The People, Power, Politics podcast

00:00:01 Intro Jingle

Welcome to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham.

00:00:13 Licia Cianetti

Hi everyone and thanks for joining us. I am Licia Cianetti, deputy director of CEDAR and I'm your host today. I am delighted to welcome to the podcast, Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett. Tom is the Harvey V Feinberg chair and director of the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He wrote extensively about all things democracy and his most recent book, who he edited with Andrew O'Donoghue, is ‘Democracies divided: The global challenge of political polarization?’ Brendan Hartnett was previously junior fellow at the Carnegie's democracy, conflict and governance program and is now research associate along with Partners, a pro democracy political communications firm in Washington, DC, where he leads their data and polling work. Welcome to the podcast.

00:00:56 Thomas Carothers

Thanks for having us.

00:00:57 Licia Cianetti

You have recently co-written a piece in the Journal of Democracy that's called Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding. And there you argue against a common argument that we hear in many academic papers, but also pundits and popular discussions that democracies are in crisis because they have failed to deliver socioeconomic benefits to their citizens. So now you say that the argument that there is this kind of socioeconomic resentment that is driving in liberal populist surge across democracies has some intuitive appeal but is actually not backed by solid evidence. So as a first question, I want to ask you how did you arrive to this conclusion? So why is the crisis of democracy not necessarily the result of peoples being disappointed with what democracy has to offer?

00:01:45 Thomas Carothers

Well Licia, you know, over the last 10 years, as the democratic recession widened and deepened and I saw so many people in the democracy community more widely searching for explanations, I felt the appeal of this common argument that it must be a failure to deliver and I was in many meetings and policy gatherings of different types where somebody would say this and everyone in the room would immediately nod their head and say that must be it. It's just so clearly that. But as I began to think about some of the cases that I knew fairly well I had that troubling sense of, but wait a minute, what about this case and that case, and, you know, it starts to take a look at Israel, for example, Israel has started to have some putting aside… the compromised nature of Israeli democracy because of the Palestinian issue, but with respect to part of Israel's polity, Israel has been a democracy for some time.

00:02:37 Thomas Carothers

Yet in the last five to seven years, Israel has been moving into a democratic crisis. Yet I think few people would say that Israel really has serious economic problems. Israel has done phenomenally well in delivering prosperity to its citizens. It's been on a tremendous growth surge really for the last 20 years. Or look at the case of Poland. Poland took a, you know, difficult turn in 2015 towards some kind of illiberalism. But that was after Poland had been enjoying the best economy in Central Europe for years. It had avoided the financial crisis of 2008. It was delivering pretty solid growth to its citizens. Yet suddenly this election.

00:03:15 Thomas Carothers

So we began to look at a couple of cases like this and then we started adding others, which we talked about in the article. Bangladesh had a the case of pretty solid economic growth in the years prior to democratic decline, Turkey and others and we put together some statistics and showed that, you know, two important things. I think first, when you look at a lot of backsliding countries, they don't show a pattern of increasing inequality and decreasing growth in the years prior to the election that began to signal a negative change. And secondly, voters were not embracing anti democracy. Embracing illiberalism is is the sort of second-half of that conventional wisdom. In fact, voters were electing people who they thought would reform or strengthen democracy, who then turned out to be backsliding leader, so we didn't find that either half of this conventional wisdom really held up to empirical scrutiny.

00:04:10 Licia Cianetti

So you already touched on one point that I wanted to bring listeners’ attention on that when people vote for this illiberal candidates, illiberal parties, they're not voting for an anti democratic agenda. They're not saying, oh yes, we really want to dismantle democratic institutions, checks and balances and and things like that. But they're voting for change. And so my next question would be where does the appetite for change come from? In a way a second related question, what happens after that change is not delivered, so the new they selected in is unlikely to deliver change to any substantial level. So are we looking at a future in which we had this endless quest for change from voters and so endless instability, or is this is a one off?

00:04:55 Thomas Carothers

Well, you know, democracies like change. Well, this year Finland had elections and Finland voted for change. Finland voted for a center right party in place of a center left party. And it would be hard to find many countries that have not delivered better for their citizens than Finland. Yet there were those restless Finnish voters voting for change. Citizens in democracies like to have options they like to try one thing, and then they try another thing. And that's actually good. It's a good part of democracy. We don't call it instability. We call it alternation of power.

