Society, State and Democratic Erosion

1. Introduction

Since the Donald Trump’s second election to the U.S presidency in 2024, many scholars have increasingly described his presidency and American politics increasingly shifting towards authoritarianism. In one prominent example, NPR summarized a Bright Line Watch survey of political science scholars reporting steep declines in expert evaluations of U.S. democratic performance in the early months of Trump’s second term, alongside widespread concern that the country is moving away from liberal democracy and toward a more authoritarian direction (Langfitt). The pattern emphasized in that reporting is incremental: elected executives expand control over the administrative state, press oversight and judicial constraints, and delegitimize independent critics and institutional referees, gradually reshaping the terms of political contestation (Langfitt).

The narrow corridor framework offers a disciplined way to interpret why incremental shifts of this kind can matter for liberal democracy. Liberty is not the natural byproduct of either a strong state or a strong society, but the contingent outcome of a sustained balance between them. A capable state can provide order, rights enforcement, and public goods, yet that same capacity can be redirected toward domination if it escapes constraint. An organized society can restrain rulers, yet it can also fragment, demobilize, or align with executive power in ways that loosen constraint rather than tighten it (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15). The analytic payoff of the framework is its insistence that liberty is relational. Its vulnerability, in contemporary settings, is that it can be read as if society consistently functions as a barrier to executive overreach. Modern democratic erosion repeatedly shows how fragile that assumption can be (Bermeo; Kneuer 840).

The United States is a useful focal case precisely because it resists any simple account centered on societal weakness. Dense civil society organizations, a professional legal ecosystem, thick media markets, and a constitutional design saturated with veto points all suggest a political system with multiple sources of constraint. Yet the last decade has produced sustained pressures consistent with democratic backsliding, making the U.S. an instructive site for connecting corridor theory to contemporary efforts at executive power consolidation (Carrier and Carothers 5 - 6).

The narrow corridor helps explain why backsliding is possible even in a democracy with substantial state capacity and formal checks. Liberty depends on balance and on continual contestation that keeps the state “shackled” (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15). That framing, however, can carry an implicit assumption that society reliably functions as the counterweight to executive overreach. The U.S. record suggests a harder problem. Backsliding does not always proceed against society. It can proceed through society, when organized constituencies, partisan coalitions, and institutional actors supply political cover for constraint-weakening moves, treat attacks on referees as legitimate, or reward executive unilateralism as desirable governance. Under those conditions, the state’s capacity expands and the social foundations of constraint erode at the same time, pushing the system out of the corridor without a single constitutional rupture (Bermeo; Kneuer; Carrier and Carothers).

This paper centers that enabling side of the corridor dynamic and treats recovery as part of the same relational problem. The binding variable is not simply societal capacity to mobilize, but the conditions under which social power is directed toward constraining the executive versus enabling it. When willingness to impose costs on executive overreach collapses, aggrandizement becomes sustainable even in a high-capacity democracy. When that willingness is rebuilt across partisan time and when institutional referees retain enough legitimacy to act, backsliding can stall and partial recoveries become possible through coordinated electoral sanction, subnational footholds, bureaucratic autonomy, and disciplined forms of extra-institutional pressure that restore enforceability rather than deepen legitimacy fracture (Riedl et al.; Michel; Markovits).

2. The narrow corridor framework

The narrow corridor is a theory of liberty as an unstable balance. Liberty is sustained when state capacity and societal capacity develop together and continue to discipline each other over time. A capable state is necessary for rights enforcement, security, and public goods. A capable society is necessary to contest, monitor, and restrain the state so that capacity does not become domination. The corridor is “narrow” because either side of the balance generates predictable failure modes: a state that grows strong relative to society drifts toward despotism, while a society that overwhelms the state produces disorder and arbitrary private power. The durable condition is therefore not institutional form alone, but a moving equilibrium in which each side repeatedly forces adaptation from the other (Acemoglu and Robinson 15).

Two features of the framework matter most for a contemporary application. First, it is a theory of maintenance. Liberty is reproduced through continuous contestation rather than secured once-and-for-all through constitutional design (Acemoglu and Robinson 15). Second, it treats capacity as morally ambiguous. State strength is not inherently authoritarian, and social mobilization is not inherently democratic. What matters is the relationship between the two and the direction in which social power is applied (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15).

In corridor terms, state capacity refers to the state’s ability to achieve its objectives, including enforcing laws, resolving conflicts, regulating and taxing economic activity, and providing infrastructure or other public services (Acemoglu and Robinson 32). That capacity is indispensable for liberty because rights without enforcement are fragile. Yet it also creates an opportunity structure for domination. When executives gain discretionary control over administration and coercion, state capacity can be converted into a durable political advantage. This is one reason modern consolidation is so often fought through the administrative state. Executive power expands most efficiently when it reshapes staffing, internal legal interpretation, enforcement priorities, and oversight mechanisms that determine how law is applied.

Newland’s account of executive aggrandizement underscores how easily these moves can be legitimized through the language of governance. In fragmented systems, presidents can frame centralization as facilitation, coordination, and efficiency. The corridor lens treats that justification as a recurring political resource: claims of effectiveness can normalize changes that increase discretionary executive control, especially when citizens perceive institutional dysfunction or crisis (Newland 381-382).

