According to all indices for measuring its health across the world (including Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and V-Dem Institute), liberal democracy is under threat by illiberal regimes. By “liberal democracy” is meant a form of institutionalized government based on individual freedom and political moderation, safeguarding minority rights, and adhering to the rule of law as expressed primarily in written constitutions. But if liberal democracies are all alike, every foe of liberalism is illiberal in his own way. This infographic shows the global expansion of illiberal rule but also distinguishes among contemporary illiberal leaders by putting their main differences on display. (But if you still look for similarities, did you already notice that all illiberal leaders are men?)
To download the full infographic or print it in high-quality and professional form, click on the button below.
When I was still a full-time academic, I wrote an article titled “Populists in Power,” which was published in the Journal of Democracy in April 2019. At around the same time, my book entitled Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis also came out by Oxford UP. In both works, I painstakingly analyzed in comparative perspective the most important cases of populist parties/leaders that have enjoyed power in their respective countries. Those countries are, in order of chronological appearance of the populist forces, Argentina, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Greece, and the United States. Based on that academic analysis, and aided by a fantastic cartoonist, I decided to condense everything in a very short comic story, combining fictional and real characters. As you will notice (but also see References below), most of the dialogues are direct quotations from speeches or other public utterances by well-known populist leaders. If you enjoyed this blog, you may also want to browse through this slide show.
Many people think that, when in power, populism is a “corrective” to democracy. This view is theoretically naive at best and empirically fictitious at worst. Just look at the most important real-life cases of ruling populism and you have a most clear answer to this blog’s title question: When populists win power, liberal democracies turn into illiberal ones; some even turn into real autocracies. Here below are six cartoons depicting, in chronological and historical order, the important cases of populist rule in Argentina, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Greece, and the United States under Donald Trump. All six cases have been analyzed and explained in separate chapters in my book Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (OUP, 2019). As of the cartoons below, these are part of a little comic story I wrote in collaboration with cartoonist Alecos Papadatos, which you can find—and probably enjoy—here and, as a slide show, here.
Σκίτσο από το κόμικ “I, the People” των Takis Pappas & Alecos Papadatos
Το 2022 είναι φορτωμένο με ενδιαφέρουσες εκλογικές αναμετρήσεις σε πολλές χώρες του κόσμου, ανάμεσά τους τη Γαλλία (όπου κρίνεται η δεύτερη προεδρία Μακρόν), τη Βραζιλία (είναι σχεδόν βέβαιο ότι ο Ζαΐρ Μπολσονάρο θα χάσει την εξουσία), τις Φιλιππίνες (με κύριους πρωταγωνιστές τα παιδιά δύο αυταρχικών ηγετών, το γιό του πρώην δικτάτορα Μάρκος και την κόρη του σημερινού προέδρου Ντουτέρτε), καθώς και τις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες (όπου στις λεγόμενες «ενδιάμεσες» εκλογές το Δημοκρατικό Κόμμα αναμένεται να υποστεί απώλειες). Καμία από αυτές τις εκλογικές αναμετρήσεις, ωστόσο, δεν θα είναι τόσο σημαντική όσο οι εθνικές εκλογές της Ουγγαρίας στις 3 Απριλίου. Και τούτο διότι κανένα από τα δύο πιθανά αποτελέσματα αυτών των εκλογών δεν πρόκειται να είναι θετικό, ούτε για τη δημοκρατία ούτε για την Ευρώπη.
