How elected strongmen weaken democracy

Democracies today are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically-elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. Penn State political science professor Joseph Wright is and his coauthors explore this trend in their new book, The Origins of Elected Strongmen: How Personalist Parties Destroy Democracy from Within.

Wright joins Michael Berkman, McCourtney Institute for Democracy director and professor of political science at Penn State, on the show this week to explore how the rise of personalist parties around the globe facilitating the decline of democracy. The book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader's career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform.

The Origins of Elected Strongmen will be released June 11 from Oxford University Press. Wright's co-authors are Erica Frantz, associate professor of political science at Michigan State University, and Andrea Kendall-Taylor, senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, welcome to Democracy Works, I'm Jenna Spinelle. This week I am turning over the interviewer chair to my colleague and co host Michael Berkman, who is the Director of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy and professor of political science at Penn State. Michael talks with Joe Wright, also a professor of political science here at Penn State. And one of the authors of the new book, The origins of elected strong men, how personalist parties destroy democracy from within the book will be released this summer from Oxford University Press, and we'll put a link to it in the show notes. Joe is one of three authors on that book. The others are Andrea Kendall Taylor of the Center for New American Security, and Erica Frantz of Michigan State University. The book looks at how elected strong men have come to power in countries around the world, how these leaders fundamentally change political parties, and perhaps most importantly, how strong men leaders are detrimental to democracy, Michael and Joe cover all of those things plus a whole lot more in this conversation. So without further ado, let's get to it.

Michael Berkman
Joe, welcome to Democracy Works.

Joe Wright
Well, good to be here.

Michael Berkman
As a student of American politics, Joe, I found that just fascinating to read about your study of all democracies between 1991 and 2020. And to think about your findings on democratic backsliding in the context of the United States. So I'm excited to get into what you and your co authors have done in this study of the origins of elected strongmen. So, Joe, how did you get into the study of authoritarian leaders?

Joe Wright
Well, back in high school, I started studying Spanish continued in college. Yeah. And the only way to learn Spanish is to go somewhere where they speak it all the time. So I studied in Chile as an undergraduate, and they set me up with a military family in Chile, and that was not but five, six years after the transition to democracy in Chile, no kidding. At the time, the ex dictator, General Augusto Pinochet was still the head of the military academy. Being in a military family or staying with a military family. They had a son at the military academy, who played in the Military Academy Band. And one afternoon I got home from university the Chilean mother I lived with said you want to go see the ceremony to induct the new cadets, I guess at the military academy. I said, Sure. We go there, watch her son play in the band. And then I would trots the Gen X dictator who was the head of the Military Academy at the time. And I got to meet him in person. Wow, that sparked my interest in dictatorships. I mean, in Chile, in a world of new democracy that had just transitioned from having lived under a couple of decades of dictatorship, and then meaning, meaning a man like that, and myself.

Michael Berkman
Wow, yeah. speaks to the value of study abroad, too, indeed. And so you went on to graduate school and studied authoritarians? I did? Yeah. It's so we often hear different terms used to describe authoritarian leaders. But of course, there are important differences across the type. So what is an elected strong man, which is what you're talking about in this book, as opposed to say, a dictator?

Joe Wright
That's a great question. So I'll start with a dictator. The dictator is somebody who comes to power in some way that's not a fair and free election, with multiple parties up running for the election. Elected strongmen are those who are coming to power for the first time in a fair and free election, but then subsequently decide to do things to the government to the way that democracy is run, to undermine that. And it could go all the way to the point where they undermine democracy to the extent that it collapses or there's no longer fair and free elections for the chief executive of the country.

Michael Berkman
So it's important distinction that they're elected.

Joe Wright
Yes, they're elected. So a lot of dictators is just that in the dictators, they're initially elected elected. In a contest that's not a fair and free multiparty election.

Michael Berkman
Do we tend to see these days democracy weakened decline through elections? Or is it more likely to see it through coos or other some kind of armed conflict?

