A legal-scholarship article that names the mechanism this tracker documents: the use of legal, even ostensibly democratic tools to entrench power and cripple opposition while preserving democracy's outward appearance.
Varol distinguishes it sharply from classic authoritarianism's naked coercion. Instead of censoring the press, the stealth authoritarian reaches for libel suits, selective tax audits, and licensing rules; instead of banning opponents, he uses redistricting, prosecutorial discretion, and rewritten election laws; instead of abolishing courts, he packs or restructures them through ordinary legislation.
Because each move carries the imprimatur of law, it is harder to detect, harder to challenge, and easy to defend as merely "following the rules." The cumulative effect is a system that still looks democratic on paper while the genuine competition it depends on quietly disappears.
The piece reframes democratic backsliding as a problem of law turned against its own purpose, and warns that legal form is a poor test of democratic substance. Widely cited, it supplies much of the conceptual backbone for the later literature on backsliding—and for how this site reads the news.
Stealth authoritarianism refers to the use of legal mechanisms that exist in regimes with favorable democratic credentials for anti-democratic ends.— Stealth Authoritarianism