POLICY BRIEF Time to reset! can we revitalise  European democracies? Brussels Democracy Paper 4/25 Resisting democratic backsliding Rachel Beatty Riedl In an era marked by accelerating democratic erosion across both established and emerging democracies, iden­tifying how resistance emerges – and when it succeeds – has become a matter of urgent political relevance. Draw­ing on data analysis from the Democratic Attacks and Resistance Events(DARE) dataset 1 , with Paul Friesen, we have mapped thousands of discrete episodes of attacks on democratic institutions and subsequent resistance re­sponses across 28 cases of backsliding worldwide since 2000. 2 This analysis provides some lessons concerning who is attacking democracy from within, and by what means, as well as which actors and conditions are able to block or reverse these attacks most effectively. First, attacks on democratic institutions – the rule of law, the judiciary, legislatures and electoral systems – are less frequent but significantly more severe in scope and mag­nitude than attacks on social spaces such as civil society, the media or restrictions on public gatherings. Social spaces are usually attacked first, particularly to shift the media narrative and citizens’ ability to formulate and ex­press preferences. They are followed by these institution­al site attacks, demonstrating a systemic escalation of democratic erosion and an effort to capture the very sites of democratic accountability that can uphold and protect social rights. Second, the capacity for resistance depends heavily on the balance of power in the legislature: when the ruling party commands a supermajority, institutional resistance is dramatically weakened or neutralised, while under mi­nority or divided legislatures, bureaucratic and judicial actors retain the strongest capacity to block or reverse attacks. In short, the study reveals a clear pattern: the quality of resistance mirrors the quality of democratic competition itself. Third, institutional protections do not occur within a vac­uum. While the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the legis­lature are key means of protection against severe demo­1  Democratic Attacks and Resistance Events(DARE) Dataset and Research Project: https://publicpolicy.cornell.edu/cgd/research/dare/ 2  Friesen and Riedl(2025): Effective Strategies to Resist Democratic Backsliding. APSA paper.