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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. 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. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the People Power Politics Podcast. I'm delighted to be joined today by Professor Sherry Berman, professor of Political Science at Barnard College and author of a fascinating recent article on why democracy's current troubles should not have come as a surprise. Professor Berman, let me start by asking what motivated you to write this piece, and what are the main concerns about democracy that you wanted to use it to highlight?
- [00:47]
B
So I wrote this piece because I think, like many political scientists, and in particular political scientists who study democracy, I've found the last many years to be quite, if not puzzling, sort of difficult to reconcile with a lot of things both my colleagues and oftentimes myself were writing. We didn't think, for instance, that long established democracies could decay or at least decay very quickly. And we were also kind of dealing with, or at least people my age were dealing with the overhang of the incredible optimism that we had about democracy at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. So for those old enough to remember how much we were thinking about transitions to democracy and the incredible wave of, you know, sort of democratic change that had happened not that long ago, last several years have been really quite overwhelming. So this was just an attempt to kind of step back from some of those trends and try to think about how to make sense of them.
- [01:52]
A
Then you argue in the piece that democracy's current crisis follows a similar and familiar historical pattern. Could you help us out by giving us a sense of what that pattern looks like and why you think we should have been able to see this coming.
- [02:07]
B
So let me break that question into two parts. The first part has to do with those democracies that I mentioned sort of at the end of the last comment, that is to say, those countries that made transitions to democracy during what we call the third wave, that is to say, the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. My last book, which was a kind of overview of the development of democracies and dictatorships in Europe, made very clear that if we go back in time, you know, sort of to the initial start of the modern democratic era with the American and the French revolutions, that all waves of democracy that we've experienced in the past were followed by immense undertows. In fact, you know, that's sort of originally why we use the term wave to begin with, right? Because any Wave is, you know, anybody who's ever been to a beach knows, has and undertow, right? And so if you were to look back at these previous periods when we had these, you know, sort of large scale transitions to democracy, they were always followed by shifts backwards, so to speak, towards authoritarianism. And that's just not a kind of history repeats itself. There's, there's causal logic there, right. And the causal logic relates to the fact that it is simply much harder, much harder to create stable, well functioning democracies than it is to overthrow authoritarian regimes. Right. So that is the reason why those previous waves have been followed by undertows. So from that perspective, right, understanding how difficult it actually is to make democracy work, even more difficult, as I said, than overthrowing authoritarian regimes, which is itself obviously an immense task. We should have not been swayed by the optimism that we were, right? Because many of the countries that made that transition at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century did not have previous experience with democracy. Many of the kind of preconditions or at least facilitating conditions that many political scientists associate with successful democracy. So that many of them began to slide back either towards authoritarianism or towards very weak and illiberal forms of democracy. That should not have surprised us at all. So from a historical perspective, I think that part of what we're experiencing is completely and utterly predictable. But a combination of a lack of historical knowledge and a sort of optimism blinded us to that. Now, the second part of your question is about those other democracies that I mentioned, the more established democracies like the one I live in, the United States, and some other long established democracies. We did not, as political scientists, spend a lot of time thinking about why or how those democracies could decay. We considered themselves, to use political science terminology, consolidated, which basically means we sort of put them in the I don't have to worry about category anymore. And clearly that was also a mistake because as we can see, they can decay, maybe not collapse directly into authoritarianism, but certainly begin to look weak, fragile, problematic. And so, you know, thinking about how to understand that brought me back actually to a lot of work that had been done during the post war period that was focused on understanding the democratic collapses of the interwar period. And I found a lot of insights in that literature that helped me better understand the kinds of things that were going on, for example, in the United States today.
- [05:50]
A
Thanks. Now, one of the things that's implicit there already is the idea that we miss things that we shouldn't have. Would it be too crude to kind of say that one of your main points is that political scientists should read more history? I mean, why do you think we did miss something that in many ways, you know, as you say, from the patterns of history we should have been looking for?
