Democratic Backslide: What Does This Mean to Individuals?

 In this section: I intend to utilize brief interviews to explore people's understanding of the law, how language plays in, and how this has impacted their understanding of democratic backsliding. 

These interviews were designed to draw out individuals' personal experiences by using a basic set of questions. This is intentional because I am looking for INPUT that adds an experiential element to this project. If I had more time or room to expand this project, I would look to sit down with each of these individuals to really get into what each response means on a deeper level, but given the constraints that time has put on this project, I will rather use their ideation to connect my argument to course concepts. 

Before asking people questions, I gave them a basic definition of democratic backslide without defining law or democracy itself, so that they could answer the questions I was asking them with context, but still from a place of authentic experience. 

Here is that definition:

Democratic Backsliding: the state-led debilitation or elimination of the political institutions sustaining an existing democracy (journal of democracy) OR Democratic backsliding, also called autocratization, is the decline in the democratic characteristics of a political system and is the opposite of democratization(Wikipedia & The Annual Review of Political Science)

Now, let's take a look at the questions I asked individuals in a survey-style setting: 

*Note that individuals were told they could say as much or little as they wanted to about the matter*

1.  When you think of the term "law" what comes to mind? 

 This seems like a really broad question to ask someone, and it really is, but this is by design. It forces people to depend upon THEIR preconceived notions, which have been built by the language and ideologies perpetuated by law in said individuals' experience. What I found by asking this question is that the institution of Law really has done a thorough job in perpetuating what it wants authority to look like in a customary sense, but its limited use of language has left people wanting something more from it.

2. What do you understand democracy to be?

Again, this question is similarly designed to be vague to follow the pattern of the prior question to create a base-level understanding for people to reference when answering the questions to follow. It puts people into a position where they define democracy based on their OWN experience. 

3. Do you think the United States is experiencing Democratic Backslide as I defined above? Why or why not?

This question aims to ask the individuals to make a decision based off of their understanding of the world and the concepts they defined in the prior questions. I first just wanted to ask a question about democracy itself, without including the concept of the law, so that these individuals could work through this issue in a guided manner that still elicits authentic responses. By doing this, it helps to add additional depth to what I am looking to argue. Many of the answers to this affirm my argument in different ways. 

4. What role, if any, do you think the law has in democratic backslide?

This question builds upon the last to connect the two concepts of law and democracy together. I am really looking to understand individual experience here so I did not want to assert that a democratic backslide IS happening because that can change dependent on individuals' experiences with these institutions.  

5. How do you think language plays into democratic backslide? 

This question aims to tie it all together, and bring it back to the focus of this class; language! This question was asked last so that individuals could reference what they had already said to articulately verbalize what I am looking to understand from these surveys/interviews.