2 studies (yes, maybe) : "Can America recover from (KRASNOV) ?

[UTUSN]

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/america-recover-trump-data-says-103000695.html

Can America recover from Trump? Here’s what new data says.

.... Both papers focused on what they call “democratic U-turns:” where a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers. The first team’s conclusions were optimistic: they identified 102 U-turn cases since 1900 and found that, in 90 percent of them, the result was “restored or even improved levels of democracy.” The second team focused on 21 recent cases and inverted the findings — concluding that “nearly 90 percent” of alleged U-turns were short-lived mirages. ....

Nowadays, thanks in large part to democracy’s increasingly dominant ideological position around the world, the threat tends to come in a more subtle and hidden form — what scholars call “democratic backsliding.” In these cases, a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections. The ultimate aim is often to create a “competitive authoritarian” regime, where elections are not formally rigged but take place under such unfair conditions that they can’t truly be considered democratic. That’s what Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party did in Hungary, and what PiS tried to do in Poland.

Because democratic backsliding happens through law and political maneuvering, rather than at the point of a gun, its opponents have more avenues (such as litigation, legislative resistance, and elections) for disrupting it. This might be why the first team found that attempts at authoritarianism were actually more likely to end in a U-turn in the post-1994 period (73 percent of cases) than in the full historical sample (52 percent). ....

What all of this means for America’s future
In 2013, the political scientist Dan Slater coined a term for this kind of whiplash: “democratic careening.” Careening democracies, per Slater, are “struggling but not collapsing”: they are places of “endemic unsettledness and rapid ricocheting” between what feel like wildly different governing models. Such a democracy “may be liable to ‘capsize,’ or tip over temporarily so that democracy ceases to function for a limited time — but not to vanish from the democratic ranks entirely through a restoration and consolidation of authoritarian rule.” ....

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