Societal capacity in the narrow corridor refers to organized collective power capable of contesting and shaping the state. It includes parties, unions, civic associations, litigation networks, watchdog organizations, investigative journalism, and subnational institutions that provide alternative sites of authority (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15). This capacity is not reducible to mass protest. It is the infrastructure that sustains monitoring and imposes costs on overreach over time. The framework also resists romanticizing society. Social organization can constrain rulers, but it can also sustain exclusion and empower coalitions that prefer domination to restraint. The corridor therefore does not assume that mobilization automatically protects liberty. It assumes that liberty requires mobilization oriented toward constraint, and that orientation cannot be taken for granted in polarized democracies (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15).

A core insight of the corridor is its dynamic character. State and society must keep contesting each other to preserve balance. Acemoglu and Robinson describe this as a “Red Queen” race: each side must keep running to stay in place (Acemoglu and Robinson 68-69). When society stops contesting, the state’s discretionary space grows. When the state collapses or fails to develop capacity, private domination and disorder expand (Acemoglu and Robinson 15). This dynamic logic explains why drift often looks incremental rather than dramatic. Balance can be lost through sequences of small changes that accumulate into a new equilibrium, especially when each step is defended as administratively reasonable or legally plausible.

Democratic erosion scholarship describes a shift in the dominant mode of democratic decline. Rather than overt breakdown, many regimes slide through gradual hollowing-out processes that preserve democratic facades while degrading the substance of constraint (Kneuer 840; Bermeo). Executive aggrandizement captures this pattern: elected leaders expand power by weakening checks and balances, politicizing the bureaucracy, and attacking independent institutions that could impose costs (Williamson 2).

This erosion repertoire can be read as the contemporary institutional form of corridor drift. State capacity supplies the tools: administrative control, enforcement discretion, and agenda power. The permissive condition is the weakening of constraint, including the degradation of the legitimacy of referees and the fragmentation of cross-cutting coalitions that would otherwise coordinate punishment. Carrier and Carothers’ U.S. framework is useful for organizing this mapping because it disaggregates consolidation pressures into arenas that align with corridor imbalance: dominance within the executive branch, pressure on other accountability institutions, and weakening of societal constraints on executive power (Carrier and Carothers 6).

The corridor framework therefore does not merely predict that liberty requires balance. It clarifies what needs explanation in contemporary democracies with high state capacity and active societies: how executive power can be consolidated without a single constitutional rupture, and how societies sometimes become conduits for that consolidation rather than its constraint (Acemoglu and Robinson 14-15; Kneuer 840; Carrier and Carothers 5-6).

3. Societal willingness to constrain

The narrow corridor is often read as a framework in which society restrains the state. This is true; however, contemporary erosion requires a harder reading: social power can become an input into executive aggrandizement rather than a counterweight against it. The same organizational density and political engagement that can discipline executives can also supply coalition support, legitimacy frames, and institutional cover that make constraint-weakening moves sustainable. In a high-capacity democracy, democratic erosion becomes intelligible only once executive strategy and social permission are treated as intertwined.

A sharper distinction clarifies what moves and what stays fixed. Societal capacity refers to the infrastructure of collective action: associations, parties, civic groups, unions, litigation networks, media ecosystems, philanthropic funding, protest repertoires, and the organizational competence required to coordinate and persist. Societal willingness to constrain refers to something different: the readiness of citizens, elites, and organized actors to impose costs on executives for weakening checks and balances even when doing so frustrates policy goals, partisan advantage, or preferences for decisiveness. In corridor terms, capacity is the ability to push. Willingness is the commitment to push in the direction of constraint rather than toward dominance, retaliation, or unconditional partisan victory (Acemoglu and Robinson 15).

Modern democratic erosion frequently advances without the immediate destruction of civil society. Elections can continue, parties remain active, courts still exist, and protest can intensify, while executives nonetheless expand discretionary control. This pattern fits the broader backsliding literature’s emphasis on incremental change and the growing salience of executive aggrandizement and strategic manipulation relative to overt breakdown (Bermeo 5–6; Kneuer 840). It also aligns with accounts of aggrandizement that stress consolidation through institutional redesign, bureaucratic politicization, and pressure on oversight while maintaining legal plausibility and electoral form (Williamson 2).

The corridor lens clarifies the deeper point. A “shackled” state is not produced by constitutional architecture alone. It is sustained by political contestation that treats overreach as overreach and makes that judgment consequential (Acemoglu and Robinson 15). When constraint becomes conditional on partisan alignment or policy outcomes, social organization can remain high while constraining power becomes brittle.

Carrier and Carothers’ contemporary U.S. diagnosis is useful here because it explicitly places “weakening societal constraints” alongside intra-executive consolidation and cross-branch dominance, treating societal constraint as a distinct arena in which erosion is fought and won (Carrier and Carothers 8). Their description of tactics aimed at independent media, lawyers, civic organizations, and election administration underscores how “societal constraint” is partly about organizational capacity, but also about whether these actors retain the legitimacy and coalition backing needed to impose costs (Carrier and Carothers 8).

Willingness to constrain is not a civic trait that democracies simply possess. It is an equilibrium produced by interacting elements that can stabilize or unravel quickly.

