What is democratic backsliding?

Democracies come in many different forms with significant variations in their institutional architecture, and some supposedly well-functioning democracies have no (or very weak) constitutional courts (e.g., the Scandinavian countries; see Larsen, [52]; Wind, [79]).[2] Arguably a useful general account of democratic backsliding must be able to explain deteriorations of democracy in such "nonconstrained" democracies, too. The system of rights is an abstract framework for positive democratic constitutional law that, as Ingeborg Maus puts it, is intended to leave room for the "political autonomy of constitutional lawmaking and law-giving citizens who first develop rights from their own vantage point, bring them historically to consciousness, and enact them into positive law" (also see Habermas, [26], pp. 160-162; Habermas, [27], p. 90). Much recent political commentary suggests that a "backlash", "revolt", or "counter-revolution" is unfolding against liberal constitutional democracy (e.g., Eatwell & Goodwin, [18]; Galston, [23]; Mounk, [58]; Norris & Inglehart, [61]; Zielonka, [82]). So long as citizens' rights to an equal opportunity to participate in political law giving are protected in other ways,[7] Habermas' system of basic rights does not even require that democracies hold elections. I speak of a "particular species of regressions" because the relevant regressions concern those fundamental constitutional rights that correspond to the basic rights Habermas sketches in the system of rights: as I will explain more below, at issue is either the outright suspension of those rights or that the exercise of those rights is obstructed without them being suspended. [Extracted from the article]