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Welcome to the New Books Network
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welcome
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to the People Power Politics Podcast, brought to you by cedar, the center for Elections, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation at the University of Birmingham.
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Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us on another episode of the People Power Politics Podcast. My name is Demitayo Okodeyemi and I'm a Research Fellow in Democratic Resilience at cedar, and I'll be your host for this particular episode. Episode It's a real pleasure to welcome Susan Stokes to the podcast. Susan is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service professor and Director of the Chicago center on Democracy, the University of Chicago in the United States. Her work has been important to how we understand democratic accountability, political behavior, and the dynamics of democratic backsliding. Susan, welcome to the podcast.
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Thank you.
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Temi Tayo it's wonderful to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
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This episode is part of our ongoing collaboration between CEDAR and the Journal of Democracy, where we bring recent articles from the Journal into conversation for a wider audience. Susan has a new article in the April 2026 issue of the Journal of Democracy titled why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy. You can find the link in the podcast description and I would strongly encourage listeners to read that particular article. The article also builds on Suzanne's recent book titled the why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracy, published in 2025 by the Princeton University Press, and that explores many of the questions in greater detail. The article takes us into one of the most pressing questions in contemporary politics. Why, in so many countries today, do leaders who come to power through democratic elections go on to weaken the very institutions that brought them into office? As the article makes clear, the central challenge facing Democracy in the 21st century is no longer the classic military coup, but rather a slower, more internal process of democratic erosion driven by elected leaders themselves. This raises a set of difficult and important questions, not only about leaders now, but also about voters, about institutions, and the broader conditions under which democracies either hold or begin to fail? So there is a great deal for us to unpack in this particular episode, but let me begin here. One of the central claims in your article is that the main threat to democracy today is no longer codes, but erosion driven by elected leaders themselves. Can you walk us through that shift? Let me put it this way. What is it about contemporary politics that has made this slower, internal form of democratic erosion more prominent?
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Coups and democratic backsliding are quite different phenomena. They both destabilize democracies, but they are carried out by different actors. So coups obviously are instigated by military officials, sometimes prodded on by elected officials, but usually they come from the military. The objective is to immediately close down democratic institutions. Usually the constitution is suspended, Congress is sent home, et cetera. Democratic backsliding is a much different phenomenon, and it's carried out by different leaders. The main actor in democratic backsliding is the chief executives, the head of government, so the prime minister or the president, and obviously the people around him or her. And the audience will excuse me for using the male pronoun. Most of these cases are cases of men. So they are politicians, people who have sought high office. Often they come up through political parties or they have some other basis for becoming, you know, entering into elections. And then they. Their goal is not so much to immediately sort of shift to a different system of government, but to aggrandize the powers of the executive within a democratic or a somewhat democratic system. And they. They certainly undermine democratic institutions and weaken democracy, but they do so not by immediately exploding all these institutions, but by kind of more stealthily undermining them from within.
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Okay, and just picking up on that, your article also steps back and asks a broader question, perhaps not just how this happens in practice, but why we are seeing more of it now. What prompted you to write this piece at this particular moment, and what did you feel was missing in how we currently understand democratic backsliding?
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So there's been a very sharp uptick in cases of democratic backsliding since the turn of the 20th to 21st century. So if you look, I think in the book, maybe not the article, there's a figure that shows the frequency of coup attempts and of democratic backsliding over time since the 1950s. And what's clear is that coup attempts peaked in the early 1970s. Certainly we have coups to this day, but they were more frequent in the final decades of the 20th century. And we see a really sharp uptick in instances of democratic backsliding. The first case in recent period comes after Hugo Chavez is elected president of Venezuela in 1999. And since then you see a big wave, a big increase. So that prompted me to ask the question, why now? Why is this happening across the globe at this particular moment in history? And one of the reasons I decided to undertake this project is that even though there are wonderful, really fascinating and very insightful analyses by social scientists of the kind of the internal dynamics of democratic backsliding and how democracy eroding leaders
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managed to stay in office, what strategies
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they use, and so forth, I didn't see a piece that sort of stood back, stepped back and said, why Is this happening now? Why are we seeing this at this point in history? And there are various answers to that
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question that I sketched.
