Weathering the Storm? The Third Wave of Autocratization and International

While the decrease in the aggregate scores of democratic density might look the same, we expect that backsliding from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy already changes the nature of international cooperation, as we have for instance seen in the cases of Hungary and, at least until the elections in October 2023 in Poland, in the EU. [...] This pattern speaks in favor of integrating subtypes of domestic regimes: The most common nature of change in the recent decade did not lead to a rise in the number of autocratic member states, but it manifests in the sweeping decline of liberal democracies in many countries around the globe. [...] In particular, Hungary and Poland spur debates about curbing alleged judicial activism of the Court of Justice of the EU and the European Court of Human Rights, essentially questioning the primacy of European law (Madsen 2020; Wind 2021). [...] For the 1990s and 2000s, studies of legitimacy have shown that IOs like the UN, the IMF, the WTO, and the OSCE have legitimized their authority with references to the language of democracy, often in the context of organizational crises and growing politicization (Dingwerth et al. [...] IGCC Working Paper | November 2023 26 Theoretically, we explore the consequences of autocratization for democratic processes and norms, the institutional design of IOs, as well as legitimacy, paying specific attention to international preferences of autocratizing regimes meant to overcome the dichotomization of regime types in the study of the effects of IO membership.