00:05:27 Thomas Carothers

Now it can become instability if alternation of power leads to the election of leaders, who then began to dismantle basic institutions of democracy and basic norms. But the impulse for change among democratic voters isn't something that I think we should immediately say what's wrong with all these democracies? People keep wanting change.

00:05:45 Brendan Hartnett

Yeah, I'll just add that. I think we also see issues where the incumbent just has baggage almost so in Mexico or Brazil, corruption scandals were a big part of voters’ frustration and desire for something different and the turn to an a political outsider. There's a number of reasons why people want change. I think that we can understand that their desire for change doesn't mean necessarily a change away from democracy. And I think that's pretty key here is that the this democracy delivering hypothesis theorizes that people want to change away from democracy due to the lack of fulfillment of their expectations. But I think we need to, really refine that and see it as a change of government is really what they're after, and it's the regime change in the democratic backsliding that follows from predatory leaders.

00:06:34 Brendan Hartnett

So I think that both the frustration with the incumbency and the status quo we've seen so many times that this populist urge, sometimes it doesn't lead to backsliding. But this populist urge really feeds on a frustration with various different things, and it doesn't even need to be objective facts that are leading to these frustrations. It can just be voters’ perceived grievances. And so for that reason, we need to divorce the issue of voters electing somebody new and rejecting the old and instead see that as normal. Whereas if voters were electing somebody who was promising to undermine democracy, that would fulfill this case. But as we discussed in the paper, we just don't see that. And so I think that change of government is really central to voters when they bring in these outside candidates who've ended up initiating backsliding.

00:07:19 Licia Cianetti

Yeah, that's a brilliant point also about the incumbents with baggage, that's something we've seen a lot in Central and Eastern Europe is a lot of studies about why party systems are kind of unstable to to some extent and why all these new parties keep coming up. And one of the most I would say common and agreed theories about that is just kind of voters try to throw out the incumbents and try to get someone new that might be less corrupt or a bit better, but again, it's not necessarily a vote against against democracy.

00:07:48 Licia Cianetti

There is a quote from your article that I think on encapsulates your argument very well, where you say that democratic backsliding, and here a quote is less about a failure of democracy to deliver than about a failure of democracy to constrain that is to curb predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders. So as Larry Bartow puts it, democracy roads from the top. It’s these leaders that kind of come into government on this wave of change and then use their power badly to undermine democracy. So I guess my question here would be if we agree that there is an intensification list of a crisis of democracy, of erosion of democracy, is that because there are more of these predatory leaders, or is it because the conditions have changed so that it's easier for these leaders to get away with undermining institutions?

00:08:40 Thomas Carothers

Licia it’s a very good question. I tend to view it, maybe it's a function of my age. I look back many years at the spread of democracy over the last 40 years and I see a broader pattern that I think we should pay more attention to, which is that we had a rush of many countries in the 1980s and 90s into electoral competition, political pluralism, and at least formal democracy all around the world, it was a great thing. Yet what it produced was somewhere around 100 countries in the world that are having fairly open political competition in institutional contexts that have very weak checks and balances, weak rule of law, relatively weak civil society in many cases, media that is easily easily captured, and so forth.

00:09:26 Thomas Carothers

And what's happened is sort of a large natural experiment over the last 40 years. What happens when electoral competition rushes into, as I said, approximately 100 contexts where institutions are very weak? Guess what, a lot of the political actors in those systems, once they get their hands on the system once they get elected, begin to distort, manipulate and undercut those weak institutions. And so it isn't that they're sort of more political, sort of predatory leaders suddenly because some sort of virus, you know, going around the world leading to them being elected, but they're in a sense digging in and taking apart as they consolidate power. Look at Victor Orban and Hungary. He came to power several times, but after he lost power in 2002, apparently he was a a changed politician who said to himself or decided next time I get to power I'm not going to lose power. He became over time, it's the same person, that he began to realize, I don't like losing power. I like competing. I like gaining power. I do not like losing power and I'm going to find ways to make sure that doesn't happen, which he did once he got reelected in 2010.

