Thinking Democratically: A Comprehensive Approach to Countering and Preventing Shrinking Space

in line with the findings from Lührmann and Lindberg (2019), who identified that over two thirds of
the autocratisation episodes within the current wave of autocratisation are led by state actors who
came to power legally and were mostly democratically elected. 75 While this is not new information,
this poses a dilemma for donors. When is the legally elected government trespassing democratic
norms? Donors continue to work with executive governments in their trade and development
cooperation, including in decisions on their civil society support. As discussed above, this has led to
a decrease in support to advocacy projects and generally went hand in hand with a reduction in
funding for civil society. In the face of shrinking space, this is very counter-productive.
What is remarkable is that major opposition parties are at times also guilty of changing the rules of
the game to restrict political contestation. Political parties’ dual role in both actively restricting
space for contestation and passively keeping in place an uneven playing field is striking, considering
the incentives – at least for opposition parties – to maintain sufficient room for competition. The case
studies blame a lack of internal democracy in political parties, the role of private and illicit funding
in campaigns, and winner-takes-all-elections for this. In the face of political parties’ often ambiguous
role, citizens have resorted to alternative participation mechanisms in some of the cases under
review, including social movements and civic assemblies.
Two other groups of actors actively shrinking democratic space are business elites and criminal
networks. Through financial support to political parties, they skew the political playing field and
undermine accountability and representation. Criminal networks present a particularly challenging
threat to democratic space, as they generally foster impunity and undermine the judicial branch of
government, which sets the scene for unconstitutional changes to the rules for political contestation
and the exercise of civil liberties. Donors may, on the other hand, consider how to leverage their
trade relations for fostering more transparency in businesses’ role in financing and interfering with
political processes.
B. Civil society, media and smaller opposition parties on the frontline
Interestingly, all cases show that restrictive measures were placed on civil society. This is not
surprising, as all case studies are testament to the resilience and ingenuity of civil society in
defending and expanding democratic space. In many cases, civil society was able to push back on
shrinking strategies through advocacy, public litigation, demonstrations, and building strategic
alliances. In other cases, civil society even gained ground by pushing for laws to improve media
pluralism (Georgia) or provide budgetary support to human rights defenders (Honduras) for instance.
More generally, civil society and journalists played an essential role in bringing to light cases of
corruption and holding the government accountable for upholding the rule of law, especially in
contexts of systematic impunity.
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Lindberg, A. & Lindberg, S. (2019): A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Available here.
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