One of these elements is Coordination. Individuals sanction norm violations when they expect others to do so and when the personal and social costs of dissent are manageable. Polarized environments complicate coordination because the same executive act can be interpreted through incompatible partisan frames, and because elites can distribute selective benefits, raise the costs of defection, or flood the environment with uncertainty about what should count as disqualifying. The logic is visible in experimental evidence on support for institutional changes that reduce accountability: voters may back executive power expansions when they believe it will advantage “their side,” and would-be autocrats benefit from reducing perceived electoral uncertainty and raising confidence that dominance will persist (Şaşmaz, Yağcı, and Ziblatt 1948–49). Constraint erodes most reliably when sanction fails to coordinate.

Another element is the Legitimacy of referees. Courts, oversight bodies, election administrators, inspectors general, professionalized agencies, and independent media constrain executives only when they are treated as authoritative enough that their decisions impose real political costs. Delegitimization campaigns that recast referees as partisan enemies weaken constraint even if institutions remain formally intact. Contemporary aggrandizement is therefore commonly paired with attacks on the credibility of institutions that could convert social contestation into enforceable limits (Williamson 2; Carrier and Carothers 8).

Tradeoffs between effectiveness and constraint is another element as well. Many citizens value democratic procedure and governance performance at the same time. When politics is experienced as paralysis, checks can be framed as obstacles to solving problems and unilateralism can be framed as responsiveness. Cross-national evidence links regime support to a perceived “happy medium” of executive power, with publics least satisfied when presidents either dominate policymaking or face entrenched gridlock (Singh and Carlin 2). In the U.S. context, the justificatory vocabulary that Newland describes (efficiency, coordination, decisiveness) supplies a ready-made rhetoric for normalizing executive-centered solutions, especially under crisis narratives (Newland 381).

These elements make willingness fragile. It can remain high for constraints perceived as neutral while collapsing for constraints perceived as benefiting an out-group. It can be reinforced by institutional credibility or eroded by repeated framing that treats constraint as sabotage.

Executive aggrandizement becomes politically sustainable when a coalition exists that treats constraint-weakening moves as acceptable collateral. In that setting, executives can reconfigure how institutions operate, who staffs them, and which decisions are complied with, without needing to abolish formal checks. Newland’s account underscores the administrative character of many consolidation moves: executive power expands through management of the executive apparatus and is defended through governance rationales that present centralization as necessary to competence (Newland 381). The corridor lens translates that administrative emphasis into a political claim: the struggle is not only over what the executive can do, but over whether society continues to treat executive self-expansion as illegitimate and punishable (Acemoglu and Robinson 15).

Carrier and Carothers’ U.S. framing is especially compatible with this interpretation because it separates consolidation pressures into arenas that map onto the willingness problem. Their “three interrelated levels” of aggrandizement place internal executive domination, cross-branch dominance, and societal-constraint weakening into one integrated project (Carrier and Carothers 7–8). That third arena is not only about repressing civil society. It is also about eroding shared acceptance that referees should bind winners and losers alike, and that constraint remains legitimate even when it blocks one’s preferred outcomes (Carrier and Carothers 8).

The United States is often treated as institutionally “overbuilt” for constraint: separation of powers, federalism, a strong judiciary, and extensive oversight architecture. These features expand veto points, but they also increase the premium on legitimacy struggles. When courts, oversight bodies, election administrators, and independent media are redefined as partisan actors, constraint becomes harder to enforce even if institutions remain formally intact (Carrier and Carothers 8). In this environment, executive consolidation is less dependent on explicit constitutional redesign and more dependent on administrative dominance, selective compliance, procedural hardball, and sustained delegitimization of referees (Carrier and Carothers 7–8; Williamson 2).

A concise comparative contrast helps isolate the mechanism. Experimental evidence from Türkiye shows that electorates can support institutional changes that weaken checks when they believe those changes will secure partisan advantage, and when perceived uncertainty about future turnover is reduced (Şaşmaz, Yağcı, and Ziblatt 1948–49). Institutional context differs sharply from the United States, but the willingness mechanism travels: aggrandizement becomes sustainable when large blocs treat constraint as optional, hostile, or subordinate to partisan and identity priorities.

Under a corridor interpretation, the decisive shift is not “more mobilization” or “less mobilization.” The decisive shift is whether constraint remains a shared commitment strong enough to coordinate punishment and sustain the authority of referees. When that commitment fractures, the corridor narrows even in a society with abundant organizational resources and even in a state with multiple formal checks (Acemoglu and Robinson 15).

4. How executive aggrandizement exploits collapses in willingness

Executive aggrandizement is often described as a collection of institutional moves. That description is accurate but incomplete. The deeper logic is political: aggrandizement succeeds when constraint becomes conditional, selectively enforced, or normatively contested. The state supplies the instruments (administrative reach, coercive authority, agenda control). Society supplies either the force that keeps those instruments “shackled” or the permissive environment that allows them to be redirected toward entrenchment (Acemoglu and Robinson; Kneuer; Bermeo). The American case is especially useful for isolating that permissive environment because the U.S. contains abundant veto points and dense civic capacity yet remains vulnerable to consolidation pressures that move through administrative channels and legitimacy struggles (Carrier and Carothers).