00:10:36 Thomas Carothers

And so I think the problem we have isn't predatory leaders. Those are sort of the product of fairly, you know, new political elites in countries with very weak traditions of democracy. But the fact that they're hard to constrain in the institutions have constraints are so weak, where the institutions of constraint are fairly strong, like the United States. People can elect a leader who has seems to have fairly weak fidelity to democratic norms, that being Donald Trump, yet being institutions managed to hold him in place. And so it's a question I think we have to focus more on what is the strength of the institutions of constraint rather than why is it happening that so many leaders are trying to amass power and steamroller these institutions?

00:11:22 Brendan Hartnett

Yeah, I couldn't agree more and I will add on the point of the US case, that one thing we're seeing develop in this election cycle is the efforts to get rid of those guardrails that are protecting democracy by various different I would call them clever mechanisms of sidestepping so capturing and taking over these different agencies with replacing civil servants, specifically mid level civil servants with political loyalists, a unitary theory of the executive. Like I do think that building on Tom's point regarding Orban and his lack of interest in losing power, I think that there's a lot going on in the US context right now that is such that as Trump comes back, he wants to ensure that not necessarily he can never lose power, but that the checks that prevented him from ensuring that his agenda was successfully implemented and from, you know, consolidating his own power aren't there anymore and I think truthfully, I do think that the selection of JD Vance as a vice presidential candidate who has said that he won't be that guardrail, that Mike Pence was on January 6 2021, I think that's pretty telling. And I do think that we can see that this is what predatory ambition of a politician kind of looks.

00:12:31 Licia Cianetti

Yeah, I was going to bring up the same parallel there. Kind of what a return of Trump would mean where they would look like the return of Orban. Of course, with the different contexts that these two leaders have to confront. And some have made the argument that we'll need to be careful about the the second time around. Right. Because the second time around leaders have learned some lessons, and it's probably not the lessons that we want them to have learned. But to bring it back to the people that vote in this potential dangers to democracy, potentially illiberal leaders. Another point that you make and is to think is important and quite subtle is that even when people are disappointed about democracy's failure to deliver, it is the perceptions of democracy's performance rather than performance per se, that shape that disappointment. So where do those perceptions come from? Who makes them? And again, are they getting worse? Is it? Is this a story that has to do with the media landscape or is again, not a story of change, but a story of opportunities that then some leaders can capture?

00:13:37 Thomas Carothers

It appears that leaders are the ones, or at least competing politicians who are most important in shaping public perceptions of the political conditions in the country, and we've seen this time and time again, like Duterte when he ran for office, he took what was a one analyst called a minor crisis in sort of crime in Philippines and manufactured. Turned it into a major crisis and said this, you know, said effectively this country's on fire and I'm the one who can put out the fire. If you look at Donald Trump's inauguration speech in 2017, he talked about in America, you know, in terminal decline and objective statistics are one thing, but the perceptions that people have due to narratives that politicians offer them turn out to be a different and sometimes much more powerful thing.

00:14:28 Thomas Carothers

We see this playing out in the US election right now, where there's a a fight at one level over the objective kind of reality of how is the US economy doing. And then there are voter perceptions about how it's doing and to the frustration of at least some Democrats, they're having a hard time bringing those two levels into sync with each other. Is this new? Has something changed? I wouldn't just sort of rush to blame, quote the internet or social media, say it must be because of technological change. Politicians have been spinning narratives for as long as politicians are in place. Think of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and the narratives that he spun about Germany's decline and he didn't have access to a Twitter account, and so you know, that's something that politicians do. I do think it is important, however, that politicians are able to step over and avoid traditional sort of quote gatekeeper media institutions and communicate more easily directly with their followers and avoid having to go through the mediating or intermediating institutions of the media, so I think that's true.

00:15:28 Thomas Carothers

But again, that isn't wholly new. People found ways to communicate directly with their followers through radio broadcasts or other things. For many in many different ways in the past, but I think we can argue the technological change may be fueling or at least accelerating in some ways, the ability of leaders to create their own virtual realities and then convey that to their citizens.