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So shifts in the nature of party appeals in the advanced democracies, with a shift toward more middle class voters, this shift of the social democratic sort of legacy left parties or changes in party systems, changes in the economy, in particular the growth of income inequality, which was already happening in many regions of the world by the late 20th century, but really was pushed forward by the process of globalization, especially in the 1990s. So we see much higher levels of income inequality. And income inequality is a major causal factor in the risk of democratic backsliding.
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So, you know, a key answer to
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the question, why are we seeing this now? Is that we have a world in
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which countries are much more unequal and
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inequality is a major risk factor in democratic erosion.
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We take that one after the other. And I'm going to start with where you just stopped. Now you trace democratic backsliding back to longer term economic and political transformations, particularly globalization, which I find quite interesting, and changes in party systems, which you have just mentioned, that left some voters feeling politically and economically disadvantaged or displaced in that sense. Can you unpack how those shifts created the conditions for the rise of backsliding leaders?
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Yes.
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So there are a number of pieces of the connection or mechanisms connecting income inequality and changes in party systems eventually to democratic erosion. And of course, there are somewhat different trajectories depending on the world region. We do see democratic backsliding in all world regions, but things happen a little bit differently in the global south than the global North. So in the global north, speaking in very broad terms, of course, there are many much variation in the real world. But speaking very broadly, globalization tended to bring with it a hollowing out of the industrial base, manufacturing base in many advanced countries, or to hurry along that process if it was already underway. And that meant that there were many people in these many voters in these countries that were left feeling a sense of grievance, a sense of loss, a sense of their children wouldn't have the same ability to reach the middle class that they had enjoyed. And it also encouraged income inequality. And the after effects of globalization also encouraged a kind of loss of confidence in institutions which people came to see as distant from themselves and kind of arrayed against them. And those direct effects of income inequality were then picked up on by ambitious leaders who recognized that they could sort of mold those sentiments into support or at least tolerance for leaders who came to office and said, you know what, I need to destroy These institutions, these institutions don't work. The courts are against us. The press is the enemy of the people. We need to take these things apart and build them back in a different mold. And that different mold involved the enormous aggrandizing of powers of the executive. So it's a complex story. There are many pieces to it. But the basic story story is that income inequality and some other changes, as I mentioned, in party systems, particularly in the global north, opened up room for right wing ethno nationalist parties to come to power or to achieve greater influence and to use that influence and power to undermine democracy and to remake or try to remake the systems in a more autocratic mold.
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Okay, thank you. The points you just made now about income inequality, which you then describe as the most significant predictor of democratic erosion. Okay, why does it matter so much here? I begin to imagine, especially when you look at the Global north on the Global south dimensions, or perhaps the far more developed countries and developing countries, why is it, what is it doing politically that makes democracy that vulnerable? And is this mainly about material grievance or is it also about trust in institutions and perceptions of fairness, perhaps?