A corridor-informed account therefore treats aggrandizement as a two-level interaction. At the institutional level, executives pursue control over chokepoints that shape monitoring, enforcement, and competition. At the societal level, executives work to ensure that those moves are not punished as disqualifying. That second level is where “willingness to constrain” does most of its explanatory work. A society can remain highly mobilized and still fail to constrain when mobilization is organized around partisan victory rather than shared enforcement of limits, or when the institutions that would translate mobilization into constraint are successfully delegitimized (Carey et al.; Carrier and Carothers).

4.1 Sequencing as strategy: why consolidation often starts inside the executive branch

Aggrandizement rarely begins with the most visible constitutional confrontation. Even in systems with weaker institutions, the initial moves often aim to control the machinery that determines what the executive can do without needing formal lawmaking. In a high-veto-point system like the U.S., the incentives for this sequencing are stronger. Open attacks on Congress or the courts can generate immediate counter-mobilization. Internal consolidation can be framed as “management,” “efficiency,” or “accountability,” categories that divide public attention and make coordination around punishment harder (Newland; Williamson).

This logic is especially clear in the U.S. administrative state. Because legislation is difficult under polarization and bicameralism, executives often pursue “governing capacity” through administrative interpretation and enforcement. That is a neutral description of modern governance, and it is also the route through which discretionary control can be expanded. Newland’s discussion of executive aggrandizement captures how managerial rationales become politically consequential. The executive’s claim to facilitate coordination and solve fragmentation can justify reconfiguring internal controls, bypassing professional norms, and tightening loyalty systems in ways that increase the executive’s ability to act unilaterally (Newland). Corridor theory treats this as predictable: capacity development creates administrative tools, and those tools become tempting when constraint is weak.

The key point is that intra-executive consolidation is not a prelude that matters only technocratically. It reshapes the subsequent contest with other branches by altering who controls information, who controls enforcement, and who bears the institutional costs of resistance. By the time courts or Congress engage, the executive may already have changed the practical conditions under which oversight is possible.

4.2 Intra-executive dominance: politicizing implementation without rewriting the constitution

Carrier and Carothers’ first arena (dominance within the executive branch) highlights a structural feature that is often underappreciated in American political discourse: the executive branch is not simply “the president.” It is a complex apparatus containing semi-autonomous offices whose routine functioning can impose friction on presidential ambitions (Carrier and Carothers). Inspectors general, career enforcement officials, internal legal counsel, procurement rules, and civil service protections are not decorative. They are mechanisms that convert general law into constraint by shaping what can be done quietly and what becomes costly.

In practice, intra-executive dominance often involves four recurring tactics:

Personnel control and loyalty filtration. Appointment power is the classic presidential tool, but aggrandizement depends on how appointment and removal are used to change the internal incentives of the bureaucracy. Consolidation pressures increase when professional norms are reframed as disloyalty and when compliance is rewarded more than legality or impartiality. The American context matters here because many executive decisions are implemented through discretionary enforcement. If the executive can reliably align enforcement officials, the constraint imposed by legislative ambiguity declines.

Procedural hollowing and oversight suppression. Inspectors general, internal compliance offices, and transparency processes (including recordkeeping norms) shape whether executive actions can be monitored. Weakening those nodes reduces the likelihood that abuses become visible soon enough for coordinated punishment. This is the administrative counterpart to a more visible institutional change. It does not abolish oversight, it makes oversight late, partial, and politically contested.

Reinterpretation and legal insulation. Executive branches contain internal legal offices that interpret statutory authority and executive power. Those interpretations can be used conservatively to constrain executive ambitions, or expansively to justify unilateralism. A corridor-informed view treats this as a mechanism that links state capacity to executive reach. The executive does not need to change the law if it can change authoritative understandings of the law inside the implementation apparatus. The more legality is treated as a flexible internal product rather than an external constraint, the more institutional friction is converted into executive discretion.

Selective enforcement and the politics of non-enforcement. In polarized environments, enforcement discretion becomes a way to reward allies and punish opponents without overtly changing formal rules. This is one reason aggrandizement is compatible with elections. The executive can maintain formal democratic procedures while using implementation power to tilt the playing field. Williamson’s account of aggrandizement captures this broader point: consolidation is often pursued through seemingly technical shifts that alter how checks operate and how competition is structured (Williamson).

These tactics are not merely “state power.” They depend on societal permissiveness. A public that treats internal oversight conflicts as bureaucratic infighting, or that frames professional resistance as sabotage, reduces the political costs of politicization. That is where willingness becomes causal. When willingness is high, these moves generate scandal and cross-cutting resistance. When willingness is low, the same moves are reframed as necessary housekeeping.

A short comparative contrast makes the U.S. pathway distinctive without treating it as unique. In settings where governing parties can more easily change constitutional rules, executives can lock in dominance through formal institutional redesign. In the U.S., institutional redesign is harder, which increases reliance on administrative and interpretive pathways to dominance. The mechanism is the same (increasing discretion, weakening friction). The instruments differ.

