When Right-Wing Populism Becomes Infrastructure, Why Democratic Recovery Requires More Than Elections
- Gülşen Doğan
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
The 2026 V-Dem Democracy Report identifies just 18 countries as democratising in 2025 after fifteen years of global stagnation. Yet it also shows that democratic “U-turns” are possible. The urgent question is not only why democracies backslide, but why some elected right-wing populist projects are much harder to reverse than others, even after their leaders lose office.
This paradox echoes Anton Jäger’s diagnosis of “hyperpolitics”. Public life is saturated with protest and moral urgency, while parties, unions and civic organisations able to convert participation into durable power have weakened. Yet the asymmetry matters: opposition mobilisation may be fleeting, while governing populists can bypass intermediary organisations and use the state to build lasting power.
Building on my comparative research on right-wing populism in Türkiye and Brazil, I argue that durability depends on whether leaders translate claims made in the name of “the people” into connected arrangements governing law, appointments, resources, information and national-local relations. When these changes reinforce one another, political control becomes everyday government. I call this process infrastructuralisation.
For foreign-policy actors, democracy support should therefore defend more than separate courts, media, legislatures, civil society groups or municipalities. It should strengthen the routes connecting scrutiny to decision and decision to implementation.
From political attack to governing infrastructure
Right-wing populist leaders portray courts, journalists, universities, civil society and opposition parties as obstacles to popular will. Such attacks erode trust, but durable change requires rules, appointments, budgets and administrative practices that make exceptional power routine.
Türkiye illustrates this conversion. Emergency rule after the failed coup attempt of July 2016 enabled purges, closures and administrative restructuring. Crucially, the mechanisms strengthening the presidency outlasted the emergency. The 2017 constitutional redesign abolished the premiership, concentrated executive power and weakened parliamentary checks. Research covering 147 decrees in the first presidential term shows how reorganisation became repeatable across policymaking, appointments, finance and public institutions.
Together, constitutional reform widened presidential authority; decrees reorganised institutions; appointments shaped enforcement; and weaker parliamentary oversight narrowed routes for challenge. The result was mutually reinforcing arrangements costly to dismantle.
Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro shows why the distinction matters. His government damaged environmental regulation, expertise and participatory institutions. Decree No. 9,759 of 2019 moved to dissolve hundreds of federal councils, although courts later limited its reach. The government also cut CONAMA membership from 96 to 23 seats and civil-society representation from 23 seats to four. Research documents staffing, budget and enforcement pressures across environmental agencies.
Yet severe damage in one field is not stable control across the political system. Courts, Congress, governors, agencies, universities, journalists and civic organisations retained partly independent authority. Bolsonaro weakened important institutions without converting them into durable, regime-wide control.
Why visible opposition is not enough
The comparison is not a ranking of two countries. It identifies a mechanism: authoritarian projects become harder to reverse when executive power connects institutions while actors resisting it remain isolated. Political intensity is not the same as institutional leverage.
An audit report matters only if its findings reach the public, trigger investigation, activate a legislature or court and lead to an enforceable decision. Research on the Turkish Court of Accounts shows that it continued to publish reports identifying waste and irregularities, but media capture and weak parliamentary follow-up often prevented political consequences. The evidence existed, the route to accountability was restricted.
Brazil’s pandemic response illustrates the opposite dynamic. When the federal government challenged restrictions adopted by governors and mayors, the Supreme Federal Court affirmed the authority of states and municipalities to act. The judgment constrained the executive because subnational governments retained both legal authority and administrative capacity. A court ruling became effective through its connection to actors able to implement it.
This is cross-institutional resistance. The capacity to carry a challenge from information, to scrutiny, to a binding decision and then to enforcement. Protest, investigative reporting and judicial independence all matter, but visibility should not be confused with leverage. Resistance is most durable when institutions can reinforce one another.
What democracy support should change
This distinction matters for governments, donors and international organisations. Democracy support often focuses on individual actors: judges, independent media, election monitors or municipalities. Each may be valuable. But programmes should also be judged by whether they create a credible route from information to action.
Three practical questions follow. Can independent reporting reach an authority with power to investigate? Can courts rely on institutions capable of enforcing rulings? Can local governments and watchdogs act before budgets, appointments or regulations are settled?
That means linking legal aid to investigative journalism; connecting audit bodies with parliamentary scrutiny and public communication and supporting municipalities as democratic counterweights, not only service providers. Funding can encourage cooperation across sectors, provided local actors (not donors) set priorities.
The risk does not stop at national borders. Cooley and Dukalskis describe “authoritarian snapback”: non-democratic states limit the transnational reach of liberal ideas at home while advancing illiberal norms through global media, markets, universities and other arenas. Their argument concerns authoritarian states broadly, but it identifies an external channel democracy-support strategies often miss. Foreign engagement can give concentrated executives resources, legitimacy and agenda-setting opportunities.
Trade, migration, security and climate partnerships therefore deserve scrutiny. They can unintentionally reinforce executive gatekeepers when funds, data or implementation authority flow through a narrow set of national offices. Democratic resilience should be assessed not only through formal safeguards but through who controls appointments, information and delivery.
The aim is not to engineer domestic politics but to avoid reinforcing authoritarian dependencies and preserve legitimate institutions’ capacity to cooperate.
Democratic delivery matters, but so does how benefits are organised. When jobs, contracts or welfare become partisan rewards, political independence grows costlier. Universal and transparent provision lowers those costs and makes democratic competition more credible.
Electoral turnover may not undo power embedded across institutions. Democratic recovery requires rebuilding the links through which information leads to scrutiny, decisions and enforcement. That is the difference between opposition that is merely visible and resistance that can endure.
This article written by Gülşen Doğan, a PhD candidate in Political Science and International Relations at Koç University. Her research examines migration diplomacy, populism, authoritarianism, and multilevel governance, with a comparative focus on Türkiye, Hungary, and Brazil. Her work has appeared in Third World Quarterly, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Politics, Religion & Ideology, and Disasters. She has also contributed to the Horizon Europe-funded BROAD-ER project at MiReKoç.
Comments