ABSTRACT
Democratic backsliding has emerged as a defining political challenge of the contemporary era, yet systematic cross-national evidence linking it to governance outcomes remains scarce. This article argues that backsliding affects governance through two analytically distinct channels: a political accountability channel, whereby weakened contestation and oversight reduce the external costs of poor performance; and an administrative channel, through which executive politicization erodes meritocratic recruitment and bureaucratic impartiality. Using a country-year panel of 86 countries from 1996 to 2024 and generalized structural equation models, we decompose the direct, indirect, and total effects of backsliding on government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption across stages of democratic decline. The findings show that governance deterioration is stage-specific, channel-specific, and outcome-specific, following a nonlinear, U-shaped pattern in which complete erosion—rather than autocratic reversion—produces the largest governance losses.