Alberto Fujimori was considered to be a prime example of why countries don't let everyday people run for president. Considered a dark-horse candidate, he ran for president simply to boost his resume to allow him to be able to run for senate the following election cycle. What he didn't expect was to be a candidate that was loved by the electorate, and to win two terms against elections with persons who have immensely more political experience.

This lead to the destruction of Congress by Fujimori in 1992, calling for an authoritarian regime to lead for roughly 3 years. But why? Why did Fujimori, arguably somebody who was a political outsider with a complete lack of political experience, wish to completely claim the government for his own? Because of countless examples similar to Fujimori, it is now a question that many ask: why elect the outsider? Especially when there is often a candidate that is either the incumbent to the election or simply a better choice for the entire country, it seems almost counter-intuitive to vote for somebody simply for the policy they pose.

Many persons interested into this type of democratic backsliding (often termed as executive aggrandizement) attempt to solve this solution from the perspective from the people, and moreso how people react to non-democratic candidates. Many researchers have uncovered interesting theories regarding how the electorate responds to different types of subverting democracy, with terms such as polarization and interest politics being brought up. However, these projects usually end with that, often a somber note regarding how it is simply useless to educate the voting population on how to spot non-democratic persons, as well as call them out, even when they directly support the interested person's policies (see Svolik).

It is in the interest of the authors, however, to discern the individuals responsible for this democratic backsliding. No doubt, the electorate must be involved for this backsliding action to occur (and to stop this backsliding from occurring in the first place), but it also requires an individual to be able to not only win the hearts of the voters but to also find ways to exploit democracy for their personal gain. If we were to use the analogy that democratic backsliding is a disease; the voters are not the viruses responsible for infecting the system, but rather are the anti-bodies that are often easily confused by rhetoric and interest politics.

Thus, more concrete ways of discerning whether a candidate is likely to be democratically subverting is needed, especially for institutions that desire to be both impartial politically while also managing to be as accurate as possible when intervening with political candidates. It is because of this, as well as the constant reminder of people such as Fujimori, that we decided to focus mostly on the "outsider" of politics, often defined as somebody who does not exist in the circle of political elites that is omnipresent in any form of government. It is thus the argument of the authors that persons who are interested in subverting democracy are not those political elites, but rather the outsiders, who desire power through illegitimate means.

While researching the topic of political outsiders as leaders and democratic backsliding, we ran into a consistent problem; research on this topic was reasonably minimal. This phenomenon is new and needs further research. However, we managed to find a few articles that were useful in our study. We mainly focused on what defines an outsider and democratic backsliding. The previous research allowed us to structure our analysis and determine what essential compounds to add.

Michael C. Horowitz & Allan C. Stam looked into the history of leaders through the leader's military experiences, childhood, education, and personal and family life to see if it would influence their decisions as a leader. We considered this study while factoring in what defines a political outsider. We realized things like education, the time they were born, and their level of political experience. After considering political outsiders' characteristics, we looked into how political outsiders may behave differently than political elites.

Timoneda, Joan C. talks about a political populist that took power over the political elites and enacted policies that were in their favor even if they violated democratic norms. This article has us thinking about policies leaders may slowly repeal that affect democracy. That leads us to look into term limit disobedience by leaders and how that may affect the standing of democracy in a country.

We also discovered Ginsburg, Tom, a paper that discusses a trend of democratic backsliding led by term limit violations. Term limit violations have been consistently violated to temper democratic norms, which led us to believe that breaking term limits is a good indicator of leaders attempting to overturn democracy. Therefore, this study guided us in defining democratic backsliding. Furthermore, it paved the way for the dependent variable (that being term limit violations).

Our research mainly will focus on how we might create variables that would accurately show what it means to be a political outsider into the system. We will focus on three main indicators that a leader is to be considered an outsider:

1. Legislative and executive experience leading up to the event (or non-event),

2. Level of formal education, and

3. Age

Our reasoning for choosing these concepts for further quantitative analysis is due to the fact that most times political elites are seen as persons that come from a high level of education, usually either from a PHD or JD program, as well as somebody that has a lot of political experience, as it would be more likely for people with political experience to have connections that would allow them an easier time politically to establish authority and power, enabling the "I help you, you help me" mentality that is constantly present in elitist politics. Age attempts to control for the fact that it often feels as though many elites exist in a particularly old group, and also attempts to understand why many case studies show the young presidential candidate supporting an autocratic government.