00:15:50 Licia Cianetti

Yeah, this is a a great point and I've been recently reading a lot of histories of fascism of Italian historical fascism. And yes, the use of fear and of narratives of decline, narratives of victimhood, are at least as old as fascism. But definitely then we might find new versions and new accelerations due to the current technological availability. Now to go back to your argument, you look at indicators of inequality, poverty, and growth at the national aggregate level. However, we've seen in several countries, at least in in Europe, that the voting patterns of successful let's call them successful urban centers and declining peripheries have been diverging, right? So illiberal populists tend to be more successful in the peripheries. Now this seems to suggest or at least to some readers, this suggests that the story is not that much about national GDP trends or even about individual income or inequality per se, but about the geography of decline, that kind of shapes a certain geography of resentment. So if whatever your income level or the actual direction of inequality, if you're seeing your surroundings getting worse, getting more run down. If you have a feeling that they're depopulating, that the things are not getting better for your area, you might be more taken in by these kind of narratives of of decline narratives of fear, the populist spin. So what do you think about these within country differences? Is that something that you've observed in your research that kind of comes into your argument in any way?

00:17:24 Thomas Carothers

I think we have to be careful here about a Western centric analysis versus an analysis that looks globally because what you're describing, which is certainly relevant in a number of European countries and probably in North America. But if we go out to say a country like India, I think it would be hard to say that the rise of the BJP and of Modi over the last 20 to 25 years is about the rural urban split in India. India certainly have been experiencing a lot of urbanizations, like most developing countries. But the BJP’s support is not confined to rural areas. It's not about the rural urban split. In fact, you know a rising middle class in India, in many cases has signed on to the Hindu majoritarian agenda and loves it. And they're all about economic dynamism that they hope the BJP will provide and they want to be participant, very similar to Turkey actually. Erdogan support in the 2000s and 2010s wasn't about urban rural, although there that divide does exist somewhat in Turkey, but there was a again a rising business class. It was that called there was a famous report by the European Stability Initiative about Islamic Calvinists in Turkey in the 2010s that were the business sector that really supported the Islamicisation of socio-political life in Turkey and they were the successful ones who were benefiting from Turkey's boom.

00:18:44 Thomas Carothers

So you have to be very careful to sort of say there's a simple divide between the rural people and the the burgeoning sort of urban middle class, and that's a conservative versus progressive or illiberal versus liberal split. So I I guess I'd approach that very cautiously, as a general explanation.

00:19:02 Licia Cianetti

Yes. And that's I think it's very important to to understand how different patterns apply to different places also with different economic outlooks, different roles in the kind of global economy where the distinction between urban and rural and class might have quite different meanings and different histories. So here I think we should touch on the question of polarization. Polarization is another of those terms that comes up all the time as kind of an explanation for the crisis of democracy and Tom, in your book, Democracies Divided, you have looked at how different societies and political systems around the world have become increasingly polarized in different forms that polarization might take. And Brendan, you've done some work on hyper partisanship in the US and how Trump voters before the 2020 elections were ready to challenge the results in case Trump had lost and we saw then what happened afterwards on January 6. So my question for you both would be where does this growing polarization come from? Are there different patterns that we see globally and different kinds of polarization? And what does polarization do to democracy?

00:20:13 Thomas Carothers

How long do you have Licia? That's a big question. Well, let me give you a one and a half minute answer and then Brendan may want to add something about hyperpolarization in the United States or hyper partisanship. Look, one way to think about it could be simply and since you're a political scientist, I'll use terms that you're comfortable with that it's a combination of structure and agency. It's structure in the sense that many democratic societies have cleavages. Sometimes they're very open cleavages between different parts of the population based on ethnicity or religion or ideology, sometimes are rather latent. Think of Britain prior to Brexit, who knew that Britain would fracture over the question of whether or not to be part of the European Union.

00:20:53 Thomas Carothers

Yeah, it was a latent cleavage which one brought out because of a referendum suddenly became incredibly salient in British life. So you can have latent cleavages or very open cleavages. So you have the structure that's in place, which are cleavages. And then you have an agency which is the agency which is a leader or a party that decides to drive a polarizing narrative for their own electoral purposes, a way of defining themselves in a way of defining down their opposition and saying we stand for this. The other side is against us. They are not just the opposition, they are the enemy. They're trying to hurt, even destroy our country. And so they put together a polarizing package of narratives and methods, I would say, and campaign on that. And they take advantage of these cleavages, drive them. And then you have a polarized country, cleavages structure, plus agency cleavages plus polarizing actors is the most common pattern. I would say. Brendan perhaps you'd like to add something on partisanship in the United States.