4.3 Horizontal constraint as a compliance problem: legislatures and courts under aggrandizement

In democratic erosion research, horizontal accountability is often described as institutional strength or weakness. A corridor lens presses on a different dimension: how easily institutions can be rendered non-binding even when they formally exist. The crucial variable becomes compliance, not design. Courts can issue rulings, and legislatures can hold hearings, but constraint fails when the political costs of defiance fall or when oversight becomes performative rather than sanctioning.

Several patterns recur in modern aggrandizement:

Procedural bypass and emergency rationales. Executives can expand unilateral authority through emergency declarations, broad interpretations of delegated power, or reliance on executive orders and administrative rulemaking. In the U.S. context, these tools are not abnormal. They are part of modern governance. The corridor danger arises when the use of these tools becomes a substitute for bargaining and when it is justified as the only way to govern. Newland’s emphasis on fragmentation and the executive’s facilitative claims is relevant here: administrative centralization can be legitimized as solving institutional dysfunction, even when it erodes accountability (Newland).

Legislative capture through partisan alignment. Horizontal accountability depends on parties and coalitions. Legislatures constrain when co-partisans are willing to treat institutional integrity as more important than short-run partisan advantage. Work that asks whether populists, presidents, or dominant executives drive backsliding is useful because it highlights that “executive project” accounts can miss the enabling role of party systems that treat oversight as betrayal (Who’s to blame for democratic backsliding). In the U.S., divided government can strengthen constraint, but unified partisan control can weaken it if oversight becomes selectively applied.

Court contestation and selective compliance. Courts are often central in U.S. debates about constraint because judicial review is highly salient. Yet court-centered accounts can overstate the judiciary’s autonomous constraining power. Courts constrain when they are complied with and when defiance generates costs. Delegitimization campaigns that portray courts as partisan can weaken willingness to treat rulings as binding. The result is a shift from judicial review as a constraint to judicial conflict as another front in partisan war. The institutional form remains. The constraining effect diminishes.

Information control as the precondition for horizontal dominance. Oversight requires facts. When internal transparency declines and when independent information sources are discredited, legislatures and courts struggle to impose meaningful costs. This is not a side issue. It is a core mechanism of aggrandizement because it converts oversight into narrative contestation rather than sanctioning.

Riedl’s pathways framework helps interpret these dynamics without reducing them to personality or ideology. Different backsliding trajectories involve different mixes of citizen support for executives, support for ruling parties, and demobilization, and those mixes shape how easily horizontal institutions can act (Riedl et al.). A legislature controlled by a loyal party can function as a shield rather than a constraint. Courts facing a hostile legitimacy environment can become cautious or symbolic. In both cases, institutional design is filtered through societal willingness.

A brief comparative contrast clarifies the point. In some backsliding cases, horizontal accountability collapses because executives can rapidly restructure constitutional rules. In others, it collapses because opposition strategies backfire or because institutions become arenas for extra-constitutional conflict rather than constraint enforcement. Cleary and Öztürk’s analysis of irregular removals and opposition tactics underscores that resistance strategies can either preserve democratic competition or accelerate collapse depending on timing, legitimacy, and coalition structure (Cleary and Öztürk). The U.S. has generally avoided irregular removal dynamics at the regime level, but the comparative lesson travels: when constitutional constraint becomes a partisan instrument rather than a shared rule, horizontal accountability weakens.

4.4 Weakening societal constraints: turning “constraint” into a partisan object

If intra-executive dominance supplies discretionary power and horizontal dominance reduces institutional friction, weakening societal constraints reduces the likelihood that violations trigger coordinated punishment. This is the willingness channel in its most explicit form. Carrier and Carothers treat societal constraints as a distinct arena because modern backsliding is not simply a matter of executives “outmaneuvering” institutions. It is also a matter of reshaping the public environment in which institutions operate (Carrier and Carothers 2025).

Several mechanisms are especially relevant:

Delegitimizing referees. Courts, election administrators, watchdogs, and independent media are often portrayed as partisan enemies, corrupt elites, or anti-democratic obstacles. This move is powerful because it shifts the moral valence of constraint. Enforcing limits becomes framed as subversion of the popular will. Williamson’s treatment of aggrandizement emphasizes that weakening checks frequently travels alongside attacks on institutional independence (Williamson 2017). Corridor theory predicts the consequence: once society treats referees as illegitimate, the state’s shackles loosen without requiring formal institutional abolition.

Affective polarization and identity security. Work on affective politics highlights that the emotional structure of partisanship can make institutional constraint secondary to identity conflict. When politics is experienced as existential, violations of procedure can be excused as necessary defense. This aligns with both formal and empirical literatures showing that voters may tolerate assaults on checks and balances under perceived high stakes, especially when partisan cues are strong (Annual Review; Carey et al.). The willingness concept is designed to capture that conditional tolerance.

Instrumental tradeoffs and “getting things done.” Singh and Carlin’s argument about preferences for presidential power highlights that publics often want executives who can act. When legislative bargaining appears broken, executive unilateralism can be rationalized as responsiveness rather than overreach (Singh and Carlin 2015). The corridor implication is stark: institutional complexity can paradoxically create demand for consolidation, especially when citizens interpret constraint as the cause of dysfunction rather than as protection against domination.

