| Sumario: | This introductory article argues that American federalism's relationship to democratic backsliding is conditional, bidirectional, and mechanism-dependent. Building on recent studies, we develop a framework identifying when federalism protects democracy and when it facilitates erosion, while specifying how it does so through three mechanisms: litigation, political safeguards, and cultural supports. The empirical record from 2025 to 2026 illustrates that these mechanisms operate simultaneously, often within the same state and through the same institutions. We examine election administration, redistricting, and policy geography across several issue areas, finding that federalism both blocked acute national threats and enabled ongoing subnational erosion. The analysis reveals that protection is strongest when mechanisms reinforce each other, that state capacity variation amplifies divergence across the federation, and that executive strategies of fiscal extortion, administrative fragmentation, and personal legal jeopardy against subnational officials are testing the limits of federalism's safeguards against democratic backsliding.
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