Anna Lührmann has been Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and since 2021 serves as a Member of the German Bundestag and Minister of State at the Federal Foreign Office.

Wolfgang Merkel is Professor Emeritus at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany, and Director Emeritus at WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He serves as Senior Scholar at the Democracy Institute at Central University in Budapest. His research focuses on Transformation of political regimes, (defective) democracy and democratization, political parties, and social democracy in power. He co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political, Social, and Economic Transformation (2019).

Introduction - Resilience of democracies: responses to illiberal and authoritarian challenges 1. How democracies prevail: democratic resilience as a two-stage process 2. What halts democratic erosion? The changing role of accountability 3. Pernicious polarization, autocratization and opposition strategies 4. Negative partisanship towards the populist radical right and democratic resilience in Western Europe 5. The supply and demand model of civic education: evidence from a field experiment in the Democratic Republic of Congo 6. Democratic Horizons: what value change reveals about the future of democracy 7. Disrupting the autocratization sequence: towards democratic resilience