Trajectories of populism and democracy in the global South: A comparative study of Turkey and Brazil

As the future of democracy is debated worldwide, this research offers a within-case process tracing technique and comparative case analysis for explaining how the current literature on democratic backsliding can address the trajectories of right-wing populist regimes in Turkey and Brazil. Both Turkey and Brazil are paradigmatic cases, shifting towards authoritarianism in the last decade and offer significant insights into the "democratic backsliding" literature for understanding the state-led abolition of horizontal institutions compared to the advanced democracies in the Global North. Selected case studies also represent the populists in power and different types of right-wing populism, such as Islamist populism in Turkey and pro-military populism in the left-wing political trajectory of Brazil. Both countries were recognized as electoral democracies in 2010 and are now seen in the top five autocratic countries of the world. However, Brazil is still categorized as a "democracy" although it is "electoral" and "flawed," while Turkey is seen as an "electoral autocracy" or "hybrid regime" in internationally accepted democracy indices. Those indices show that there are authoritarian trends for both countries, but why Turkey and Brazil had variant degrees of authoritarian populist consolidation in the last decade despite their similarities on historical trajectories of coups, economic development and political instabilities in western-model driven democratization and modernization process? The study mainly argues that polarization and opposition to civil society and critical thinking pave the way for authoritarian populist consolidation both in Turkey and Brazil. However, institutional conditions in Turkey have been the harbingers of a greater move towards such a consolidation, thanks to 20 years of uninterrupted authoritarian populist control of the legislature, judiciary, bureaucracy, political economy and media.