Why Does Democracy Decline?

Since the third wave of democratization in the 1970 s,many countries have embarked on their own democratization process.Not all countries’ democratization practice is smooth,nor can these countries always consolidate the development of democratic politics at a relatively stable and high level.As the ideal goal of human social life,many big-name democratic countries have encountered various problems in their democratic political development,especially the mature democratic countries represented by the United States,which have been labeled as failed democracies.Larry Diamond and other scholars have paid attention to the changes of democracy in the world,and put forward terms such as "democratic decline" to summarize the changes of democracy in many countries today.Larry Diamond and other scholars have defined the decline of democracy,which is mainly reflected in the changes in quantity and quality,including the gradual increase in the speed of the collapse of democracy;A resurgence of authoritarianism;The decline in the quality of democracy in western countries.At present,the academic research on the causes of the decline of democracy is also carried out from multiple perspectives,but the occurrence of a phenomenon is often the result of the joint action of multiple factors,so the key question we want to discuss is--what causes and the combination of paths lead to the occurrence of the decline of democracy? However,most member countries of OECD have highly developed economic level,diversified democratic system and diversified cultural development.Therefore,this paper takes OECD countries as the research object.Based on the research of domestic and foreign scholars,this paper takes democratic decline as the outcome variable and selects the data of democratic diversity database.Using five conditional variables,namely group deprivation,Peace degree of country,characteristics of leaders,political corruption and political polarization,V-DEM,Global Peace Index and Fragile State Index were adopted.The software of fs QCA3.0 version is used for calibration,necessary condition analysis,condition combination path analysis and other steps.After fs QCA sufficient conditions for the inspection,we had eventually lead to democracy recession combinations of three paths: the first path that if leaders has obvious personal characteristics,the degree of political polarization is high also,political corruption exists,even if the country is in a higher level of steady state,democracy will fall into recession.The second path shows that if certain groups in a country have a high sense of deprivation,and the national leaders have obvious personal characteristics,the degree of political polarization is relatively high,and the degree of corruption is relatively high,then these factors and their combination will often lead to the decline of democracy in a country.The third path can be translated as:if a country is in a state of extreme instability and has widespread political corruption,democratic decline will occur even if the country has a low sense of group deprivation,the characteristics of national leaders are not obvious,and the degree of political polarization is low.In addition,political corruption,characteristics of national leaders,political polarization,these three conditional variables will have a certain impact on the decline of democracy.