- [06:11]
B
So yes, I do think political scientists should read more history. Not because history blindly repeats itself, as I previously said, but because the things that we're thinking about today, why democracy succeed or fail, how and why waves happen, these are not things that obviously began in the late 20th and early 21st century. So surely there are lessons to be learned. And I think political science is much less of a historically grounded discipline than it was, for instance, during the post war period. We've learned a lot. We are much more methodologically sophisticated than we were decades ago. We have much more data that we can use to try to understand what's going on today. But we have fundamentally kind of lost the ability to think about the ways in which our current era is similar to and different from previous eras. And I think that really has kind of limited our ability to understand contemporary developments. I also think the other factor that I mentioned, which is not a political science factor but a human factor, is also important. I mean, there was just so many great things that happened at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century politically that I think we were, as a kind of group of people interested in political events, really overwhelmed by that optimism. I mean, the transitions to democracy, the collapse of communism, the sense also at the time also faded that the neoliberal era was going to bring in an entire swath of bring prosperity to countries that had been suffering now economically for a decade or two, we really had the opposite of what is today known as a poly crisis. We had this incredible sense that history had entered this new and better phase. And I think that really, again, also blinded us a little bit to some of the dynamics that we should have recognized as really quite predictable in retrospect.
- [08:05]
A
Now, in addition to kind of saying that we should think and look more at history, you're also arguing that we should pay more attention to, I suppose, older theories, some could say historical theories of democratic stability and democratization. So what do you think they help explain that? More recent institutional focused approaches, or I guess we could also say more quantitative, data focused approaches overlooked.
- [08:33]
B
Exactly. So as I said, when I sort of went back and tried to find theories and frameworks that could better help me understand what was going on today, and I looked back at some of these post War, social scientists grappling with the interwar years. One of the things that they really focused a lot on was that democracy was short, was obviously a political system, but that it did not rest on certain social and economic foundations. It was likely to be very weak and even fail regardless of what institutional infrastructure you slapped on it. Right. So some of the things that I kind of mentioned in that piece, which I think are sort of, when you mention them to political scientists or other observers of democracy, intuitively one understands. But we were not, I think, sort of sufficiently focused on things like do we have deep societal cleavages? Are our economies marked by not only socioeconomic inequalities, wealth and income, but deep regional inequalities? Are our partisan bubbles kind of hardening as opposed to kind of being somewhat more fluid and porous? Are we arguing about do we have zero sum controversies in our party systems or do we have ones that are more able to be compromised and bargained over? I mean, all of these kinds of things, again, were the types of, whatever you want to call them, variables or factors that folks who are trying to understand the collapse of into war democracies were very much focused on. And I think because they don't often lend themselves exactly to the kinds of data analysis maybe that we do today, they were kind of a little bit shunted aside, or rather people recognized them but still felt, okay, look, these are long established democracies, they're wealthy, and so they're just, they cannot fail. And that's just not the way I think some of our great post war theorists would have understood the success or failure of democracy.
- [10:36]
A
Thanks. Let's probe that a little bit more. I mean, your argument places a lot of weight on social and economic conditions. Inequality, mobility, polarization. I suppose one of the things that's become more fashionable in the last 10 years is to focus more on a different set of explanations. In particular, for example, elite manipulation and the idea of presidents as being the major problem, or prime ministers of executive aggrandizement and democracy being undermined from those in power has become one of the most dominant themes. How do you see those arguments in relation to your focus on what we might think of, I guess, as more structural conditions?
- [11:18]
B
Right, so that's a great question. I mean, I'm certainly not arguing that the literature that we have as social scientists developed over, let's say, the last 10 years about Democratic decay is wrong. Right. So it is absolutely the case that elite manipulation is a crucial part of the puzzle. But what I think you have to recognize is that that is the end of a long causal chain, right. That elites can undermine institutions, that elites can work to help to delegitimize the procedures of democracy, that the norms of democracy have weakened to the point where elites can do all of these things, that has to be recognized as the end of a causal chain. Right. So if you had tried as an elite, let's say, to do the same kind of stuff that let's say Donald Trump is doing in the United States in 2024, or that he tried to a lesser degree in 2016, if you had tried that in 1990, you would have failed because the conditions for that kind of, again, undermining delegitimization were simply not there. And so what I think these kind of social and economic or structural accounts, as you put them, give us is better insight into the conditions that allow elites to engage in this kind of democracy undermining behavior. Right. So it's not that. That is not a part of the puzzle. Surely it is. But I think the correct way to see it is being at the last stage in that causal chain, right. That a political leader or a political party can come to power that is willing to undermine democratic norms and institutions must itself be explained by the fact that voters are willing to elect these people, that they are willing to allow them to do that. And there's just a lot of stuff, stuff that goes into creating the kind of conditions that make that possible.
