cratic erosion, they are given courage and direction by public pressure. To that end, social mobilisation can bet­ter target institutional sites for democratic resistance. Putting pressure explicitly on the judiciary, legislature and bureaucratic agencies of the state to perform their democratic role of horizontal accountability, rather than allow transgressions, is an important and evolving strat­egy of civil resistance. Mapping the terrain of democratic backsliding Given that the contemporary world is marked by back­sliding(democratic erosion from within, generally by elected executives and ruling parties 3 ) as the predomi­nant form of contemporary autocratisation, and that un­like classic coups or outright breakdowns, backsliding proceeds through incremental, legalistic strategies(what Scheppele has termed»autocratic legalism« 4 ), democrati­cally elected leaders exploit institutional mechanisms to weaken checks and balances and concentrate executive power. 5 By analysing all countries experiencing different stages of backsliding, we can draw lessons from ongoing backsliders such as Hungary, India, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey and Venezuela, as well as from partial to full recovery cases such as Brazil, Malawi, Poland and South Korea. Three features stand out. First, state institutions are the principal aggressors: over 80 per cent of attacks origi ­nate from the executive, legislature or bureaucratic ap­paratus. Second, social democratic spaces – media, civil society and civil liberties – constitute the majority of tar­gets , accounting for roughly two-thirds of all attacks. Third, institutional attacks, while less numerous, are more systematic and legally mediated, reflecting the strategy of embedding autocracy within a formal democratic framework. These findings confirm that today’s auto­crats prefer legal tools to overt repression – they protect autocrats by capturing the very sites that could hold them accountable and create divisions within society with regard to whether democratic backsliding is even happening, hampering the development of a broad op­position coalition response. Differentiating social and institutional spaces Both social and institutional democratic spaces are criti­cal to democratic practice, and yet they have different functions. Social spaces – media, civil society, non-violent mobilisation such as protests and rallies, and opposition parties – serve as the connective tissue of democracy, linking citizens to power and channelling preferences for effective representation. Institutional spaces – judiciaries, legislatures, bureaucracies and electoral authorities – form the structural core of horizontal accountability to hold power to account, to enforce the rule of law and cre­ate and implement new laws and policies that represent citizens’ preferences and rights. In this era of democratic backsliding, attacks on social spaces tend to be targeted and extra-legal, including harassment of journalists, restrictions on NGOs, or in­timidation of protesters. These are frequent and often designed to signal dominance rather than fundamental­ly alter institutional architecture. They seek to chill criti­cal voices and urge pre-emptive capitulation to the rul­ing party’s will. By contrast, attacks on institutional spaces are typically legalistic and wide in scope(affect­ing society and politics as a whole), such as constitu­tional amendments, court-packing or electoral law ma­nipulation. These events, though rarer, represent‘inflec­tion points’ after which reversal becomes exceedingly difficult. The distinction has profound implications for resistance. Social spaces are more visible and mobilise immediate public backlash – mass protest, media campaigns or co­alition formation – whereas institutional spaces, once captured, tend to generate only narrow or elite resist­ance, based on more technical capacity and access. One key takeaway is that the pace and sequencing of attacks matters: early capture of legislatures and courts often forecloses the very channels through which organised resistance could later emerge. Who resists – and how? Resistance actors range from citizens and civil society organisations to bureaucratic agencies, legislative and judicial institutions. Just as attacks range in scope and magnitude, resistance varies in degrees of mobilisation and pressure, from a statement of disapproval to full le­gal reversal of an attack. Judicial resistance is the single most powerful predictor of the blocking of anti-democratic attacks. In the aggre­gate model, full mobilisation of the judiciary raises the likelihood of blocking an attack by more than 50 per ­centage points. 6 Bureaucratic and legislative resistance also has significant effects, albeit less frequent. Civil so­3  Nancy Bermeo(2016): On Democratic Backsliding, Journal of Democracy 27(1): 5–19; Larry Diamond(2015): Facing up to the democratic recession, Journal of Democracy 26(1): 141–155; Riedl, R.B., Friesen, P., McCoy, J.,& Roberts, K.(2025). Democratic Backsliding, Resilience, and Resistance. World Politics 77(1, suppl.), 151–177. https://dx.doi. org/10.1353/wp.2025.a954440. 4  Kim Lane Scheppele(2018): Autocratic Legalism, University of Chicago Law Review 85(2): 545–584. 5  Riedl, R. B., McCoy, J., Roberts, K.,& Somer, M.(2025). Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and(Partial) Recoveries. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 712(1), 1–22, https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ann. 6  Friesen and Riedl(2025): Effective Strategies to Resist Democratic Backsliding. APSA paper. 2 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung e.V.