Η κατάσταση της δημοκρατίας στον κόσμο έγινε χειρότερη πέρυσι, σύμφωνα με τη νέα ετήσια έκθεση του Economist Intelligence Unit. Η έκθεση αξιολογεί 167 χώρες με βάση 60 επιμέρους δείκτες μοιρασμένους σε πέντε μεγάλες θεματικές ενότητες: εκλογική διαδικασία και πλουραλισμός, λειτουργία της κυβέρνησης, πολιτική συμμετοχή, δημοκρατική κουλτούρα και πολιτικές ελευθερίες. Σύμφωνα με την έκθεση, μόνο 64 χώρες στον κόσμο έχουν σήμερα «κάποιου είδους δημοκρατία», σε αυτές δε ζει ποσοστό λιγότερο από το μισό του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού (45,7%). Από τις 64, μόλις 21 χαρακτηρίζονται ως «πλήρεις» δημοκρατίες και αυτές συγκεντρώνουν το 6,4% του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού. Αν δε απομονώσουμε τις δέκα καλύτερες δημοκρατίες στον κόσμο σύμφωνα με την παραπάνω έκθεση, διαπιστώνουμε ότι το ποσοστό όσων έχουν την τύχη να ζουν σε μία από αυτές είναι αποκαρδιωτικά μικρό—μόλις το 1,2% του παγκόσμιου πληθυσμού!
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.
Originally published as an op-ed in Greek newspaper Kathimerini, 30 January 2022.
2022 is packed with critical elections in many places around the globe, including France (to decide whether Emmanuel Macron will continue to be the resident of the Élysée), Brazil (Jair Bolsonaro is almost certain to suffer a rout), the Philippines (featuring the scions of two autocrats—the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos and the daughter of current president Rodrigo Duterte—as main protagonists), and the United States (where the Democrats are expected to suffer losses in the November midterm elections). None of those contests, however, is as important as Hungary’s national elections in early April. The reason for that is that none of the possible outcomes in that contest can be good for democracy or for Europe.
An Q&A session with the European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS) about populism, and more. We discuss about the spatiotemporal dimensions of this phenomenon; the relationship of modern populism to liberal democracy, of which it is the polar opposite; the difference between populist and nativist parties; the importance of charismatic leadership for the populist success; and the ways in which contemporary liberal democracy may face the populist menace. Most of those topics have been covered in previous work of mine, especially in my book Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis. Hope you will enjoy the interview. For more interviews of mine related to populism, you may want to read or listen here, here, and here.
Q Your research underlines the necessity of the clarification of the basic concepts and exposes the conceptual and methodological errors in populism literature. To begin with, how do you outline the common problems within the growing literature on populism?
A The literature on populism has grown fast but also in a haphazard way. As a result, the concept of populism is being stretched to a breaking point. It was several decades ago that Margaret Canovan, among others, warned that, the more flexible this concept would become, the more tempted political scientists and others would be to label “populist” anything that doesn’t fit into previously established categories. This is what has actually happened. Today, “populism” is everywhere and almost everything is “populist.”
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.)
Στις 30 Απριλίου 1928, μόλις τρεις εβδομάδες πριν από τις γερμανικές εκλογές εκείνης της χρονιάς, ο Γιόζεφ Γκέμπελς, τότε γκάουλαϊτερ του Βερολίνου, έγραφε στη ναζιστική εφημερίδα Der Angriff (Η Επίθεση) τα εξής: «Μπαίνουμε στο Κοινοβούλιο με σκοπό να πάρουμε τα όπλα της δημοκρατίας από το δικό της οπλοστάσιο. Αποκτούμε κοινοβουλευτική εκπροσώπηση με σκοπό να παραλύσουμε την [δημοκρατική] ιδεολογία της Βαϊμάρης με τα δικά της μέσα. Ερχόμαστε ως εχθροί». Σε κείνες τις εκλογές το ναζιστικό κόμμα κέρδισε μόλις το 2,6% των ψήφων και μόνον 12 έδρες στο Κοινοβούλιο, μία από αυτές από τον ίδιο τον Γκέμπελς. Το τι επακολούθησε είναι γνωστό.
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.
Making retrospective sense of what really happened in 2016, the year “populism” was invented, and addressing the stubborn misconceptions the populist hype has given rise to. There are lessons to be learned.
As 2016 was drawing to a close, a Washington Post journalist put it all in this nutshell: “If you had to sum up 2016 in one word, you might choose ‘populism’.” For The Economist, too, 2016 was “a year of triumph for populists in many places.” As this newspaper warned, in both America and Europe right-wing populists were on the march playing on widespread social resentment (picture below on left). Others were already busy in writing epitaphs for liberal democracy. Never mind that Grexit, perhaps the most sensational story of 2015 (it merited four Economist covers in that year alone), had been prompted by Greece’s leftist populist government. Never mind, too, the Economist’s own confusion with terminology since, by the end of 2016, it was using “nationalism” as synonymous to populism (picture below on right). Be that as it may, by then “populism” had become commonplace. It was now the catchword that could explain all the ills that afflict modern democracy. The logic is simple and goes as follows: Populism is bad for democracy; hence, when you think a democracy goes badly, look for populists. Or just invent them!