Targeted pressure on civil society infrastructure. The erosion literature emphasizes that civil society can be weakened not only through overt repression but through legal harassment, funding vulnerability, and administrative burdens. Ispahani’s discussion of civil society under siege captures how these pressures can reduce capacity and raise the costs of participation. Even when capacity remains, willingness can still decline if engagement is made socially costly or reputationally risky (Ispahani 2017). The U.S. context typically features subtler versions of these pressures, often mediated through litigation, regulatory scrutiny, and narrative delegitimization rather than wholesale closure of organizations. The mechanism remains similar: raising the costs of constraint.

A concise comparative contrast reinforces the mechanism. Studies of Türkiye, including work that links voter support to economic perceptions, polarization, and institutional narratives, show how executive consolidation can be sustained when large blocs treat constraint as optional or hostile (Şaşmaz, Yağcı, and Ziblatt; Affective Politics dissertation). The U.S. is structurally different, but the willingness equilibrium travels. When constraint is reinterpreted as partisan sabotage, coordination collapses even in societies with high civic infrastructure.

4.5 Feedback loops: why aggrandizement becomes self-reinforcing

Early administrative consolidation reduces transparency and weakens internal friction, making subsequent moves easier and less detectable. Delegitimization of referees reduces the costs of defiance, making selective compliance politically viable. Selective compliance further weakens institutional credibility, reinforcing delegitimization. Polarization then makes cross-cutting coalitions harder, so punishment becomes less likely. The result is a self-reinforcing pathway out of the corridor that does not require an abrupt authoritarian rupture.

Riedl’s focus on partial recoveries is useful here because it implies that backsliding pathways are not deterministic. They depend on whether feedback loops are interrupted by coalition shifts, institutional autonomy, or subnational and bureaucratic sites that remain capable of enforcing limits (Riedl et al.). The U.S. system, with its federal structure and dense legal infrastructure, contains more potential interrupt points than many cases. Yet those interrupt points still rely on willingness. Courts and subnational governments can act, but their capacity to stabilize depends partly on whether their authority is treated as legitimate and binding rather than as partisan warfare.

The corridor framing therefore points to a precise vulnerability in the American setting. Formal constraints and societal capacity are abundant. The fragile element is the social foundation that makes those constraints enforceable. When that foundation weakens, aggrandizement can proceed through administrative centralization, compliance politics, and legitimacy contests that gradually shift the balance toward executive dominance without overt regime change.

The remaining question is how that foundation is rebuilt, and which institutional nodes can convert renewed willingness into durable constraint rather than episodic outrage.

5. Resistance and recovery inside the corridor

Executive aggrandizement is often discussed as a one-way process, but the empirical record is messier. Backsliding can stall, reverse in part, or yield unstable “partial recoveries.” The corridor framework helps explain why. Drift out of the corridor is a relational shift in the balance between state power and social constraint. Re-entry is not simply an institutional reset. It is a reconstruction of the conditions that make constraint enforceable: renewed societal willingness to impose costs, plus enough institutional autonomy inside the state to translate that willingness into binding limits (Acemoglu and Robinson; Riedl et al.).

Riedl and colleagues’ emphasis on pathways is especially useful because it resists a single template for recovery. Trajectories differ according to whether backsliding is sustained by mass support for the executive, by durable support for the ruling party, or by demobilization and fragmentation of opposition coalitions. Those differences matter because they determine where resistance can form and what kinds of resistance can plausibly “bite.” Some regimes face organized popular opposition but weak institutional channels. Others retain institutional veto points but lack cross-cutting public willingness to treat constraint as binding. Recoveries, when they occur, are typically multi-channel. They combine electoral defeat, institutional pushback, and coalition shifts that rebuild legitimacy for referees and procedures (Riedl et al.).

5.1 Recovery as rebuilding enforceability, not restoring form

The core analytic mistake in many accounts of democratic resilience is to treat institutions as if they constrain automatically. Courts constrain when rulings are complied with. Legislatures constrain when oversight produces sanctions. Elections constrain when losers accept outcomes and winners treat procedural limits as binding. Civil society constrains when it can coordinate punishment and when participation is not prohibitively costly. These are enforceability conditions, not formal design features.

Corridor logic therefore reframes the recovery question. The issue is not whether the United States “has institutions” that can constrain. It is whether political actors and publics sustain the willingness to treat those institutions as legitimate authorities, even when their decisions are unfavorable. Where willingness is low, institutions persist but their constraining force becomes symbolic. Where willingness rises, institutions that looked weak can suddenly operate as real veto points because defiance becomes costly.

This is also where executive aggrandizement literature becomes analytically precise. Aggrandizement often works by lowering the expected costs of violating norms (delegitimization, selective compliance, internal administrative control). Recovery requires raising those expected costs again. That is the political function of willingness.

5.2 The willingness problem in recovery: coalition breadth and tradeoffs

Section 3 defined willingness as an equilibrium shaped by coordination, legitimacy judgments, and effectiveness tradeoffs. Recovery demands changes along each of those dimensions.

Coordination requires coalition breadth: Cross-cutting coalitions matter because they deny aggrandizers the ability to portray resistance as merely “the other side” trying to win by institutional sabotage. When defenses of constraint are visibly partisan, executives can hold their coalition even under institutional criticism. When defenses of constraint cut across partisan and social lines, the legitimacy of referees becomes harder to attack, and sanctioning becomes more credible.