- [13:19]
A
Thanks. I suppose, you know, one of the things that that sort of raises is the relationship between some of the processes that we're seeing today. In the paper, one of the things that you emphasize is the erosion of cross cutting cleavages and the impact of rising polarization. Some of that seems to be about a process of economic change, but some, I guess, others would point to as being driven by technology and the role of social media and the broader media environment. How do you think we can best explain the effect, you know, the rise of political polarization? And how much of a role does polarization play in your explanation of the challenges that democracy faces today?
- [14:06]
B
Right. So again, polarization is obviously has to be part of any conversation about the undermining of democracy, about the sort of weakness of democracy in places like the United States, and I would say to a lesser degree in Western Europe as well. That is to say, countries that have these kind of long established and wealthy democracies. Right. But that polarization, you know, this is the kind of, you know, turtles all the way down kind of thing. This polarization itself, right, is a product of the last several decades. And I think we have a variety of social, economic and perhaps technological factors if you want to throw changing media landscape and changing communication networks into that set of explanations as well. So you mentioned a couple of things that I mentioned in this paper that again were pretty standard things for post war theorists to focus on. Right. So, you know, I mention in the paper a theorist that everybody knows and many people still read, you know, the classic sort of Seymour Martin Lipset modernization theory. And you know, one of the things that he said or one of the things that he emphasized, right. Was that the reason why he thought economic development was so closely related to democracy was that it had these kind of social and economic consequences, right. Which it does not have today, but it did have during the post war period. And so what were some of those things? So declining inequality. I already mentioned increasing cross cutting cleavages. He also talked about things that we also discussed today, right. Which is he thought that growing education associated with economic development would create more moderate and compromise oriented citizens. I'm not sure that that is true either. And so all of these things, right, the fact that citizens are now not as embedded in cross cutting networks and cleavages, that especially in a place like the United States, people are now even living in more politically homogenous neighborhoods. That they are, as a result of changes in media, getting information more than they were before from sources that reinforce their preexisting biases that they are interacting via social networks. Again also with people who reinforce their biases, that we have much greater differences between urban metropolitan areas and some, you know, the more left behind rural and non major urban areas than we had before. All of these kinds of things someone like Lipset understood were causally significant for democracy. And we see, you know, the trend lines in places like the United States and elsewhere really going in precisely the wrong direction as far as creating conditions for stable democracy that theorists like Lipsit would have suggested. And this is to get back to your initial point related to this polarization. We are simply more divided in so many ways socially and economically than we were some decades ago. And you can see that feeding into that polarization that is so much also a part of this question about, you know, why these long established democracies look so much more fragile than we expected them to.
- [17:23]
A
So I'm going to ask you a question that maybe as a historically minded thinker is going to be a cheeky one, but I want you to think ahead into the future and I want you to tell us on the basis of the kind of model that you've developed in the conversation we've just had, are we going to see things getting better for democracy? Are we going to see things getting worse for democracy? What do you see in terms of the driving forces you've talked about today and whether they're going to ease that pressure or whether we're actually going to see a further process of democratic decay. And as you say, one of the things that's striking about your piece and I think a lot of the literature we've seen on democratic resilience recently is that nowhere is safe. There are no countries that are safe from the process of autocratization. We have to get out of our heads the idea that any countries are impervious. So are you, if you had to have a sort of crystal ball and prophesize, are you seeing further challenges for say, some of the established democracies of Europe in the future? Or do you think actually at a certain point the basic conditions will shift and there'll be better conditions for rebuilding democracy in 10, 15 years time?
