Introduction: Democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia

This introduction to the special issue highlights the key findings and implications of democratic backsliding in Southeast Asia. It begins with an overview of the region's democratic landscape using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset and compares the patterns and modes of backsliding in six selected cases. Collectively, the articles suggest the importance of unpacking regime components and the growing attitudinal elite-mass gap in analyzing the quality of democracy. The liberalization effects of social media were found to be mixed. The theoretical and empirical findings offer a fertile ground for future comparative work beyond the region.