Democracy, Liberalism, and their Opposites

December 15, 2022January 10, 2023

Democracy, Liberalism, and their Opposites

First published in Democracy Paradox, December 15, 2022

Describing Political Systems

Say you want to construct an all-encompassing typology of political systems in the world. Now, since most knowledge is mediated by words, you had better start with establishing a clear vocabulary. Fine, but you are already stumbling upon the unclear and confusing terms used by such well-respected sources as the V-Dem Institute, the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House, or in the academe. Here is a sampling of such terms: “flawed democracy” (as if there are democracies that are “flawless”), “electoral democracy” (as if there are democracies without elections), “hybrid regime”, “competitive authoritarianism” or “partly free regime” (as if there are democracies that are half-democratic and half-nondemocratic), and more. Is there a way of avoiding this terminological and notional hullaballoo?

Yes, there is! In fact, only two terms, and their opposites, should suffice to classify all political systems into a small number of categories that are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive. This thinking yields two pairs of terms. The first pair includes democracy and its opposite, non-democracy; the second pair consists of liberalism and its own opposite, illiberalism. The next step is to define those terms.

Continue reading Democracy, Liberalism, and their Opposites“

September 1, 2020September 3, 2020

The invention of “populism”

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!

Continue reading “The invention of “populism””

May 23, 2020April 13, 2022

Populism vs. nativism

Populism and nativism are often confused. But they are distinct phenomena. They develop in different places, have different causes, use different rhetoric and symbolic discourse, present different leaderships, and have different kinds of influence on the democratic societies in which they develop. Therefore, they call for different political and policy responses from politicians, policy-makers, and other relevant stakeholders in society. This infographic points out those differences. If you want to know more, please check my previous work on this topic here, here, and here. More is to come.

February 13, 2020February 13, 2020

Populism trivia – 3

There was a time, not long ago, that really important scholars writing about the maladies of contemporary democracy, did not think in terms of populism. For evidence, none of the titles pictured above sitting side by side on my bookshelf even mentions the P-word in their indexes! What a difference from many of today’s authors who proclaim that “populism,” variably defined, is simply the kiss of death to democracy.

February 4, 2020May 7, 2021

Cat-dogs

This is part of a little series of posts that this blog is very fond of and which is dedicated to clear concepts. In a way, it is also my little act of homage to Giovanni Sartori (pictured above), who was one of the brightest lights I was lucky to encounter (and meet personally twice) on my early academic path. A first post was about what a concept really is, a second post was about good concepts, and a third about bad concepts. This fourth post is again about “bad” concepts and how they usually lead to faulty understandings of the world that surrounds us. In its present form, this is a (slightly modified) excerpt from my Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). A fifth post will follow with concrete examples of real cat-dogs from the academic world.

Back in the early 1980s, in one of America’s great universities, Giovanni Sartori, an Italian professor of theoretical comparative politics and great logician, taught a class on research methodology. Already by his time, research in political science had begun to disregard qualitative methods and embrace quantitative ones instead, despite that same professor’s warning that words and concepts always trump numbers alone—but let us not drift from the original story. Continue reading “Cat-dogs”

January 20, 2020January 25, 2020

The swift extinction of Europe’s ruling nativist parties.

Whether because of the conceptual confusion between populist and nativist parties, (which are often but erroneously lumped together in the ill-defined categories of “far right” or “nationalist populist,”) or whether because of the spectacular lack of knowledge about the country cases out there, most people, including serious journalists, policy makers, and politicians, fail to make sense of the — no so subtle — distinctions among contemporary democracy’s main challengers. Take, for instance, the nativist parties.

First the news: Earlier today, Norway’s Progress Party (party logo pictured above), a long-term junior coalition partner in Norway’s broadly conservative government, quit office. This is small global news, perhaps, but reveals something really big, at least for Europe. For, as of now, January 2020, no nativist party enjoys governmental power in any European country (bar Switzerland). Second, the irritant: Who are now going to cry wolf when no wolf does really exist? Now, the facts:

Fact #1: Before 2000, there were no nativist parties in Europe to have enjoyed governmental responsibilities. Continue reading “The swift extinction of Europe’s ruling nativist parties.”