Joe Wright
Yeah, so in the 20th century, most dictatorships were started through armed groups, either using violence or threatening violence. This would be the military is an armed group rebel groups is an armed group or foreign invasions as foreign militaries in the 20th century, 21st century, right now, it's much more common to see a new dictatorship born from an elected strong man. That is somebody who comes to power as a Democrat insofar as they were elected in a fair and free multiparty election. And so we call they wanted democracy, but then subsequently do things to undermine that democracy that by some In the future, they have undermined it to the point where it's no longer we can call it a democracy, but rather a dictatorship. And so the new dictatorships that are born in the 21st century are more likely to be born via that mechanism, undermining democracy from within, than from armed groups outside of the government.

Michael Berkman
I want to get to this notion of democratic decline in in a second. But just what do you see as some of the contemporary leaders that you would characterize as elected strongmen thinking of Orban and Hungary?

Joe Wright
Yeah, so certainly, he's a great case of that. Another one that we examined a little bit in the book is Bill Killian in El Salvador. But the the first ones sort of to arise on the scene, if you will, in the back of the 20th century, are folks like Marcos and Philippines? Would you want to Peru and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?

Michael Berkman
So throughout the book, you're looking at how these elected strong men contributor cause democratic decline? So can you kind of clarify for, for us, what you mean by democracy? And what it means to have less of it?

Joe Wright
So democracies are places that start out as, you know, fair and free elections for the chief executive. But with that comes a lot of other stuff, too. So typical, sort of thicker descriptions of democracy would involve things like executive constraint. And what do I mean by that, that means their institutions, horizontal institutions, like a judiciary and bureaucracy or legislature that can effectively constrain the behavior of the elected leader, could be vertical constraint, where you have civil society organizations, or voters, ultimately, via the threat of voting, the bums out of office that constrain the leaders behavior while in office. So democracy can diminish by reducing those executive constraints, as well as through sort of the erosion of the norms that individuals in the population the citizens hold as to how we should play politics.

Michael Berkman
So that's what you would call sort of a vertical constraint. Yeah, the public would hold to certain kinds of democratic norms, and expect their leaders to hold to those democratic norms. But as those norms the road, then that kind of vertical constraint weakens.

Joe Wright
Yeah, one of the most important norms would be simply be that when I lose, I'm gonna step down from office peacefully.

Michael Berkman
Yes. Democracy means parties loose, yes. And the horizontal constraints, I mean, in the American case, we often think of checks and balances as being horizontal constraints. And so as democracy declines or erodes, we hear different kinds of terminology for those harms. Horizontal and vertical constraints are essentially being weakened or attacked. That's correct. Yeah. So as as the book title makes clear, you're interested in the origins of these elected, elected strongmen? And you You argue that these origins lie in political parties, in particular, what we call personalise parties. So I just found this fascinating, think about what's going on with the Republican Party these days, and political parties more generally, since Americans are so often negative towards political parties, and I kind of see your book as painting, a normatively positive picture for political parties. So let's dig into that a little bit. Explain to what I made me more. Can you say a little bit about the difference between, say, a policy party and a personal party?

Joe Wright
So policy, parties or programmatic parties may have an ideology, a set of policy proposals, which can change over time. But individuals, both within the party elites in the party, the representatives and other folks that are leading the party, hold to some extent, as well as the voters who support that party, sort of want that stuff, that group of policies and pronouncements and rules and ways of governing than the alternative, they want that more than the alternative. And so the way that individuals would gain power in that party and become leaders of that party would be they would work their way up the party system, maybe at the local level, up to the state level up to the national level, by being part of those programs, talking about those policies. And yeah, people can sort of change over time. And, you know, there's nuances to all sorts of these policies. But at the end of the day, voters are voting for the party, because they like that party's set of programs, more than a different party. And so really the attachment that individuals all the way up and down the party, the supporters as well as the elites have is to that program.

Michael Berkman
Before you go into the personal party. So when I think about, you know, a traditional notion of a party system you'll have to pro grammatic parties in the American Society of two, two programmatic parties, they are largely divided along some kind of ideological lines, social groups align behind them on those issues. And the idea is that a political party kind of links the public with government and elites, and the, the career path for a politician in a system like this is up through the party system. So maybe we'll go from a lower office to a higher office or from a party position into elected office or a higher party position. Now, how does that differ from a personal party?