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Well, in the Global south, levels of
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inequality have been persistently very high. The highest levels of income inequality, you know, biggest Gini indexes are in sub Saharan Africa and in Latin America. Latin America actually experienced some reduction of income inequality in the early 21st century with the commodities boom, with the, with the growth of China, economic growth of China, but never, nevertheless, they're highly unequal regions of the world. And with globalization and the arrival of ever more international capital and displacement of a failure to fully address problems of income inequality and democratization, which certainly in Latin America eventually led to the rise of party systems where there was a distinct left and right, even if the particular political parties were somewhat shifting and ephemeral. So you had a kind of crystallizing of a kind of pro working class, pro informal sector, a set of parties and political claims that pressed for benefits, you know, for sort of populist, economically populist agenda. So that was sort of the nature of the development of party politics and the kind of framework for political contestation in the Global South. And that meant that you had, you know, many leaders came to power who were in favor of improving the situation of the poor and the informal sector and rural citizens in the global south who didn't undermine democratic institutions, but then some did. So you had leaders like Evo Morales in Bolivia, or Rafael Correa in Ecuador, or Jacob Zuma in South Africa, or Lopez Obrador in Mexico who came to power pushing for kind of champions of the poor, who also found conditions ripe for undermining the courts, the press, sidelining Congress when they needed to. So that's one kind of story. And then in the global north, it is kind of a different story of what's constant is the rise of income inequality and as I mentioned before, rising polarization and loss of confidence in institutions. And in that setting, that opened up space for right wing ethnonationalist parties to come in and be able to claim that they were the champions of the working class in a way that maybe the traditional, the legacy left had, had lost that identity to some degree, and which the legacy right wasn't. Both the legacy left and the legacy right had kind of gotten on board with a program of globalization. And certainly the legacy right was not in favor of, of redistributive policy. So that all of that appealed to various, you know, groups who saw themselves as having lost out economically and who had lost out. And in the global North, a lot of that grievance and animus was directed by these leaders against minorities, against migrants, against racial and ethnic and religious minorities who then became, that became a kind of horse that the right wing ethno nationalist right could take to office and could then, you know, build our strength and tolerance for democratic backsliding.
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Key important points there. And then eventually what people then have access to in terms of resources and perhaps the level of deprivation that they have determines how they are able to engage with the process, engage with institutions and all of that. And that brings us to think, one of the hardest and most important questions in your work. You ask why voters sometimes tolerate leaders who undermine democratic institutions. Now, based on your research, how would you, how should we understand that particular process? Is it active support or resignation? Identity politics or something are far more complex than that.
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Yeah, there's, you know, there are segments of most populations who kind of prefer authoritarian styles of governance. And that's, I think, true in many parts of the world. The evidence does not suggest that that sentiment grew before the rise of democratic backsliding. That is that democratic backsliding does not appear to be a response to a kind of shift toward a desire to get rid of democracy. So people still in public opinion polls in many countries where we have data, they tend to still say, yes, I agree that democracy is flawed, but the best system of government, to the extent that those, that the numbers of people agreeing with those statements has decreased, that tends to be after a period of democratic backsliding, has set in. And after you have leaders who are like the recently unrelected Viktor Orban in Hungary who say, you know, that liberal democracy is dead and that the liberal countries around the world have run out of steam and that real dynamism comes from authoritarian systems. So when they, when people hear those messages over and over, some of them are won over to it. But it's not in general the case that democratic backsliding is a response to a loss of confidence in democracy as, as a system of government. But what we, what you do see is with polarization, many people become more tolerant of backsliding leaders. They sort of say to themselves, well, you know, I'm not crazy about the
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encroachments on the rule of law, that they're sort of picking people off, off the streets and deporting them, or that
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they go around saying bad things about the press. That's not, I don't love that. But if the other side were to
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come to power, you know, and then
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you finish the sentence, however, however you wish, if the other side comes to
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power, we become a, a neolib nightmare, or if the other side comes to power, we become Venezuela was the, you
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know, was the term that was certainly used in the, in the US context. So polarization has been an important part of why people tolerate democratic backsliding, even if they remain to some degree really pro democracy. On the other hand, polarization has some disadvantages from this, from the point of view of the backsliding leader, when they go around saying that the opposing, the
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opposition party is full of people who
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should be exiled from the country or who are traitors or who don't care about the, the country and are criminal gangs.
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And they say all those things that
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can be music to the ears of their supporters. But imagine how it lands with the supporters of the opposing party. They might say to themselves, you know, I don't think we're traitors. I think we love our country. I don't think we're a criminal gang. And so that polarizing discourse by the backsliding leader can create a backlash and can actually be kind of counter mobilizing on the other side. So that's where what I call trash
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talking democracy comes in.
