"Defining and Tracking the Trajectory of Liberal Constitutional Democracy"

We provide some definitional and empirical scaffolding for thinking about whether the Egyptian and Turkish cases are outliers or exemplars of the current state of democracy. This means first considering how “democracy” should be defined and analyzed. We argue that in thinking about democratic decline, it is most useful to focus on ‘liberal constitutional democracy’ as a distinct species of democracy, one that has enjoyed a hegemonic status at least as an ideal since the mid-1990s. Our analysis complements our other work, in which we have broken down liberal constitutional democracy into its consistent parts, and explained how each part can fail or persevere. We then analyze about the present trajectory of democracy, roughly defined in these terms,