Democratic Frontsliding in the European Union: The Problem of Autocratic Enclaves and the Case for Restorative Disobedience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
After countless warnings of a democratic recession, there are glimmers of democratic renewal, especially in the European Union. As an illiberal government in Poland was voted out of office, policymakers began debating how to restore liberal democracy and what role the EU should play. We answer by theorizing “democratic frontsliding” – the piecemeal restoration of liberal democratic institutions and practices after a period of democratic erosion – and explain how obstructions to frontsliding can be overcome, leveraging Poland as a case study. Frontsliding confronts the problem of “autocratic enclaves:” illiberal elites who survive a democratizing election and wield their institutional powers to obstruct democratization. To dismantle autocratic enclaves, we argue that a government may need transgressive acts of defiance and conscientious rule-breaking, which we call “restorative disobedience.” We develop normative criteria for restorative disobedience to prevent its abuse and explain how the EU can mandate, incentivize, and support restorative disobedience.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.028 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".