Abstract

In recent years, comparative constitutional lawyers have turned their attention to the study of democratic backsliding. However, such scholarship is yet to draw on the now extensive literature on traditional authoritarian systems. The bifurcation of regime type that has structured comparative legal research for decades—for comparative constitutional lawyers and for scholars of specific authoritarian regions—is now under strain. With the global rise of authoritarianism and the growing use of law by authoritarian states, the world is harder to neatly separate into two camps than it once might have been. This Article reflects on how we might place two bodies of literature—on comparative constitutional law and on the study of authoritarian law—in conversation with one another, and how we might study a world with a plurality of regime types, where in many cases there is increasingly a continuum both in regime type and in legal practices. In proposing that we bring together scholarship on traditional authoritarian regimes and contemporary scholarship on democratic backsliding, we hope to illuminate what might be democratic or authoritarian about a particular legal practice, which in turn can shape how we understand democracy and authoritarianism.