Over the summer, Professor Al Montero (Political Science) and Professor Juan Diego Prieto (Oden Postdoctoral Fellow for Innovation in the Liberal Arts and Political Science) met to read and discuss two books on the topic of travails of democracy in comparative perspective; this reading circle was made possible by the CGRS. Below is a reflection of their reading research circle work.
Juan Diego and I selected two recent books on the travails of democracy in comparative perspective. The first was Larry Bartel’s Democracy Erodes from the Top: Leaders, Citizens and the Challenge of Populism in Europe. This work focuses primarily on West and Southern European countries, though Bartels is a professor of political science emeritus at Princeton who has spent most of his career focused on American politics. Using data from the European Social Survey primarily, Bartels takes issue with the idea popular in much of the literature that bemoans “democratic backsliding” in advanced capitalist countries. He shows through a careful study of hot-button issues such as Brexit, the election of “anti-democratic” populists in Hungary and Poland, and the continued support for extreme right-wing and left-wing parties and movements in France, Greece, Spain, and Italy that the role of popular support for democratic erosion is weak and inconsistent. As the title of the book argues clearly, it is political elites who endanger democracy through the hegemonic intentions of some leaders and parties. In a broader longitudinal and comparative context, Bartels shows that over time popular sentiment that once seemed to run against democracy and the European Union project has waned in intensity and returned to a more moderate orientation. Given that both Juan Diego and I are very interested in the pathways of democracy in comparative perspective, Bartel’s study is an important corrective and a reminder that the people are not the main cause of the institutional failures of contemporary democracies. As two Latin Americanists who have seen electorates vote in presidents such as Jair Bolsonaro, we may take some level of comfort from the fact that the people can also vote them out as Brazilians did with Bolsonaro in 2022. Where these leaders become entrenched, as they have in Hungary and Venezuela, the threat to democracy comes clearly from these incumbents.
The second book we read and discussed was Scott Mainwaring and Tarek Masoud’s Democracy in Hard Places. This is an edited volume that explores what we might call “outliers” in the universe of cases of countries that have undergone democratization under circumstances that prevailing theory would find as inhospitable for the continuance of this form of government. The compilation includes chapters that focus on democratic stalwarts such as India and Argentina, but also very unlikely democracies in hostile regional neighborhoods such as Indonesia, Benin and South Africa. Nancy Bermeo’s chapter on Timor-Leste is an excellent reminder that sustained war can reorder the range of political possibilities, literally destroying anti-democratic actors who would otherwise undermine nascent democratic institutions for their own purposes. In making sense of the lessons from these unlikely democracies, Juan Diego and I were fascinated by Mainwaring and Masoud’s shifting away from institutional causes to agentic ones. In many ways, this orientation is a return to the elite-focused theory of the 1980s that sought to explain various transitions to democracy in the developing world in Latin America and Southern Europe. Mainwaring’s concluding chapter focuses the main argument on the normative commitments of incumbent elites to democratic forms. Again, this is not something that we would expect from a political scientist who has made a career focusing on institutional constraints. That is permissible, but we struggled to get a hold on what new theory might come out of this study of outlier cases, other than the significant nod to agentic approaches. Nevertheless, we enjoyed our conversations about both books, which deepened our convictions that the field of comparative democratization has a great deal more room to grow and develop.