The share of people living in democracies is declining worldwide – from 52 percent in 2016 to 29 percent today. With Hungary, even the EU now has a member state that is no longer considered a functioning democracy, but an electoral autocracy. Where are democracy and the rule of law particularly vulnerable to authoritarian attacks? How can further deterioration be prevented?
These are the questions that the RESILIO project tries to answer. RESILIO looks at the ability of the rule of law to withstand threats and hazardous events without losing its core functions. The focus of the project therefore lies not on the performance of the rule of law per se, but on its resilience.
RESILIO goes beyond the legal framework and institutional design of the rule of law by also including resilience factors such as civic space, media landscape, political culture, or the overall socio-economic circumstances.
By assessing how the complex environment in which the rule of law is embedded can contribute to its resilience, RESILIO offers a new, preventive perspective on democratic regression and rule of law backsliding. The model helps to identify not only vulnerabilities but also pathways to reinforce bulwarks against violations.
The RESILIO Monitor is based on a quantitative data analysis which was also visualised. Rule of law resilience was assessed in each country and broken down into three resilience dimensions. Moreover, member states were grouped into clusters sharing intrinsic similarities based on specific characteristics regarding different aspects of rule of law resilience.
Geographic scope of the project is EU27. Click here to continue
Method
No original data was collected for the purpose of the project. Instead, RESILIO is based on publicly available data from 2022, obtained through desk research and from secondary sources. The initial data were coded and merged into different resilience aspects, which were in turn combined to nine resilience factors. Three of these make up one dimension of rule of law resilience: a systemic dimension, a subsidiary dimension, and a contextual dimension.
Coding was necessary to categorize data, in both quantitative and qualitative form. One standardized ordinary scale for all collected data was developed, where:
- 0 stands for “no/does not exist”;
- 1 stands for “worst/weakest/smallest/unsatisfactory”;
- 10 stands for “best/strongest/largest/excellent”;
- the values in between reflect the intensity of a given characteristic.
How to interpret the results
The RESILIO Monitor transforms data available for all EU member states to systematically organise and group them in the form of:
- Overall EU27 Rating: ranking all EU member states according to their aggregated scores – from the highest to the lowest level of rule of law resilience.
- Detailed ratings based on sub-scores: ranking all EU member states according to the specific scores for each resilience dimension, factor, and aspect – from the highest to the lowest.
- Resilience clusters: grouping all EU member states according to correlations between chosen pairs of resilience factors.
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