Joe Wright
So personal party, the main feature of the party, sort of conceptually, is that the leader controls the party. And the elites have less ability to constrain the behavior of the leader in the party. And the reason for that, oftentimes, is simply because these are parties where the leader, himself or herself, are more likely to have created the party as their own personal vehicle to get elected in the first place. That is, there is no party to rise up through, they just create a party, a new party. Sometimes they call it after themselves, give it their give it their own names. And as a result of the elites that they that they gather around them to help them run the show, if they do get elected, tend to be people who are beholden to that individual leader and not to sort of program programmatic policies that the leader is necessarily espouses. And so the the internal sort of power structure of the party is quite different. And the leaders tend not to have sort of worked their way up the party, even in part because they oftentimes have created them. It also means that we find substantial evidence across the globe for this also means that these are leaders that controls resources, sort of party resources to a greater extent than the elites. What do I mean by that? I mean, things like simply the financial resources of the party, the ability to to to nominate sort of control over the nomination process. And while there are certainly internal party rules that can shape how nominations occur, there's a lot of unwritten rules about how that happens. And actually, that's what we see happening in the United States today, where it's actually unwritten rules about how nominations work within the Republican Party, which are reshaping it very quickly, sort of in in the process giving Donald Trump more power within the in the Republican Party. Yeah, sort of see that on display there.

Michael Berkman
I want to get to that in one second. Just to clarify something, too. So we were talking before about constraints on a leaders power. And from what I understand you're saying, party elite should be a constraint as as well, at least within a within an operating programmatic party system? Absolutely.

Joe Wright
So elites are actually the primary sort of your own party elites are the are the main constraints on your behavior that you face every day when you rule? Right? They're the ones that you have to rely on for legislative support. If you get to influence the courts, those are the people in the courts that are aligned with you, they get to say that your what you do is, is legal. And so those are the people that when you are successful at doing something in government, they're the ones who have done it for you. And therefore that gives them tremendous power to shape what that looks like.

Michael Berkman
So you were mentioning the aren't the republican party before? So I mean, if I think about the Republican Party of George H. Bush, I mean, that seemed like a real a classic programmatic party and George Bush came up. I mean, he's the consummate Insider. Right. The original Yeah, yeah. Not just the rich, yeah, consummate insider, kind of policy party or a programmatic party become a personal party.

Joe Wright
Yeah. So that's a good question. We were trying to understand the origins. I mean, that's sort of the point of the research. And so to do that, we wanted to figure out a way to, you know, this concept of a person's party. And we actually wanted to conceptualize that and measure that based on information from before the leader comes to power to power, right, because oftentimes, the maneuvers that we see of leaders to transform their parties, and make them more personalist are actually some of the same things that people call anti democratic and sort of our evidence of, of democratic backsliding. So conceptually, we needed to separate those things. But I do think that there are pathways through which sort of a programmatic party can be transformed into a personalist party. In some ways, those parallel just the way that personal parties arise in the first place, even when it's not when it's a new party. And it's not just a sort of a transformation of an existing party. And those those ways are when again, going back to sort of the the resources that individuals control. And so one of those is win win. Party leaders, and I think this is what we see a little bit happening in the Republican Party are able to circumvent the traditional mechanisms for gaining support of the electorate. And so a good example of this would be, you know, Trump was essentially able to use a information mechanisms that didn't necessarily rely on the party to get his message out to voters the first time around. And you can see that today, right? So he's the first President, I believe you can correct me if I'm wrong, you this is your case. So you know, well, but I think he's the first president to sort of spout off on his own Twitter account on his own truth, social, right. I mean, I know that Obama had something but basically, his campaign ran it.

Michael Berkman
I want to just trace out a little bit more, sort of how a personal party once you have one becomes detrimental to democracy, because as I'm understanding your argument, that's kind of what starts a chain that eventually has very dangerous effects and and a chain that's much, much less likely to happen when you have more pragmatic parties. And, and also, just to touch back on what you were saying. The notion of a personal party is consistent with a more general personalization of politics. Isn't that right?

