a range of online tools to document human rights abuses and promote accountability action (Nyabola 2018). Moreover, social media is used in everyday forms of resistance, for example, by creating and sharing satire, which may eventually prompt mobilisation (Yékú 2022).
While the definition of resistance concerns both state and non-state actors as the targets of resistance, it is resistance against state actors driving polarisation and autocratisation that receives most attention. However, incumbents and political leaders with autocratic tendencies often develop coalitions with societal actors to nurture a support base that helps build, sustain, or legitimise their power. Once in government, they may co-opt or mobilise social groups that align with their interests or at least bolster their confidence. For instance, Hindutva groups in India are in strong support of the BJP government adopting measures that lead to the exclusion of Muslim communities and informally reproduce authoritarian dynamics at the grass roots (Jaffrelot 2021; Nielsen and Nilsen 2021). These organised groups simultaneously perpetuate and deepen the polarisation that Aiyar talks about in this issue. The third wave of autocratisation is thus not only about autocrats pitted against citizens: citizens are pitted against one another in politically and affectively polarised contexts, as Moore addresses in his contribution to this IDS Bulletin. Regimes with autocratic tendencies have long formed alliances with corporate actors (Kolstad 2024). More complex alliances have emerged between state and private actors; for instance, those that collaborate to drive gender backlash agendas and influence anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual (LGBTQIA+) legislation in different parts of the world (Edström et al. 2024).
These dynamically evolving alliances between states and societal actors will require resistance groups to assess where to put their energy: which actors to confront in addition to the state, and how. For instance, Mano and Sardenberg explain the informal alliance between Bolsonaro and evangelical churches in Brazil – a notion of ‘gender ideology’ as a derogatory term by churches gets diffused through religious communities, thus nurturing support for bolsonarismo. Consequently, while feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements and politicians have long worked to promote progressive gender equality policies, they also need to collaborate to counter such narratives in society that continue to drive an anti-gender and anti-LGBTQIA+ backlash.
With increased support for populist actors that deepen polarisation in contexts such as India, Brazil, and beyond, citizens need to confront diverse actors with autocratic tendencies, including fellow citizens in their immediate vicinity. At the same time, Caiani and Eren (this IDS Bulletin) point out that societal actors take on other societal actors across international borders, demonstrating how democracy activists in Finland targeted the radical right in both Finland and Italy by mimicking and subverting contentious action by Italian right-wing actors. And while resistance actors in Western democracies may learn from seasoned democracy activists in electoral autocracies in the global South, it appears that strategies aimed at depolarisation need to be integrated into the resistance playbook.
Democracy is about the people, the demos. This IDS Bulletin demonstrates how citizens play a major role in processes of autocratisation, resistance, and democratisation in their capacity as voters and mobilisers. The contributions highlight the interaction between popular and electoral politics, between voters and movements. The current state of democracy asks for an analysis of the diverse motivations of citizens to vote for leaders and parties that promised outright they would undo democratic institutions, and the expectations they had of what these leaders would deliver in terms of redistribution to enhance their welfare and the recognition of their rights, or the repudiation of the rights of others.
Democracy works where checks and balances through political, institutional, and social accountability institutions work. In liberal democracies, the judiciary is the first line of defence, but when autocrats come to power, they swiftly move to undermine an independent judiciary, concentrate powers in the hands of the executive, and constrain the media and other important freedoms (Tomini et al. 2023). The contributions in this IDS Bulletin highlight how this unfolded in the US, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across some parts of Africa and Europe, but they also provide an understanding of what can be done to halt and reverse these dynamics, and also address feelings of discontent by those who feel left behind by a lack of redistribution. Anger over economic malaise has been a driver of protests in autocratic contexts alongside demands for democracy, as this year’s protests in Türkiye show (Dinc 2025), underlining the importance of the need to address redistribution in diverse contexts. In contexts where formal civil society organisations are forced to scale down, everyday forms of resistance may become more important.
Important questions remain. How can left-wing and other political parties that aim to uphold inclusive democratic values reconnect with the constituencies they lost to parties with autocratic tendencies? Where have they done so, and how? What combinations of and interplay between strategies work in what kind of context? How to tackle alliances between societal actors and state actors is a relevant field of study that has received insufficient attention, and needs to be addressed in future research, especially in contexts of polarisation.
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