In this season of the Efficient Secrets podcast, I’m going to be talking to experts at the University of Oxford, along with some other guests, about how constitutional studies can help us understand democratic backsliding – the increasingly prevalent process by which consolidated democracies begin to degrade the rights and freedoms supposedly guaranteed by their constitutions.

This podcast is part of a broader project, the Constitutional Studies Forum, which will bring together scholars of law and politics to understand the challenges faced by liberal constitutional democracies across the world today.

In this first episode, I sat down with the founders of the Forum – Professor Petra Schleiter from the department of politics, and Professor Nick Barber from the faculty of law – to talk about aims of the forum and why we’ve chosen democratic backsliding as our first topic.

Music: Old Street by ORANGE PRODUCTION, licenced by Tunetank

This episode explores some of the fundamental foundations of the constitutional democratic state with experts in political and constitutional theory. What basic rights and duties of citizens are entailed by the concept of a democratic constitution? Do democratic constitutions have to resemble an ‘ideal’ type? Can the concept of democracy be applied to entities other than states, such as multinational federations? And how can we build the redress of historic injustices into modern constitutions?

Music: Old Street by ORANGE PRODUCTION, licenced by Tunetank

The second episode looks at the political process of backsliding and what happens to constitutions when this occurs, with experts on political institutions and the theory of (de)democratisation. What is democratic backsliding, why does it start, and when does it lead to transitions to authoritarianism? What kind of political regimes are more resistant to the impairment of democracy? And what can democracies do to prevent backsliding from occurring in the first place?

Music: Old Street by ORANGE PRODUCTION, licenced by Tunetank