Legitimacy must be reattached to referees: Aggrandizement regularly targets the institutions that convert public pressure into binding limits (courts, election administrators, oversight bodies, independent media). Recovery therefore depends on restoring enough legitimacy that these institutions can operate without their every intervention being treated as illegitimate warfare. This is not about universal trust. It is about sufficient legitimacy to make defiance politically expensive.

Effectiveness tradeoffs must be addressed, not dismissed: Singh and Carlin’s “happy medium” argument highlights a recurring vulnerability: publics may accept stronger executives when they perceive governance failure or gridlock. In that environment, calls for constraint can be heard as calls for paralysis. Recovery coalitions that cannot speak to performance and responsiveness risk being outflanked by arguments for “decisive” executive control. The implication is not that constraint must be sold as technocratic efficiency. It is that a stable corridor equilibrium typically requires some credible story about how democratic governance can still deliver.

These are the conditions under which willingness rises enough to support enforceability. Without them, resistance can be loud without becoming constraining.

5.3 Institutional translation: where resistance becomes binding

Even when willingness increases, recovery is not guaranteed. Social energy has to be translated into institutional constraint. That translation depends on pockets of autonomy inside the state, and on institutional arenas that remain contestable.

Carrier and Carothers’ disaggregation of backsliding is helpful again here. If aggrandizement proceeds through intra-executive dominance, resistance cannot be only external. It must also operate through the state itself: through professional norms, internal watchdog functions, and bureaucratic actors who can slow, expose, or refuse politicized directives. Newland’s administrative emphasis reinforces this point. Modern consolidation often advances through managerial control, so resistance that never touches administrative machinery risks being expressive rather than effective.

The U.S. context contains multiple potential translation sites:

Courts can be constraint multipliers when rulings are followed and when defiance triggers broad political costs.

Legislative oversight can be effective when co-partisans treat integrity as non-negotiable, which is precisely where willingness matters.

Bureaucratic autonomy matters because implementation is where discretionary power becomes durable.

Electoral administration matters because elections are the central vertical accountability mechanism, and delegitimization of electoral processes is one of the most damaging routes to weakening enforceability.

A corridor reading does not treat any of these as independently sufficient. It treats them as channels that become effective when social willingness provides legitimacy and sanctioning capacity.

5.4 Subnational resistance as corridor stabilizer

Subnational politics is a particularly important recovery channel in large federal democracies. Michel’s work on the subnational roots of democratic resilience shows that opposition control at subnational levels can preserve organizational capacity, protect civil society, and provide alternative arenas for policy and institutional contestation. Subnational governments can serve as footholds for legal challenges, oversight, and administrative continuity even when national executives attempt to centralize power. In corridor terms, they are extra nodes of state capacity that remain contestable, which is precisely what a narrowing corridor threatens to eliminate.

The U.S. is structurally primed for this dynamic. Federalism and state-level institutional variation can create multiple sites where resistance coalitions can govern, litigate, and mobilize. The stabilizing effect is not automatic. Subnational resistance can also deepen polarization and encourage zero-sum escalation. The difference depends on whether subnational arenas become mere partisan trenches or whether they provide credible platforms for defending procedures and constraints that can be generalized beyond one faction.

The comparative point is that subnational opposition is often one of the most durable resources available under aggrandizement. It preserves capacity and creates institutional translation sites. Yet its success still depends on willingness, especially the willingness of national actors and publics to accept subnational authority as legitimate rather than as illegitimate obstruction.

5.5 Extra-institutional pressure and democratic disobedience

Modern erosion often raises the costs of institutional constraint. When referees are delegitimized and when internal oversight is suppressed, extra-institutional pressure becomes more important, not as a substitute for institutions but as a mechanism for restoring enforceability. Markovits’ argument about democratic disobedience is useful here because it treats certain forms of disruptive civic action not as anti-system behavior but as a democratic resource when standard channels are blocked or hollowed. The corridor logic is compatible with this view: society’s constraining power sometimes has to be asserted outside routine channels in order to restore the authority of those channels.

This is the tightrope. Extra-institutional action can also be framed as disorder, which executives can use to justify further centralization. The implication is not that protest is risky and therefore undesirable. It is that the political meaning of protest depends on coalition breadth and legitimacy. When protest is isolated and easily characterized as factional or violent, it can accelerate drift. When it is broad, disciplined, and linked to procedural demands that can be institutionally translated, it can raise the costs of aggrandizement and strengthen referees rather than weaken them.

Ispahani’s emphasis on civil society under siege adds a practical constraint to this picture. Even where civil society remains legally permitted, harassment, funding vulnerability, and reputational costs can thin participation and weaken coordination. Recovery coalitions therefore often rely on actors that can absorb costs (professional associations, unions, faith organizations, local governments, philanthropic networks). The relevant analytic point is that willingness is not merely attitude. It is risk tolerance distributed across organizations.

5.6 Comparative lessons: resistance can backfire, and opposition strategy matters

Recovery is not guaranteed even when opposition is energetic. Cleary and Öztürk’s analysis underscores that certain opposition strategies can accelerate democratic collapse, particularly when they pursue irregular removals or tactics that undermine procedural legitimacy. Their broader point travels beyond the specific Latin American cases: when opposition tactics make the regime conflict appear extra-constitutional, executives can justify exceptional measures, and wavering publics can shift toward “order” arguments that favor centralization.