Joe Wright
Yeah. And that's a general trend that a lot of folks have noted over time. And we're sort of focusing on the political party as a vehicle for expressing that. Because ultimately, you know, people, like presidents or prime ministers have to rely on other people to help do them things, do things with them. And that really is central from our understanding of how dictatorships works, right. Dictators don't rule alone, there's an organization that supports them, that helps them gain power, and helps them stay in power. And in democracies, that's the party. Yeah. And so that's why we wanted to look at as a party as an organization that mobilizes people has the power to do things on behalf of the leader to help them attain power. So the core theory, sort of the core of our theory is that these personals parties, the dynamics that happened within them, because the leader has more individual power, and the the elites in these parties are less likely to constrain leader and the reason for that is sort of twofold. One is when the elite have less access to resources, they can't use those resources, those, they can't use those resources to sort of to bargain credibly, with the leader of the party. That is, if the leader has more nomination power, more financial resources, he is he or she is more likely to sort of have a bargaining advantage, when they're sort of trying to decide how they're going to divvy up the power within that within the party. And the second, the second is that the career incentives of the elites are often quite different. That is, they're better off sort of not constraining the leader, if the leader does something that would say, undermine democracy. And the reason for that is that their political careers are more closely tied to the leader, rather than to the party brand itself, and other elites in the party. That is, if you're a local party elite, in one of these parties, getting up to the next rung of the the partying and getting power within the party, what matters is more your relationship with the leader of the party, and how well you sort of implement the program of the party at the local level to get you promoted up to the next level.

Michael Berkman
Because without that leader, you really have no future in that party. And in fact, that party might not even exist, right, without without a leader.

Joe Wright
And so keeping that leader in power is paramount. Because your political career depends upon not just the party staying in power, but that particular leader of the party stay on power. Yeah. So you can you can think of somebody like John McCain, or mitt Mitt Romney, who were eventually became leaders of the Republican Party. But before that, they were elites within the party. Yep. And they had worked their way up in the party. And they accepted when they're when their candidate lost at various points, you know, their candidate lost a number of different times. And they accepted those losses, in part because they knew that they would have a chance to run with that party, even though the leader that they had supported that ended up losing was, you know, was out of out of government. So these, these are people that were able to run eventually, under that party label. Now, if it had been just the leaders party, and the leader gets kicked out of power, then they may not have a chance to, to, to access power, and competitively run it in the future.

Michael Berkman
So so the the leaders acknowledgement of democratic norms, and willingness to abide by democratic norms, is, I think, from following your argument important for the public as well in terms of how they're thinking. And so I want to talk a little bit more about this notion of vertical constraints. So we've been talking largely about horizontal constraints and party elites, I think of as kind of a horizontal constraint that you make a really interesting argument in your book, I think about polarization. And the argument you make about polarization. You is, first of all, that polarization is effective and not ideological gonna ask you to make that distinction. But also that polarization is endogenous, to this sort of personal party system. In other words, it's not like we have polar for our list. It's not like we have polarization, which then leads to personal parties, but rather the development of personal parties helps to increase this particular type of polarization. Can you kind of flesh that out for us?

Joe Wright
Yeah, so first, going on the ideological polarization is when sort of people divided society into into one or sorry, in two or more sort of groupings, that are ideologically internally ideologically aligned, you know, so So in the US context, Southern Democrats would have been not necessarily fully ideal ideologically aligned with Northern Democrats through much of the 20th century, even though they were in the same party. And and so the partisan ideological polarization under that scenario is not as high as when all the people in the Democratic Party are sort of all have the same ideological beliefs say about racial order in the United States the way that they didn't, Democrats didn't in the in much of the 20th century were Northern and Southern, sort of ideological sorting, right, right now, that would be ideological. partisanship. affects the partisanship is where the individuals are sorting into parties based on sort of the identity of the of their own party and the identity of the other party. And the the distinctions that people making are not so much policy related, oh, I don't like the Democrats or I don't like the Republicans, because of the policy they stand for whether it's economic policy, taxation, foreign policy, it's not so much the policy stance of the other party that they're opposed to, but the actually very people in the other party, so I don't like Democrats because of who they are. I don't like Republicans because of who they are. And I make a bunch of assumptions about what kind of people they are. And I know, I don't like those other kinds of people. And it happens on both sides. So that's our factor polarization. Now, how is that sort of endogenous to this process? So the thing that I've noticed about American politics is that we're in a situation where if you asked Americans today, sort of what they disagree on a lot about, do they disagree on whether or not you know, we should support Ukraine with more military aid? Or do they disagree on whether or not we should tax more and spend less, there's gonna be fair bit of alignment, actually, across parties on those ideological positions, sort of those programmatic positions about policy, but there's going to be less sort of alignment across or agreement across parties, and almost perfect alignment within parties on basic issues about how to interpret the very moves that Trump made to undermine democracy. And so perhaps the most, the most poignant example of this or glaring example of this would be election denialism. Right. And so there's a lot of uniformity within the Democratic Party, that they believe that Biden fairly won this election. And there's a lot of uniformity within the Republican Party, that, that, that Trump, you know, was legitimate winner, and then the the election was stolen. Right. And and so the, the polarization isn't about some ideological position about policy, but rather, the very fundamentals about what happened in what it is in November of 2020. And indeed, this includes the January 6 as well, polarization over what how to interpret that very event. So it's not that people deny that Joe Biden occupies the Oval Office today, or people are polarized over whether the over that very fact, with their polarized over is whether or not the Democrats undermined democracy to steal the election in November, and whether or not the Republicans and Trump, you know, tried to steal the election, if you will, by overturning or interfering with the electoral account process.

