ciety and citizen protests play complementary roles: while they seldom block attacks directly, they often trig­ger institutional responses, particularly by bringing legal challenges before the courts. In several African cases – Malawi, Zambia and Benin – civil society’s initiation of lawsuits created the opportunity for pro-democratic judi­cial rulings. These examples highlight the importance of social mobilisation targeting institutional domains, with specific demands for horizontal accountability. By contrast, the effectiveness of resistance declines sharply when the ruling party holds a parliamentary su­permajority. In such contexts, judicial and bureaucratic autonomy erodes, while legislative opposition is struc­turally marginalised. Under minority or divided govern­ment, however, institutional actors display higher rates of mobilisation and success. This pattern is vividly illus­trated in Poland’s post-2015 backsliding under the Law and Justice(PiS) government: once PiS consolidated parliamentary control, judicial resistance persisted but at diminished capacity, while civil society protests pro­vided mobilizational rather than structural counter­weights. 7 Broader implications for democratic resilience While the democratic resilience and formal independ­ence of courts and bureaucracies is crucial, we must un­derstand the social roots and legislative balance that shape the decisions such institutions take at any given moment of challenge. Legislative pluralism and societal activation are crucial, playing a catalytic role by con­necting social mobilisation to institutional mechanisms. Conversely, when polarisation fractures civil society, as in Indonesia, or when legislative dominance stifles op­position – as in the United States – even strong institu­tions struggle to resist. Timing and sequence are also important. Early resist­ance, particularly judicial, can arrest backsliding before institutional capture becomes irreversible. Delayed or re­active resistance, by contrast, tends to be symbolic. This temporal insight underscores the value of preventive measures, such as safeguarding judicial appointments, protecting bureaucratic tenure and maintaining trans­parent legislative procedures. Societal pressures on these domains are critical as pre-emptive sites of demo­cratic resilience. For policymakers and democracy-support organisations, external assistance should prioritise supporting judicial independence and access to justice, in addition to elec­toral system monitoring and support. Second, interna­tional actors can bolster domestic civil society’s legal ca­pacity to file constitutional or administrative challenges, thereby triggering institutional defence mechanisms. Third, donors and democratic governments can condi­tion cooperation on maintaining parliamentary pluralism and avoiding procedural manipulation that creates de facto supermajorities. From resistance to recovery Even in contexts of entrenched backsliding, recovery is possible when resistance networks align across social and institutional domains. In Brazil, Poland and Malawi, mass protest movements combined with judicial inter­ventions and electoral mobilisation to eventually unseat backsliding incumbents. However, blocked attacks do not automatically restore democratic quality; institutions often remain scarred by capture, and citizen distrust of institutional manipulation creates challenges for demo­cratic accountability and integrity in highly polarised so­cieties. 8 Critically, resistance is not random, but adapt­able, conditional on context and attack sequence, as well as learnable. 7  Michael Bernhard(2021): Democratic Backsliding in Poland and Hungary, Slavic Review 80(3): 585–607. 8  Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, eds.,“Special Issue: Polarization and Democracy: A Janus-Faced Relationship With Pernicious Consequences,” American Behavioural Scientist 62, no.1(2018), https://journals.sagepub.com/toc/abs/62/1