de Sa e Silva, Fabio de. “Autocratic Legalism 2.0: Insights from a Global Collaborative Research Project.” Verfassung Und Recht in Übersee / Law and Politics in Africa, Asia and Latin America 55, no. 4 (2022): 419–40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27305889.
Since the early 2000s, scholars have increasingly examined the phenomenon of democratic backsliding. While legal analysis was initially peripheral to this field, by the mid-2010s researchers in political science and constitutional law began to highlight the ways in which law and legal institutions were used to erode democracy in countries such as Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and Ecuador. These studies revealed that leaders with authoritarian tendencies often relied on legal mechanisms to dismantle liberal democracy while preserving a façade of legality—a practice Corrales termed “autocratic legalism,” later expanded and popularized by Scheppele.
In 2019, a group of scholars from Brazil, India, and South Africa launched the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL) to systematically investigate how law is deployed for antidemocratic purposes across both the Global North and South. The special issue reports the project’s initial findings. Collectively, the articles provide new empirical data on underexplored cases, broaden methodological and analytical approaches to the study of law and democratic decline, and critically interrogate the geopolitics of knowledge production on democracy and law. Building on these contributions, the editorial calls for a new research agenda—“autocratic legalism 2.0”—to further advance the study of law’s role in democratic backsliding.