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And I have to say I came to this realization more empirically than theoretically. So I just noticed when studying and reading a lot of the discourse of
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these backsliding leaders that a lot of
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the time they weren't really criticizing the other party. They were saying that the institutions were flawed, that the courts are full of corrupt judges, that the, you know, that the press is, is incompetent, that, you know, the national election administration body was full of people who cared more about going out to fancy dinners than they were, than really doing their jobs well. So they're attacking institutions. They're not attacking rhetorically. They're not attacking the system of government. Democracy is a system of government. They're attacking particular institutions which they want to weaken and make more dependent on the executive. So that's what I call trash talking democracy. And in the article and also in the book, I offer more evidence that that is actually a distinct rhetorical strategy that's separate from the polarizing strategy and that it does avoid the problem of a backlash among the opposition. That when people, opposition voters hear attacks on institutions, they might actually believe them, even if the. It's a leader, they don't like who's saying them. And they, they certainly don't have a kind of, they don't rally to the defense of the institution. So it doesn't have that kind of backlash effect.
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And listening to all of these, one question that comes up is whether democratic revolution is intentional in that sense. To what extent should we think of backsliding as a deliberate political strategy as opposed to something that emerges more gradually, perhaps from competition incentives and institutional weaknesses? Is there in effect a kind of playbook that leaders follow?
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There's a lot of variation in the ideological orientation of backsliding leaders, and I sort of hinted at that one our earlier discussion. So they come in two basic ideological flavors. Right wing ethno nationalists, and that tends to be in the global north, and left populist, and that tends to be in the global south, with some exceptions, such as Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But in general, that distinction holds. So they're different ideologically, but they definitely use a single playbook. There's a kind of depressing cookie cutter aspect to what the kinds of institutions they go after and some of the strategies that they use to go after them. So they go after the courts, they go after the press, they go after the opposition. They at least sideline or perhaps attack the powers of the legislature. They go after civil society organizations, they go after universities. This is something that some of the recent work I've been doing is looking at more closely. So they cut budgets and they undermine confidence in scientific knowledge and they replace the leadership of the universities. You know, rectors get, get thrown out and, and faculty get harassed and sometimes, sometimes fired. So the playbook is, it is Really a playbook. And it's, it's quite similar from country to country, in some cases more severe, in some cases a little bit milder. But the playbook is very much a playbook.
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We're talking about democracy in actual sense. When does it stop being democratic? You know, another important point in your article is that many backsliding systems still end up retaining elections, court system and former institutions, as it were. So how should we think about that gray zone? In essence, at what point does a system stop being meaningfully democratic? Is this something we can identify clearly, or is it always something that is gradual and perhaps contested?
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I'll take the gradual question first because this is interesting.
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The early literature on democratic backsliding very much emphasized the gradual, slow, stealth, equality.
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And I think that's changed a bit.
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Certainly from the perspective of the United States, there's nothing slow or stealthy about the undermining of democracy of the Trump administration the second term. And I think perhaps the greater speed and maybe greater openness of the actions of backsliding leaders more recently has to do with the fact that people are aware of it. It's not a mystery any longer. They're not waking up one day and saying, that's an odd thing for an elected president to do. Now we have a sense that this is a pattern and a wave, so gradual, a little less the question of how, you know, so when does a, a democracy stop being a democracy and how do we know it has? And again, those are probably two different questions or two different answers to those questions. The conceptualization of democratic backsliding that I've adopted from really great work by a scholar named Melis Labens at the Central European University in Vienna involves the conceptualization is when there is a sharp and sort of simultaneous decrease in what we call both vertical and horizontal accountability. And when that happens over a brief period of time and is severe enough on both dimensions, then that becomes a case of democratic backsliding. And so what's vertical accountability means? Basically, the ability of voters to assess, evaluate an incumbent in comparison to a challenger and vote the incumbent out and the challenger in if they decide that that's what they want to do. And then horizontal accountability is the ability of co equal branches of government to control the executive, the ability of independent or semi independent public bodies to do the same. I think when you really know that you've gone over the edge to autocracy is when you stop having elections as a mechanism of vertical accountability. So when you have countries that hold elections that were democracies and start holding elections where they lose and they ignore the results, or when there's no longer really the ability of opposition parties to freely participate in elections, and therefore the voters don't have a chance to consider an opposition. So the two clear cases where we've gone from democracy to eroding democracy to authoritarianism are Venezuela and Nicaragua. There are other, you know, Russia looks a little bit like this, although we don't usually put Russia in the category of an eroded democracy because it never really became democratic enough after the fall of the Soviet Union. But it's a similar kind of pattern. And then there are other cases where we won't really know. And this goes to the question of, you know, when do we know that this has happened?
