Gila Stopler (College of Law and Business – Ramat Gan Law School) has posted The Decline of Liberal Democracy and the Revival of the Patrimonial State on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Global democratic backsliding has led to a gradual decline of liberal hegemony and the rise of various autocratic regime types. Among these emerging systems, this article focuses on the revival of patrimonialism, a system of governance characterized by the institutionalization of patriarchy as a method of political rule, in liberal democracies, including the US under Trump. In Part I, the article uses feminist theory to analyze the conceptual and historical foundations of patriarchy and its persistence in the private sphere under liberal-democratic governance. It argues that a central weakness of liberal theory and practice lies in the public/private distinction, which has historically shielded and incubated anti-liberal, populist, and religious-nationalist ideologies, allowing them to accumulate power and eventually challenge the public and constitutional sphere. In Part II, the article employs a legal and comparative perspective to trace the concrete mechanisms of this transition, focusing primarily on the United States under Trump alongside comparative examinations of Hungary under Orbán and Poland under Kaczyński. It details how these regimes systematically subordinate legal-rational authority to the personal will of the patrimonial leader through the capture of the civil service and the judiciary, the politicization of religion, and the rolling back of women’s and minority rights. The article concludes that because patrimonialization transforms the state’s institutional architecture and remains anchored in deeply entrenched private-sphere patriarchy, reversing this backsliding is a profoundly difficult task.
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