Authors

Petra Gausti²; Lenka Buštiková¹;  ¹ University of Florida, United States;  ² Charles University, Prague, Czechia

Discussion

Does mobilization from below strengthen liberal democracy? Democratic backsliding is shaped by a variety of factors. The ambivalent effect of mobilization from below has only recently come to the forefront of debates on democratic resilience (Greskovits, 2020; Stanley, 2019; cf. Hellmeier and Bernhard 2023). Central Europe exemplifies this paradox: as populists came to power, electoral and non-electoral participation increased, yet democracy declined. This suggests a complex relationship between populism and societal mobilization (Guasti, 2020). We explore conditional effects of societal mobilization on liberal democracy utilizing Bernhard's typology (2020). We use a unique quasi-experimental data from the 2023 Czech presidential elections.