Michael Berkman
So this in this affective polarization, which I've heard referred to as tribalism, yeah, that makes sense, but also as epistemological polarization, where people are seeing like entirely different world just kind of what you're describing around. But the conflicts between different tribes, or different teams becomes almost existential, like I can't let you win. Because it's not like we just disagree on some policy, but rather, it's sort of the end of democracy as we know it or whatever we want to call. We call this system. An election denialism seems to be really key. Doesn't it for you think about how insistent Donald Trump has been on denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and the and the extent to which he has made it kind of a litmus test of support throughout the Republican Party. I mean, what do you make of, of all of that?

Joe Wright
So this is not something that we walked through. But but but the world of dictators, actually gives us a very clear answer on on on this his right, is that Donald Trump doesn't have to truly believe that the election was stolen for him. No to any of the people that say and repeat that sentiment in order they have to believe that to be true privately. What matters here is that, that Trump says any sort of induce indulgences, induced loyalty among the elite supporters in his party, he can throw out an outlandish statement that in fact, the more outlandish, and the less likely it is to be true, the better. And the reason why is that he can figure out sort of, who is willing to sort of debase themselves by repeating the lie that everybody knows is not true, he can sort out who's sort of a true loyalist and who's not. And what's even more sort of pernicious about this process, is that the more that elites sort of repeat the lie, not only does he use it as a selection mechanism to figure out who's sort of going to be the most loyal amongst these potential elites. And so you see, this is how he sorted out sort of who earns his nomination is basically based on the extent to which they're willing to do the next election denialism. When people start to repeat that, it actually makes it less likely that people outside of the Magga circle are going to take them seriously. And so it may actually close off opportunities, whether it be in the private sector, or in future political career outside of Magga, may close off those opportunities. So you're now you're like, stuck, so you're stuck. Right? Right. So So neither Trump may not believe it in northern elites believe it, but they've repeated it, that now the only way for these people to have power and, you know, in a dictatorship, where this sort of this it reaches its peak, is that people actually don't have economic opportunities outside the party. And so the more that they've repeated this, it reduces those other opportunities. And so they have no choice in the end, but to remain loyal, because that's their best sort of economic outcome, their power outcome or whatever it is that they care about. The outcome that's that is with that party, right. And because by repeating the falsehoods, they have actually demonstrated that they you know, it reduces their option it was we call the outside option, their ability to dive amass power, or amass wealth or have a job and a well-paying job and prestige.

Michael Berkman
I'm thinking of the sort of efforts that Trump and many of the Republicans are making to redefine the January 6, yeah, people as hostages, patriots, peaceful protesters, all kinds of that that in itself seems to me like a kind of way of redefining what political violence is that this kind is maybe acceptable.

