BRUSSELS DEMOCRACY PAPER 1/25 How to Transition to Sustainable Democracies? Investing in Democracy Means Fighting Income Inequality by Susan Stokes O ver the past half century, democracies around the globe have become more unequal, while in the past quarter century, democracy in many countries has frayed. It turns out that these two trends are related: the more unequal a country’s distribution of income, the more likely its democracy is to erode. Therefore, policies that reduce income gaps are not only important on economic and moral grounds; they are also an invest­ment in the resilience of global democracy. What do scholars mean by phrases like democratic erosion or democratic backsliding ? These are processes in which politicians are elected president or prime minister and then actively work to undermine its their country’s democratic institutions. They aggrandise their own powers, and do so in ways that go beyond the conventional muscle-flexing of chief executives. An example is when Viktor Orbán, beginning in 2010, engineered a virtual partisan takeover of Hungary’s courts; or when Donald Trump in 2020 falsely claimed fraud in the U.S. presidential election and tried to block the transition of power; or when Nicolás Ma­duro in 2017 closed down Venezuela’s nation­al congress after elections brought the opposi­tion to power, and turned legislative authority over to government-friendly Supreme Courts. 1 Melis Laebens(2022), of the Central European University, conceptualises demo­cratic erosion as sizeable and simultaneous declines in vertical and horizontal accounta­bility. Vertical accountability means that voters are able to assess the actions of incumbents and either re-elect them or cast them out of office.(If individual leaders are under term limits, voters can hold their parties to account.) Horizontal accountability means that co-equal branches of government and independent public agencies are able to monitor and potentially block the actions of 1 Book-length studies include Levitsky and Ziblatt(2018), Haggard and Kaufman(2021), Przeworski,(2019) and Gamboa(2022). My own book, The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies , will be published later this year by Princeton University Press. 1