- [18:37]
B
So look, I don't think history is predetermined. So, you know, nothing is, is sort of set in stone. But if we were to look back at some of the things we've already discussed, I think we might have some good ways of understanding the kinds of things that will shape those future outcomes. So if we start with the last part of the causal chain, right? So if the last part of the causal chain and understanding why long established democracies decay is to look at the actions of, you know, whatever leaders and political parties like elites, if you want to use that term more generally, the question is, right, do we elect politicians and parties whose priority is democracy, Not a particular policy agenda, not a particular, you know, sort of. I like this, I like that. But parties that are focused on protecting democratic institutions because that is the prerequisite for everything else. So, you know, if we have politicians and parties in power that are not there, and if we have voters who are willing to elect parties and politicians who are not committed to the democratic rules of the game, that's obviously putting our democracies in some sense of danger over the long term. Correcting or fixing those social and economic foundations of democracy is absolutely necessary. So these kinds of structural trends, these are decades in the making, right? You can see if you're looking for them, all of these things sort of happening, you know, sort of from the late 20th century on. Again, growing inequality, decline in cross cutting cleavages, increasing divergence between educated elites and non college educated voters. These trends are decades in the making. Now can they be reversed? Absolutely. But that's not a short term process. Right. So do we have as a society and do we elect people committed to fixing these foundational elements? That is a choice that we have to make. But we must understand that that is a long term process because the decay again has also been decades in the making. So my long winded answer is, look, if we want to understand whether democracy is going to get stronger in the coming years or continue to decay, we have to look at all of the things we've discussed here. We have to look at the kinds of politicians and, and parties we as voters choose to elect. And we have to look at whether we as societies are focused on fixing the social, economic and technological trends that are feeding these processes that are making us not just polarized, as you said, but sort of not as committed to democracy as perhaps we were some decades ago.
- [21:21]
A
I think one of the things that, that strikes me in terms of how we then think about the future is that there's going to be interaction effects Here. We get a leader, let's say Donald Trump in the United States. One of the things that leader does is embarks on new forms of economic policy and social policy. Those things play into some of the things you've been talking about in terms of the social cleavages that then potentially generate more polarization, which leads us further away from the conditions in which it's possible to rebuild democracy. And so I suppose one of the questions, in a sense that's implicit in what you're saying is when will we get governments and leaders elected again who will have a popular mandate to go the other way and actually invest in policies that close those gaps and those divides? And I think this perhaps takes us on a little bit to the topic of your new book, because I know you have a book coming out soon of oup, the Political Consequences of Economic Neoliberalism, the Left and the Fate of Democracy. I wonder if you could just take a moment to share with our listeners, many of whom I know will be fascinated by this, some of the core animating ideas of that book and how they speak to this question about the relationship between economic ideas, policy, and the prospects for democracy.
- [22:41]
B
Well, thanks for that question. I mean, the book definitely tries to grapple with the interaction, as you said, of a bunch of these trends. And for me, the key era here is the 1990s. And that era is marked by many things. But one of the things that the book focuses on is the sort of the neoliberal convergence between the center left and the center right. And to my mind, this set off a number of deleterious trends that we have been talking about and continue to affect our societies today. I mean, one is the direct economic consequences of that. Things like growing inequalities, growing insecurity, divisions between more successful urban areas and less successful left behind ones. But it also really shifted the way the center left related to many of its traditional constituencies. They kind of moving away from their traditional economic profile and increasingly dominated by education. They stopped kind of appealing to voters primarily on economic issues and shifted increasingly towards profiling themselves on social and cultural ones. And this not only shifted a lot of, you know, lower educated and lower income workers over the course of a generation out of the camp of the left, leaving them, as we know, to be picked up by other parties, most often those of the what we call populist right. But it really helped to fast track this process of shifting political competition to social and cultural issues. And this is a really, I think, very dangerous trend for democracy because these issues tend to be much more zero sum. They tend to be much more identity focused and therefore, again, lend themselves to kind of that sense perception of threat. And if you also, if you look at society today, preferences on social and cultural issues are what we call in the social sciences bimodal. Right? They're very, very divided between educated elites, to just oversimplify a little bit, and less educated voters. Whereas economic issues tend to have preferences that are kind of normal, shaped like a kind of bell curve. And that really means that it's just much easier to come to compromises and bargain or over those kinds of issues. So just a lot of things kind of interact in ways that are very bad for democracy over time, beginning in that great era, ironically, of optimism in the late 20th century.
- [25:16]
A
Thanks so much. Well, I will be rushing out to buy it as soon as I see it on the shelves. I know many listeners will as well. Thanks so much. Professor Sherry Berman, professor of Political Science at Barnard College College. And you don't have to wait for the book because the article Democracy's Troubles should be no Surprise, is already available from the Journal of Democracy, our partners in this podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today and to all our listeners at home, we look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.
- [25:44]
B
Thank you.
- [25:46]
A
Thank you for listening to the People Power Politics podcast brought to you by Cedar, the Center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability, Accountability and Representation at the University of Birmingham. To learn more about our center and the exciting work that we do on these issues around the world. Please follow us on Twitter eadarbham and visit our website using the link in the podcast description.