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I think there are many people who
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were skeptical that a loss by the Fidesz party in Orban in Hungary would lead to an alternation of government, would lead the prime minister to step down. And it appears that that is going to be the case. So their uncertainty was resolved in the direction of, well, it's an eroded but still functioning democracy. Turkey is another case where kind of hard to know. It's certainly a severely degraded democracy. A lot of the opposition leaders end up in prison. They have to run for office from prison. Sometimes an independent press has been severely degraded. Civil society organizations are under assault, et cetera, et cetera. But we won't know what will happen
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if and when the opposition wins a national election. Then the question is, does President Erdogan and the AKP party step aside and say, okay, your turn, or do they not? And that's what's going to decide.
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Then we will know what kind of regime this is.
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Okay. Lots of interesting examples there to draw on. And perhaps on a very positive note now, which I more or less glean from your article, you show that erosion can be slowed or even reversed by institutions, civil society, and even voters themselves. In practice, what tends to make a difference between systems that resist backsliding and those that do not? As your response just now you mentioned, election are still very key system. The key mechanism here or other factors are also very important.
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Yeah, well, there are important roles for many kinds of actors. So there are important roles for opposition party leaders and for lawyers and judges and for civil society organizations and social movement leaders and participants and for the press and for academic researchers. Many professional associations can play a very important role. For example, in the United States, there are bar associations or professional associations of lawyers that have at the state level that have disbarred lawyers who took part in the so called big lie, the 2020 and early 2021 effort of Donald Trump to remain in power. Just this week, John Eastman, a key lawyer who took part in that effort to steal the 2020 elections, was disbarred by the California Bar Association. And so there are many roles for many different actors. But I will stress voters and just citizens like you and me in the part we can play. So there are about 22. Well, in fact, there are exactly 22 backsliding leaders since 1999 who we've identified following the method that I mentioned earlier, pioneered by Professor Labanz. And they operated in 27 countries. So 27 instances of democratic backsliding. And the good news is that but most of them eventually leave office and they leave office by different means. So if you look today, who's still in office among the backsliders, there are about five of them and who remain in power. That doesn't mean that backsliding has ended in every other country. But those leaders remain in power. So how do they exit power? Well, the most important mechanisms are related to elections. So they're voted out of office. And we count six instances where like Orban, the backsliding leader or party lost at re election. They also stepped down sometimes because of term limits. Obviously that's more an issue in that's a mechanism that's an institution that applies to presidential rather than parliamentary systems. But they're often under term limits.
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I would say they don't necessarily always graciously exit under term limits.
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We have leaders who have orchestrated the weakening or removal of term limits but eventually have to step aside because of term limits. So that's an important election related mechanism. I'd point to just one example is Lopez Obrador in Mexico who abided by the very firm term limit of a single six year term.
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Now, it was easier for him to
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do that because he knew that his successor was going to be from his own party.
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But still term limits play a role. And then there are instances in which
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political parties, the leader's own political party removes him. And again, apologies for the masculine pronoun, but they happen. He's removes him from power. And that happened in South Africa.
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The African National Congress removed Jacob Zuma from power in 2018. And the question is why do they do that?
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And the answer there is mainly because they see this incumbent, this leader, this party leader and head of government as
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an encumbrance to them in future elections. So they're going to lose elections if this person stays at the head of the party.
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So they remove him.