00:21:55 Brendan Hartnett

Yeah. So I'll just add that I think the Dalian definition of the necessary conditions for polyarchy or democracy to emerge is really pretty important to understanding this and that if the cost of tolerating your political opposition in government is higher than the cost of repressing them, it doesn't allow for this mutual toleration that is integral to democracy, and I think that it it's especially true when we see that there's just entirely different visions for our country, so looking at whether it's Hindu nationalism in India, Christian nationalism in the US, or national conservativism, whether or not Turkey is a secular country or not. When there's fundamental differences about what the country is and what it should be, it leads to a case where there's going to be hyperpolarization. Yes, but it's also going to then translate into efforts to indeed repress the opposition, which is fundamentally undemocratic.

00:22:50 Brendan Hartnett

And so I think that this, this idea of two competing divisions and when it becomes such that there's no agreement, everything is zero sum. That's when we see this hyperpolarization lead to clear, undemocratic action, unwillingness to accept results, efforts to go after and target political oppositions. Of course, the emergence of political violence, which we've seen in Slovakia and the US most recently. So I think that in that sense that's when we're seeing this polarization that is natural and, you know, runs the political ideology spectrum turned into a hyperpolarization that leads to direct attacks on democracy.

00:23:25 Licia Cianetti

Thank you. So I had a question kind of brings us back a little bit to the economics factors. Maybe the overarch argument that we could make for coming from this conversation is that we cannot just tell one story that there will apply everywhere in the world, right? So you have different combinations of political, economic, social, ideational factors that then combine different in different places. And we have to be sensitive to this different stories. And that makes a lot of sense. At the same time, if we are seeing a global downward trend for democracy, then kind of the question comes up of why is that? Why are all these different processes happening at the same time? So is it just kind of, you know, with the sum of contingent unconnected declines and you know, this kind of wave of automatization is actually in a way, and accounting fiction, or are there some global drivers or changes in the global context that are making democratic decline more likely across different contexts, and again, kind of here I'm thinking about some kind of major changes in terms of economic transformations. So kind of within the work of the World Inequality Database has shown that not only income inequality has grown across many countries, but actually wealth inequality seems to be the big story that has grown at higher rates. And we've seen rates of extreme wealth accumulation that are unprecedented for the democratic era. And that, some argue, might be putting stresses on all democracies that then they'll come in the different places might be different depending on these other conditions and contingencies as well. Is that a fair account or am I being again returning to this economistic vision of kind of trying to find this overarching explanation?

00:25:18 Thomas Carothers

I think it's not a good account and I think you're you're feeling the just irresistible pull of the inequality explanation. I don't particularly like inequality either. I don't think it's good for countries to have a high level of inequality. That's not why Poland went backward democratically. That's not why Israel went backward democratically. That's not why India has been going backward democratically. Inequality has been going down in those countries. Poland has one of the lowest levels of inequality in the world.

00:25:45 Thomas Carothers

To what extent is that a useful explanation? Why do we keep going back to that explanation in the face of clear empirical evidence that it's not a good explanation? So what is happening in the world is that a single thing, or is it just a whole bunch of little things? That's what you're really saying. It's neither, Licia. It's the following. I look at the world is divided into three parts. First you have the domain of consolidated authoritarian countries and what's been happening over the last 20 years is that domain, which are the survivors of the 3rd wave, the autocracies that survived the 3rd wave like Russia and like China and Iran and so forth, have been hardening. Because they survived, they were effective in fighting off impulses for democratic change, and they're just grinding down whatever countervailing institutions or impulses still exist, and consolidating so on the one hand, you have authoritarian burdening in a number of countries to 30 to 40 countries, maybe at most.

