Although coups like the one imposed by King Mahendra in 1960—or the one done by his son Gyanendra in 2002—do exist as historical examples of a democratic system’s sudden death, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue in their 2016-bestseller How Democracies Die that democracies don’t always collapse ‘suddenly’. They explain how democratic backsliding is a long, sustained and rather predictable process. To explain that, they use a simple phrase: Norm erosion before rule erosion.

It doesn’t take an authoritarianism scholar to appreciate the difference between norms and rules. While the latter refers to the black letters of the law—for example, Rule 38 of the House of Representatives Rules, 2023, which allows a Prime Minister to remain absent during Q&A sessions in the parliament—the former resembles longstanding socio-political traditions and values such as restraint, mutual toleration, respect for institutions and acceptance of oppositional voices.

Democracies survive mostly because of political actors’ willingness (and capabilities) to internalise those democratic norms. However, once those norms begin collapsing, formal rules eventually become vulnerable. This is why democratic backsliding rarely announces itself dramatically. Even with elections continuing, courts remaining open and constitutional mechanisms formally surviving, democracy slowly backslides, at varying speeds and proportions, once leaders start helping democratic norms erode.

The recent [un]parliamentary debate, where the opposition parties demanded the presence of the PM to answer questions on the government’s annual policies and programmes, signifies one such distinction between rules and norms. The House rules make it clear that the PM—who can naturally have other business to attend to on the day of the debate—need not be present to answer questions, and can delegate it to a fellow minister. Indeed, PM Balendra Shah delegated this to the seniormost minister in his cabinet, Swarnim Waglé, who, without losing his oratory touch, did a good job in answering most of the questions from the opposition. Indeed, no rule was violated, as several lawmakers from the ruling RSP argued.

Norms, however, were indeed eroded—as the opposition lawmakers’ legitimate expectations that the PM address the ‘responsible house’ were met with bizarre lesson-readings from their colleagues in the governmental benches. Rule 38 does permit the PM’s absence, but it doesn’t mean that the PM should treat the exception as the norm every time. Without respectful explanations, his conduct suggests either a disregard for parliamentary conventions or impatience with constitutional ceremonies.

PM Shah has repeatedly engaged in conduct that isn’t just ‘unconventional’ and ‘anti-establishment’ but revealing of deeper patterns of norm erosion. His infamous walkout during the presidential address reinforces that pattern. Even when one ignores Shah’s performative ‘smart-ish casual’ dressing sense, that walkout couldn’t go unnoticed. Although defenders like his principal political advisor, Asim Shah, have tried defending PM Shah’s walkout as a health-triggered move that doesn’t necessarily signify abnormality or disrespect for institutions, Balen himself has continued his infamous silence on this issue as well. Balen didn’t feel the need to inform (let alone explain to) the President, the House and the Nepali people of the reasons for his voluntary, unceremonious walkout.

This ignorance of norms and democratic culture didn’t stop at (or start from) the parliament’s campus. On his swearing-in ceremony, PM Shah was clad in a black-coloured daura-suruwal. Although it was more formal and event-suited, it still violated a norm that had been formally crystallised into a rule that required him to put on a white-coloured daura-suruwal (colloquially called “Dress Number 3”, as prescribed in the dress code mandated by the home ministry through an official notice published in the Nepal Gazette in 2010). While this might appear superficial and unnecessarily protocol-savvy to supporters seeking dramatic changes in governance fashions, it is essential to remember that democracies rely not only on formal legality but also on rituals of institutional respect. When leaders consistently desacralise institutions in the name of personal authenticity and anti-establishmentarianism, they implicitly teach their uncritical supporters that procedures, conventions, norms and institutions are unimportant compared to the leader’s charisma-driven personality.

This process is historically familiar when viewed through comparative lenses. Donald Trump’s political rise in the United States was marked not initially by overt constitutional rupture, but by systematic norm erosion through language and behaviour. Be it his racist remarks, such as “Mexican rapists” during his election campaigns in 2016 or his refusal to commit to peaceful transfer of powers in early 2021, democratic norms had been weakening long before the Trump-provoked attack on the US Capitol on January 6. Balen’s infamous 2025 Facebook post, where he pulled together an obscenity-laden F-list targeting major political parties (including the one that he’d join a few months later) and friendly nations, or the 2023 one where he threatened to burn down the Singha Durbar, had very much warned us of his potential slide to authoritarianism long before he assumed the premiership in 2026.

Historical examples like the infamous Adolf Hitler have all taught us how norm erosion leads to rule erosion. Modi’s India offers an example of how personality-centred and hyper-majoritarian leadership brings about hostility towards dissent, a cult-worshipping culture among the masses, and the weakening of institutional neutrality. Going back by a century, we can see that the Weimar Republic didn’t collapse overnight, either—as democratic norms had been hollowed out, long before Hitler was declared the Führer, through contempt for parliamentary politics, glorification of strongman leadership, demonisation of opponents, political vulgarisation, and public exhaustion with institutional dysfunction. This comparison doesn’t necessarily equate Balendra Shah with those troubling figures. However, the fact that such comparisons increasingly appear conceivable should itself ring democratic alarm bells.

The recent departure from the longstanding convention of appointing the senior-most apex court judge as the Chief Justice is similarly concerning. No senior-most judge had been superseded in the Chief Justice selection process in recent history before the Balen-led Constitutional Council, through a majority vote, recommended the fourth-rung on the ladder—Justice Manoj Kumar Sharma—as the new Chief Justice. That decision didn’t erode any ‘rule’ per se, as the constitution very much allows the Council to select any one of the six judges who had had over three years of experience in the apex court’s bench.

However, such erosion of norms and traditions must have been followed by a diligent explanation of the rationale behind the decision. Shah cabinet’s spokesperson, who isn’t a member of the Constitutional Council, however, did make an effectively unilateral statement on how data showed that Justice Sharma had disposed of the highest number of cases among the six qualified candidates. This is precisely where constitutional scholar Kim Lane Scheppele’s concept of autocratic legalism becomes relevant. Neither Balen nor his spokesperson faced the press, which could have posed tough, Socratic-style questions on the validity of the data presented, the scope of data collection and the reasons behind choosing such scope.

Contemporary democratic erosion often occurs not through outright illegality but through the strategic manipulation of legal discretion (and, in this case, of data) to weaken institutional neutrality while preserving a façade of neutrality. Modern authoritarianism rarely abolishes constitutions immediately—it gradually hollows out norms, traditions, respect for institutions, institutional cultures and longstanding conventions from within, thereby normalising arbitrariness and unconstrained executive discretion.