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So again, in an indirect way, it's
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a kind of electoral mechanism.
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I'll just mention briefly, since you're in the UK in my book, and I mention this in the article, I treat the government of Boris Johnson as a kind of a near miss. So Johnson was adopting many strategies that
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backsliding, the sort of parts of the playbook that backsliding leaders adopt. It didn't become a full blown case
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of democratic backsliding, to be sure, but one of the reasons it didn't was the Conservative Party removed Johnson, forced him to resign. And the reason, or you know, I'm sure there were many reasons that many leaders had, but one of the key reasons was that the Conservative Party, that Johnson was losing support even among voters in the Conservative Party and the Conservative Party was losing by elections. And so under electoral pressure, they removed Johnson from office. So that again is a kind of electoral election related mechanism.
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And that's why I say that we, mere voters actually play a really big
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role in removing these leaders from power. Let me just add that, you know, there's an optimistic way of looking at this kind of accounting and that is that most of these leaders leave office. Many, the majority of them leave office and are replaced by leaders with Democrat, with firm Democratic commitments. And so in a sense there's, you know, there's optimism. There's no reason to feel that there's something inevitable about a slide toward autocracy. As I mentioned, there are really only a couple of cases of full autocratization in these cases. At the end of these episodes, on the other hand, the backsliding leaders spend their time in office destroying institutions. They tend to be adept at that and they leave a mess to clean up. They leave a big lift for the Democratic leaders and democratic forces who are returned to power and return to influence when they leave. So the average term in office for backsliding leaders is about nine years. And that's plenty of time to do all kinds of destruction. So even though they're not inevitable, they don't last. They certainly leave a degraded democracy behind them. Getting past that is a big job.
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Let me end on this. If part of the challenge is that many people feel democracy is no longer working for them, I mean, what will it take to rebuild that relationship in a way that is both credible and stable?
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Well, I want to go back to
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the economic factors and particularly income inequality as a cause, as a kind of cause may be strong. It is the most important factor in cross national statistical studies that I've done jointly with My colleague Eli Rao at Tech University in Monterrey in Mexico, income inequality is a very robust factor in increasing or decreasing the risk of democratic backsliding. And so it stands to reason that one of the ways to regain public confidence in institutions and in the value of democratic ways of doing things is to address problems of income inequality. And, you know, that's, I think that politicians are coming to that point of view already. I think that the center left, the kind of legacy left parties that lost their connection or lost their connection to working classes became more blurred, are kind of rediscovering that that's an important connection to make. It's an important connection to make just for electoral purposes, but also for safeguarding their democracy. So the emphasis that we see now among many leaders here in the United States and elsewhere on affordability on a living wage, on improving the minimum wage, all of those kinds of particular policy proposals are connected to the problem of income inequality, which I think really needs to be addressed. That alone is not going to undo
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the effects of democratic backsliding, but it's
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an important place to start.
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All right, a lot to reflect on there in terms of the importance of enhancing living conditions for people across all nations of the world as very crucial to mitigating some of the challenges that democracies face. And of course, helping also to build elements of democratic agency that people can channel into limiting the influence of backsliding leaders. And with that, key actors, including civil society and voters, also have roles to play in making sure that the backsliders playbook, to use Susan's term, becomes less effective going forward. Thank you very much, Susan for joining us. This has been really, I want rich and thought provoking conversation and thanks also to all of you listeners for listening. This episode is part of our collaboration with the Journal of Democracy and you can find a link to Susan's article, why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy in the podcast description. If you enjoyed this episode, do check out our previous conversations in the series and more broadly across the People Power Politics podcast. My name is Temitayo Okodeyemi. I'm a research fellow in Democratic Resilience at cedar and I've been speaking with Susan Stokes, the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service professor and Director of the Chicago center on Democracy at University of Chicago in the United States of America. Thank you very much and until next time, thank you indeed for listening. Thank you for listening to the People
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Power Politics podcast brought to you by cedar, the center for Elections to 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. Visit our website using the link in the podcast description.