The multi-level politics of countering democratic backsliding: state of the art and new research directions
该特刊从多层次视角研究欧盟应对成员国民主倒退的政策变化，探讨其成因及对目标国家的国内影响，为政治学者和政策制定者提供新研究框架。
After more than a decade of inaction or, at best, using soft instruments, the EU has become more assertive against democratic backsliding in member states. This special issue adopts a multi-level perspective to tackle the new research avenues that arise from this change in EU policy. Its contributions investigate two broad questions: first, the causes of this policy change, and second, its potential domestic impact in the backsliding countries. Focused on the EU level, a first set of articles revisits and refines existing accounts of EU inaction in order to explain the EU’s recent turn towards greater assertiveness. A second set of contributions concentrates mainly on the domestic level to explore the potential impact of the EU’s efforts to counter democratic backsliding in the member states that are the targets of EU actions. This introduction identifies the main themes of this new research agenda, provides an overview of the individual contributions to the special issue and their main insights, and sketches avenues for further research on countering democratic backsliding in the EU.