Στο προηγούμενο άρθρο μου σ’ αυτήν τη στήλη έγραφα ότι η ιστορική διαίρεση Αριστεράς-Δεξιάς, η οποία καθόρισε τον εγχώριο πολιτικό ανταγωνισμό από την δεκαετία του ΄40 και εφεξής, έχει πλέον χάσει την ισχύ της και σταδιακά αντικαθίσταται από μια νέα διαίρεση ανάμεσα σε φιλελεύθερες και μη φιλελεύθερες πολιτικές δυνάμεις. (Ειρήσθω εν παρόδω ότι η Ελλάδα δεν είναι η μόνη χώρα όπου συμβαίνει ένας τέτοιος μετασχηματισμός. Η Γαλλία και η Ιταλία, ας πούμε, αποτελούν ακόμη τυπικότερα παράδειγμα.) Εάν λοιπόν ο παραπάνω ισχυρισμός είναι σωστός, υπάρχουν δύο σημεία που αξίζει να προσεχθούν ιδιαίτερα. Το πρώτο είναι ότι κάθε ένα από τα νέα πολιτικά στρατόπεδα εμπεριέχει και δεξιά και αριστερά κόμματα, τα οποία μάλιστα ενίοτε συνεργάζονται μεταξύ τους. Το δεύτερο ενδιαφέρον στοιχείο είναι ότι, καθώς η παλιά και η νέα διαίρεση τέμνονται, οι ψηφοφόροι βρίσκονται αντιμέτωποι με το εξής δίλημμα: Να ψηφίσουν με βάση τις παλαιές ιδεολογικές τους ταυτότητες (οπότε ο εκλογικός αγώνας διεξάγεται επάνω στον άξονα δεξιά-αριστερά) ή με βάση νέες πολιτικές και κοινωνικές ταυτίσεις (στην οποία περίπτωση αναμετρούνται οι μετριοπαθείς φιλελεύθεροι φιλοευρωπαϊστές έναντι μη φιλελεύθερων ευρωσκεπτικιστών); Τέλος, θεωρώντας ότι ο τρόπος με τον οποίο οι ψηφοφόροι πρόκειται να αντιμετωπίσουν το παραπάνω δίλημμα είναι το κλειδί για να ανοίξουμε το μαύρο κουτί των επόμενων εκλογών, έκλεινα το άρθρο μου υποσχόμενος να επανέλθω. Μόνο που δεν φανταζόμουν ότι θα χρειαζόταν να το κάνω τόσο σύντομα! Διότι εντωμεταξύ προέκυψε η υποψηφιότητα του Γιώργου Παπανδρέου για την ηγεσία του ΚΙΝΑΛ.
The questions in this interview were asked by Professor Marlene Laruelle, director of the Illiberal Studies Program, Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University. We talk about how to conceptualize populism in a minimal way; the differences between mine and Fareed Zakaria’s notions of “democratic illiberalism,” the distinctions among populist, nativist, and nationalist parties; the similarities between European and American populisms; charismatic leadership and Poland’s leader Jarosław Kaczyński; Greece’s politics, of course; left and right populisms, and why they tend to form alliances; and the basic building blocs of a taxonomy of political regimes worldwide. I hope you will enjoy it! For more interviews of mine on topics related to populism, you can also check here, here, and here.
In your book Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis(Oxford, 2019), you speak of democratic illiberalism, thereby reversing the terms used in Zakaria’s famous text on illiberal democracies. Can you explain to our readers how you define democratic illiberalism?
In my work, populism is conceptualized and defined minimally as “democratic illiberalism,” which points to modern political systems, political parties, or individual politicians combining adherence to electoral democracy and liberal democratic principles. I also use the term “populist democracy” with reference to political systems in which both the ruling party and major opposition forces are populist. I first used these terms in an article that compared Greece and Hungary as typical populist democracies and was published in 2013 in Government and Opposition. (Notice, by the way, that this Hungary-specific article preceded by at least a year Orbán’s now-famous 2014 speech in Transylvania, after which this term became common.) Anyway, my definition of populism recalls Fareed Zakaria’s terminology but the puzzles that motivate my research, the empirical cases I focus on, and the theoretical propositions I put forward are entirely different than his. The contrast is very interesting from a sociology-of-knowledge point of view, so let me say a bit more about it.
