Autocratic Legalism 2.0: Insights from a Global Collaborative Research Project

Since the 2000s, scholars have been faced with a new phenomenon, which political scientists eventually labelled democratic backsliding. Law has not been central in studies of democratic backsliding, but it has not been completely absent either. In the mid-2010s, scholars––mostly from political science and constitutional law––began tracing the links between legal norms/institutions and the degeneration of democracies in countries such as Venezuela, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and Ecuador. These studies found that law had become central to the toolkit used by leaders with autocratic dispositions to undermine liberal democracies from within, while cloaking their moves in legal forms. Corrales called this practice ‘autocratic legalism’; Scheppele elaborated on this notion and popularized it in the law and society community. In 2019, a group of scholars from Brazil, India, and South Africa created a project to investigate the antidemocratic uses of law across the Global North–South. In homage to Scheppele, they labelled this the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL). This special issue reports on initial findings from PAL. The articles herein accomplish three remarkable feats: 1) they, of course, provide a rich body of data on the countries studied, including some where the relationship between law and anti-democratic politics has been relatively neglected; 2) they expand and enrich the analytical and methodological framework for studying such a relationship, and 3) very importantly, they challenge the existing geopolitics of knowledge on issues of law, democracy, and democratic backsliding. In this editorial, I draw from those contributions to outline an agenda for future research on these issues, which I call autocratic legalism 2.0.