00:26:43 Thomas Carothers

Then you have a second domain. Which as I mentioned around 100 countries which were mostly in the Global South but also in Central and Eastern Europe and a few parts of the former Soviet Union, which were the new democracies or the Global South democracies in the case of India, which wasn't a New Democracy. In that domain, you have, as I said, weak institutions, a growing number of rather restless and predatory political actors who are taking advantage of those contexts and degrading democracy in a number of them, although in others like South Africa, they've been able to resist the efforts of someone like Jacob Zuma to try to drive the democracy off the off the cliff. So you have a domain of countries where democracy is really churning and struggling, and not surprisingly, surviving in some places, damaged in others.

00:27:29 Thomas Carothers

And then third, you have a domain of countries that consolidated wealthy democracies of East Asia, Oceania, Western, Northern, Southern Europe, and North America, where democracy surviving. None of those countries has experienced fundamental backsliding. So yes, there's experiencing democratic tremors and pressures, but they’re not backsliding, none of those countries has had a totally failed election, none of those countries, fundamentally violates democratic norms and processes and so forth.

00:27:56 Thomas Carothers

So three different things are going on, autocratic hardening among certain set of countries, a lot of churn and backsliding, in another set of countries. And the third set of countries which for different reasons the consolidated democracies are experiencing some pressures but are actually surviving. So far. So it's not one thing that's happening. Three big things are happening. And we look at that and say democratic recession, look, Russia's more autocratic, South Africa seems to be in trouble. Oh my gosh, Donald Trump is scary. Those are very different things that are happening in three different parts of the world and we have to be very careful about painting with a single wide brush and saying I see what it is. It must be inequality or it must be Neo-capitalism or it must be the internet or whatever it is that we like to sort of try to paint with.

00:28:44 Licia Cianetti

Yeah. So we're coming up to the time. So I wanted to ask a final question. It's a huge question. So in your article, you don't only talk about what the issue is, but you also propose some solutions or at least some ways to try and prevent democratic backsliding. And Tom, we have worked on democratic bright spots. So examples where there have been openings to strengthen or restore democracy. So what do you think can be done to support democracy and what can we learn from existing bright spots?

00:29:13 Thomas Carothers

I think we can learn three important things from existing bright spots in terms of democratic survival or resilience as people like to call it these days. First, take the case of South Africa. When you have a democracy that's fairly new, somewhat weak, little bit shaky, and is threatened by a predatory leader like Jacob Zuma. What's really crucial, what happened in South Africa is the rule of law constrained Zuma, with the assistance of civil society, there was a fundamentally important report on state capture that helped crystallize what Zuma was doing to the South African economy or political economy and South Africa was able to constrain a predatory leader. So the first lesson is support as much as possible the rule of law and other institutions have constrained both domestically and internationally. Find ways to bolster them.

00:30:00 Thomas Carothers

The second lesson comes from the case like Israel, which is massive public protest in the face of predatory political action. The contestation in Israel between Netanjahu’s efforts to undercut the judiciary in the Israeli public has been profound and that in a number of countries is what constrains leaders. Is that sort of massive protest action. We'll see if that happens in Venezuela over the next several weeks after the recent election there. And then the third lesson is a case like Guatemala after the election of of Arevalo last year, where a very shaky democracy, only a very partial democracy, but they elect a reform oriented leader, it looks like he's going to be stymied and not able to take office. But international actors, United States, Europe, some other Latin American countries provide a lot of support and help keep the process together as well as Guatemalan civic actors and Guatemala is able to limp into a better period. So those are three big things: strengthen the independent institutions, countervailing institutions, public protest is critical in some number of cases and third, international action well targeted around certain critical junctures can really make a difference.

00:31:12 Licia Cianetti

Thank you. So this is a good way to end. We're coming up to the end of our podcast, I want to thank you again both Tom and Brendan for joining us at the People Power Politics Podcast. I am Licia Cianetti, deputy director CEDAR and the host of this People Power Politics Podcast episode. I have been talking to Thomas Carothers, Harvey V Feinberg chair and director of the Democracy, Conflict and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Brendan Hartnett, Research associate at Longwell Partners. Thanks a lot.

00:31:40 Thomas Carothers

Our pleasure to be with you.

00:31:40 Brendan Hartnett

Thank you.

00:31:42 Outro Jingle

Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics Podcast brought to you by CEDAR, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work we do on these issues around the world, please follow us on Twitter at @CEDAR_Bham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.