If you are interested in the topic of leadership, have at the moment nothing better to do, or both of the above, why don’t you try to see whether the characteristics of charismatic leadership as explained this infographic fit the cases of political leaders that you have a good knowledge of? When you play this game, remember that there’s only one basic rule to it: To qualify as “charismatic,” the leader(s) you choose must meet all ten of the characteristics mentioned. They disqualify, and thus revert to the category of “ordinary” leader(s), if they miss even one of those characteristics. Playing it should be fun! (And, by the way, if you are a true fan of infographics, you may also enjoy this one.)
On November 3, 2020, the American voters fired Donald Trump, as shown in the graph below. The graph, to be sure, tells the truth. But this particular truth is deceptive. Biden’s win was an exceptionally narrow one, and this outcome does not bode well for America and the well-functioning of her liberal institutions. This blog post explains.
NYT, November 16, 2020
Joe Biden won the election, and Donald Trump lost it (to this moment, he hasn’t clearly conceded defeat yet). But it was a narrow victory for the Democrats. The voters did not issue the broad rejection of Trump that Biden’s camp had hoped for. The “blue wave” that the pollsters had expected to sweep across the country never happened. (In fact, almost nothing of what pollsters had expected ever happened). Instead, Trump picked 5m votes more than in 2016 despite four years of scandals, impeachment, and his terrible mismanagement of the coronavirus outbreak that had killed more than 230,000 Americans until election time. The Republicans increased their ranks in the House of Representatives (although control of the chamber still belongs to the Democrats) and appear poised to hold onto the Senate if they win in January 2021 the two runoff elections in Georgia.
For many months before election day, the polls suggested Joe Biden would win the White House by a significant margin. As I am writing this (3 November), the outcome is still uncertain and the world is on tenterhooks. But, even if he scrapes in 270 electors, Biden is going to be a lame President. (In any case, the Democrats have already lost the Senate and the majority at the Supreme Court.) From now on, American politics will be a dogfight, to put it as mildly as possible. But this isn’t my point in the post. My point is that the current outcome was not entirely difficult to predict. In fact, and given the comparative analysis of similar cases of countries with populist governments, it was a straight conclusion. Over the past year alone, I have written a ton in various places about the likelihood of a Trump win. Below is some of that early forecasting
In an article that was published in the Journal of Democracy in April 2019, I warned: “Once in office, populist parties invariably establish an illiberal order that displays four characteristics: reliance on charismatic leadership; incessant political polarization; the colonization of the state by loyalists, accompanied by the undermining of liberal institutions; and the systematic use of state-sponsored patronage. Populists in power tend to display strong resilience as long as the above characteristics are in place.”
Ante-postscriptum (April 2021): In April 2021, a memo came out in Washington D.C. stating a simple fact about the previous year’s electoral outcome. “Thanks to the quirks of the electoral college,” it stated, “the difference between a new administration and four more years of Donald Trump was merely 43,000 voters cast across Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona.” The report was signed by a group of five leading Democratic polling firms —ALG Research, GBAO Strategies, Garin-Hart-Yang Research Group, Global Strategy Group and Normington Petts—banded together in an effort to understand the “major errors” and failure “to live up to [their] own expectations” and predict how close the 2020 race actually turned out to be. They admitted having underestimated turnout, as well as a number of measurement errors, but, I think, their major problem was the lack of a deeper understanding of how politics work, especially when the incumbent is a populist. Eventually, the pollsters settled on the idea that “there is something systematically different about the people [they] reached, and the people [they] did not.” Or, perhaps, they reached the same people as usual. Only that, in populist democracies, people get energized, and act, in unusual ways.
I have been studying and writing about populism for over ten years. And, with just 56 days left before the U.S. presidential election on 3 November, I think it likely that Donald Trump is to win re-election. This view is based on my published comparative research on the sum of postwar liberal democracies that have undergone the full populist experience: Populist rise, populist rule, and populist aftermaths. While building the argument below, I provide links to previous works of mine, which you may find useful. Let’s go, then, with this judgement keeping one thing in mind while hoping for another. What is to keep in mind is that, unless in the following days or weeks the American market suffers a massive decline, in which case Biden wins, spiralling polarization is of advantage only to Trump. As of the hope, may this forecasting be wrong.