The main way we wished to measure how one went about executive aggrandizement was mainly through McKie's paper that discussed term limits and how certain leaders attempted to either respect, extend or abolish them. We initially went with either stating if term limits were respected or not, but after initial investigation yielded, we then decided to expand if term limits weren't respected to the variant of ways they either failed or succeeded in removing these term limits.

In order to control for potential reasons why countries contravene term limits in some manner, we also included two main control variables to analyze simultaneously:

1. GDP (as measured in 2022 USD), and

2. Consistent years a country has been a democracy.

Our main reasons for choosing these as our main controls is from rival hypotheses on why executive aggrandizement occurs. Since GDP is widely accepted to be the best way to measure wealth of a country, we decided that the rival hypothesis of wealth driving autocratic tendencies would be a worthwhile avenue to explore. We also explored countries that might have had a longer democratic "streak", meaning that they would be more predisposed to supporting democracy if the democracy was longer lasting than others.

Our findings showed unexpected results. Contrary to our hypothesis, only one independent variable was statistically significant. Education was the least statistically significant variable, with a p-value of 0.571. The results suggest that we either have an extraneous relationship between executive aggrandizement and level of education, or simply have the issue of data sampling error to handle. National political experience had a p-value of 0.098, which may indicate some form of statistical significance behind this variable; however, more data is needed to be confident that it is a prominent finding. Age is the only variable that came out as statistically significant, with a p-value of 0.008. The p-value indicates that age is the only statistically significant effect on the likelihood a leader would violate term limits. As mentioned, national political experience may also point out that a leader would infringe on term limits, yet with the current information and data-pool collected that we have, it is impossible to say whether or not it affects democratic backsliding.

The findings show that being an outsider does not matter. You need not a complete lack of formal education, or a complete lack of political experience so you can be a dictator emerging from a democracy. In order to be a person who beats term limits through bureaucratic means, you must know the system. A person that wants to exploit the system from within requires two main things: to be able to know the system on an expert's level, and to be able to know what flaws it might have to attack.

The media often portrays these people who desire to subvert democracy as political outsiders wanting to butcher the system because of their desire for chaos, but often it is from well-educated and well-trained persons who are able to subvert democracy in such a way, not people who are able to gain power through other means. There is simply more than a single way to gain power, and political outsiders are simply unable (or unwilling) to learn how to exploit democracies in order to become a source of power by political means. Often, it is the people that have been in power, those whom either have potentially run into their end of democratic reign or who simply desire eternal power from an autocracy, that wish to break the democracy through their own means.

This is the reason why democratic backsliding has become more popular than taking power by force as of recent. The "laypersons" way of obtaining political power - by supporting a militaristic group and leading them to cut heads off in order to gain power - is no more. Although it still happens, it happens rarely, and people have realized that this system of government change is not sustainable, and often begets more coups attempting to take the throne. This is the reason why democratic backsliding as a whole has become an event so catastrophic to the world: through a coup, the new government may last for a decade, but through executive aggrandizement, the new government could last forever.

This research can also mean something towards people wishing to protect against leaders taking advantage of the people, and it is a simple piece of advice.

Do NOT let the media convince you that the problem will resolve itself.

So many case studies exist where a leader is considered to be a moron, or an outsider, or a political candidate that only supports fringe benefits, only for people's belief that the leader would essentially self-implode their campaign get elected, and magically the government turns to the worse. Look towards the 2016 elections in the US for an example: while the Democratic party was touting how stupid and out-of-touch former President Trump was, he proceeded to gut legal protections against his political opponents. This issue only presented itself while we considered genuine threats to democracy and to our well-being as the people to be "unworthy" of our campaigning and our attention politically.

This issue can exist on both sides of the aisle too, and in order to safeguard democracy and to protect future generations from autocratic tyranny, we must be willing to put aside labels and funny (sometimes unfunny) jokes in order to fight those who threaten to undermine democratic principles with all of our force. We ask that any interested researchers consider these questions going forward, and more specifically consider the effect that the individual that creates the democratic backsliding. A wider scale analysis of what could be considered an outsider, as well as operational changes to certain indicators might yield results regarding what potentially psychological traits allow for democratic backsliding to occur more frequently, and more severely.