Full bibliography

This paper critiques the dominant literature on democratic backsliding, arguing that contemporary analyses overemphasize normative decline, populist leadership, and political culture while neglecting the structural role of capitalism. While influential accounts, such as Levitsky and Ziblatt’s focus on eroding norms of mutual toleration and institutional restraint, explain how democratic erosion occurs, they offer limited insight into why the postwar democratic consensus has fractured. Drawing on critiques such as Adam Tooze’s, this study contends that existing scholarship remains analytically thin in its treatment of power. In particular, it highlights the systematic absence of class analysis and the reduction of “the economy” to market fluctuations rather than a set of historically contingent, coercive social relations. Revisiting mid-20th-century critical theorists, including C. Wright Mills, Ralph Miliband, and Göran Therborn, the paper argues for a renewed engagement with the relationship between capitalism and democracy. It suggests that without integrating class dynamics and structural inequalities into analyses of democratic decline, current scholarship risks offering incomplete diagnoses and inadequate remedies for the crisis facing Western democracies.