January 12, 2020April 26, 2020

Bad concepts

This is the third in a series of posts about concepts and the (good and bad) ways in which we use them to conceptualize real-world politics. The first post was about concepts in general and how they work. The second post was about “good” concepts while this third post is about “bad” concepts.

WHEN A CONCEPT IS BAD?

Unlike good concepts, which feature a simple term, unambiguous meaning, and clearly identifiable referents, a concept is said to be bad when (1) it is based on a confusing term, (2) its meaning-to-word is ambiguous, which results in definitional disasters, and (3) its meaning-to-referents is vague, which makes operationalization, and eventually the classification of the units to be analyzed, impossible. Bad concepts lead to a bad understanding of the world.

Several good examples of bad concepts are in Cas Mudde’s new book The Far Right Today (a research area that is close to my own research interests and about which I claim some knowledge myself). The book is full of terms meant to signify a host of “ideologies,” which merge and combine with each other only to produce more confusion. The main definitions (as presented at the book’s end in glossary form) are below. This terminological maze is the result of two major errors: |A| poor conceptualization, which creates definitional disasters, and |B| false synonymies, which derail concept operationalization and frustrate the classification of empirical cases. Let me clarify. Continue reading “Bad concepts”

January 11, 2020September 4, 2020

When a concept is good?

This is a second post on concepts and how to use them in both our everyday lives and in academic analysis. The first post was about concepts in general, the present one is about “good” concepts. A third post follows about “bad” concepts, and a fourth one about more bad concepts in the form of “cat-dogs.” All posts owe to the work of the great Giovanni Sartori on concepts and methodology in social and political sciences.

How do we conceptualize, AND what is a ‘good’ concept?

To conceptualize is far from easy. It requires three moves at once: (a) decide on a simple term with (b) unambiguous meaning that (c) points clearly to specific comparable referent units. We have a good concept when it expresses clear meaning and helps to seize the object.

A concept is good when it expresses clear meaning and helps to seize the object. Only good concepts may establish boundaries that separate the object that we want explained from other objects that may look similar but are not the same.

January 10, 2020January 12, 2020

About concepts

This is the first in a series of posts about concepts and the (good and bad) ways we conceptualize the real world of politics. The second post explains when a concept is “good” while the third post is about “bad” concepts. These posts are inspired by the work and follow the tradition of the late great theorist Giovanni Sartori.

What is a concept?

To the extent that we try to understand the world out there, a concept is the basic unit of our thinking.

As shown in the graph (featured image above), concepts have a triangular structure.

Continue reading “About concepts”

December 13, 2019July 17, 2020

Populism trivia: When did you first hear about populism defined as “democratic illiberalism” (even before Viktor Orbán made this definition popular)?

Well, definitely NOT in Fareed Zakaria’s “Rise of illiberal democracy.”

Populism first defined as "democratic illiberalism"

The first time that populism was conceptualized and defined simply as “democratic illiberalism” was in this paper, published online in FirstView in July 2013. Interestingly, the subject matter of the paper was a longitudinal comparative analysis of the two countries which, back in the early 2010s, already seemed like exemplars of populism, Greece of its leftist variant, Hungary of a rightist one. [For the record, one of the reviewers rejected the article because (a) the definition was “unconventional” and (b) the comparison of the two countries seemed rather outlandish.]

At the time, I presented the ideas in the paper in a few places and occasions. In one such place, there was an academic and (as I would learn later) close friend of Viktor Orbán who approached me after the presentation for the usual after-event little talk. He was a pleasant old fellow and, as I distinctly remember, he was impressed by my definition of populism. The paper was published in print in early 2014. In the summer of the same year, Orbán would make ripples world-wide with his famous speech about turning Hungary into an “illiberal democratic” state.