This comparative lesson is directly relevant to a U.S.-centered account of willingness. If willingness is the pivot variable, then opposition strategies that look expedient but degrade procedural legitimacy can be self-defeating. They reduce the chance of broad coalition formation, they make referees easier to delegitimize, and they lower the costs of executive exceptionalism. The corridor is maintained not only by resisting power grabs, but by doing so in ways that reinforce the legitimacy of constraints as constraints.

5.7 What makes partial recovery durable

Riedl highlights that recoveries are often partial. That is consistent with corridor theory, which treats balance as dynamic rather than final. Several factors make partial recovery more likely to stick.

Willingness that generalizes beyond one leader. Recovery that depends entirely on personal opposition to a single executive is fragile. The test is whether coalitions defend constraints even when their own side holds office.

Institutional reinforcement that changes incentives. Some reforms raise the cost of future aggrandizement by strengthening oversight and protecting administrative autonomy. Without incentive changes, recovery can remain temporary.

Preservation of contestable nodes inside the state. Subnational autonomy, independent oversight functions, and professional bureaucratic norms provide continuity for constraint.

A credible account of democratic effectiveness. If governance failure remains salient, publics can drift back toward executive concentration. Stability in the corridor is easier when democratic institutions can plausibly deliver.

The corridor lens therefore yields a hard-edged conclusion about democratic resilience. Resistance is not a moral category. It is a mechanism. It works when it restores enforceability by rebuilding willingness and by activating institutional channels that can impose binding limits. It fails when it remains factional, when it degrades procedural legitimacy, or when it cannot translate social energy into actual constraint on administrative and political power.

7. Conclusion

The narrow corridor theory is a demanding account of liberty because it treats freedom less as an inherited institutional endowment and more as an equilibrium that must be continually reproduced. State capacity is indispensable for rights enforcement and public goods, but it is also the raw material of domination when constraint weakens (Acemoglu and Robinson 2019). Contemporary democratic erosion research specifies how that weakening often occurs in electoral regimes. It is rarely announced as regime change. It proceeds through executive aggrandizement, institutional hollowing, and legitimacy struggles that keep formal structures in place while reducing their practical binding force (Bermeo 2016; Kneuer 2020; Williamson 2017).

The central move of this analysis has been to treat the decisive variable in high-capacity democracies as societal willingness to constrain. Societal capacity matters, but it is not sufficient. A society can remain highly mobilized and still fail to constrain when constraint becomes conditional, when referees lose legitimacy, and when coordination collapses under polarization and high perceived stakes. In that setting, the executive can convert ordinary tools of administration into durable advantage, not because institutions vanish, but because they become easier to manage through compliance politics, internal consolidation, and sustained delegitimization (Carrier and Carothers 2025; Carey et al.).

This willingness-centered interpretation also clarifies why the American case is analytically useful. The United States does not fit a simple weak-institutions or weak-civil-society narrative. Its vulnerability is the brittleness of enforceability in a polarized legitimacy environment. Carrier and Carothers’ disaggregation helps explain how that brittleness is exploited: dominance within the executive branch, reduced effectiveness of horizontal accountability, and weakening societal constraints operate as mutually reinforcing arenas rather than as isolated problems (Carrier and Carothers 2025). Newland’s emphasis on administrative routes to executive expansion reinforces that consolidation is often managerial before it is constitutional. It is fought through the routines of implementation, oversight, and interpretation that determine whether constraints operate in practice (Newland 2003).

The implications are straightforward but not comforting. Remaining outside the corridor does not require democratic breakdown. A lower-quality equilibrium is plausible in which elections persist but constrain less, checks exist but bind episodically, and administrative power becomes a central instrument of partisan advantage. Riedl et al.’s pathways logic suggests that the most common pattern under these conditions is not a single endpoint but a sequence of drift, stall, and partial recovery, shaped by shifting coalitions and by whether resistance can reactivate legitimate, enforceable constraint rather than merely register opposition (Riedl et al. 2025). The corridor narrows not only when the state grows stronger, but when society loses the cross-cutting willingness that makes constraint binding across political time.

Two limitations also follow from the argument. First, willingness is not directly observable in a single measure. It must be inferred from triangulated indicators: tolerance for assaults on checks, legitimacy judgments about referees, coalition breadth, and tradeoff frames that prioritize decisiveness over procedure. Second, willingness is not an independent moral essence. It is shaped by performance, perceived threat, partisan identity, and institutional credibility. Treating it as a variable therefore raises a further question about causality: which institutional and political conditions most reliably rebuild willingness in a way that generalizes across parties, rather than temporarily mobilizing one side.

That question points toward the next research step embedded in the corridor logic itself. Durable re-entry requires more than institutional design tweaks. It requires political work that restores the legitimacy of referees, rebuilds cross-cutting coalitions around constraint, and preserves contestable autonomy inside the state so that social pressure can become enforceable limits. Without those conditions, executive aggrandizement remains a rational strategy and democratic resilience remains a matter of temporary interruption rather than stable balance.