What explains differences in democratic backsliding? As transitions from authoritarianism to democracy follow different paths, so does the erosion of democracy into authoritarianism. While most of the current literature on democratic backsliding focuses on the concentration of power in the executive as a precursor an expression of backsliding, some democracies backslide while sustaining highly constrained executives. I explore the cases of Guatemala and El Salvador to suggest that processes set forth at the onset of democracy resulted in diverging regime characteristics and particular backsliding paths, three decades later.