Joe Wright
There's a strong finding that we have from dictatorships, that when dictatorial governments control lots of information, state on media, these kinds of things, they don't newspapers, they're very, very good at selective attribution. And then what does that mean? So it's if there's bad economic news, they don't deny that the economy isn't doing so well. But rather they attribute that to someone, not them external forces that are causing the economy to go down badly. However, when the economy's doing well, well, then yes, it was all my doing. I did. So selective attribution. And that's a way of sort of saying, Okay, we're not going to deny the world as it is out there. We're going to help you interpret what that means. And I think that's what goes on with this. We're not going to say that January 6, that didn't happen. Right? I'm not going to deny that that actually happened. Because we can see the pictures right, we can see people assaulting police officers, so they don't deny that happen. But they then reinterpret what that means. Right? And it could be that that, oh, it was just a few bad apples. Oh, they were plants by the other side that actually committed the violence. The rest of them were innocent, but they're being caught up in some sort of political witch hunt, right? That's how you interpret that evidence. But they're denying that saying, you know, what, that photo or the TV, the TV footage that I watched live, as it was happening on January 6, like that didn't actually happen. Like they're not doing that kind of denial yet, but they are reinterpreting the evidence and elites then mimic that and that becomes the narrative by which other people interpret what that means that that historical event, right?

Michael Berkman
Well, let's dig deeper, a little bit. deeper into the Republican Party. And so your study is a quantitative study lots of data. And as you mentioned earlier, you want to capture the notion of a personal party or or a programmatic party, sort of before the leader takes power. And so I'm thinking that the the Republican Party that Donald Trump took over in 2016, is going to be different than the political party he's using in this election, would you would you agree with that the party has become more personal. I mean, I'm looking at things like the fact that his daughter in law is now in charge of the RNC. And we can get much more personal than that. And in fact that they basically fired everybody and then rehired them back after kind of loyalty pledges to Trump, the head of the Republican Party in Arizona right now, and because I think it's, you know, the American political parties are very decentralized, relative, I think, to a lot of other political parties. So we have these very strong state parties as well as the National Party. But you're seeing these kinds of changes in the state parties as well. So for example, the head of the Arizona Republican Party, where they're about to have all kinds of things going on in Arizona, was the director of Election Day integrity operations in Arizona for Trump and ran a nonprofit group that basically search through voting records. So she's coming directly out of this kind of denialism framework and loyalty to so just to talk a little bit about how this Republican Party that Trump is using now has feigned

Joe Wright
I think that's, that's important. And it's changed in ways that I think are resonant with what some of the things we show in our in our book, and in particular, we've we find strong evidence across the globe, that personalized parties or parties also that are coincide with parties where there's actually a weak local branches, that is the the dissent or the power of the local authority entity is relatively weak. Okay. And that's gonna be true of these parties, where a leader just creates their own party for an election before an election. And it can take time to to actually get local branches in place. And when they do they end up placing loyalists in those in those positions. In 2020, you know, the, the the, I like to tell my students this, that it was the Republican Party that saved democracy in the United States, right. To me, it was very clear that Donald Trump wanted to undermine democracy by basically figuring out a way to stay in power when he knew he lost his associates. That election basically, eventually told him he had lost Yep. And then from there, there's pursued a series of things and got a couple of people to help them do this stuff, to try to to change votes to try to overturn the vote counting in jail, which was January 6. So he clearly proceeded. And who were the people that stopped them? Yep. Ultimately, the people were stopped. Were not the Democrats. Right? It wasn't necessarily even much in the way of the Justice Party. It was other elites in the Republican Party. So actually, I think you'll know the details of this much better. But there was somebody injustice, I think that's affected and said, No, I'm not going to do what you want me to do. But more importantly, at the local level, right, the folks that saved democracy in places like Arizona, and in Georgia, and I think Michigan was another example. We talked about our book, where it was local Republican leaders who said, No, we are not going to change the vote count, to give Trump more votes and swing the state towards him when we know that he lost. Right. And so that was a crucial wasn't Democrats that were saying, Stop, stop this the shenanigans it was the Republican elites in those local areas that said no to Trump has stood up to him. And then ultimately, January 6, the person who stood up to him was the ultimate elite, which was his vice president. Yep. Right. And so you've got these key players in the Republican Party in 2020, at both of the local level, but even at the very, very pinnacle of the Republican Party outside of Trump in the vice presidents who eventually said, no, no, we will support your policies, we will condone language that you use that as offensive, but we will not undermine democracy will not let you steal this election.

Michael Berkman
So where do we direct our attention? I mean, I read your book and think a lot of it is that oh, actually, having programmatic, strong political parties is a very good thing for democracy. So we should try to strengthen political parties, but not quite sure what that means in real terms, as opposed to sort of abstract but what do you think? I mean, is it focusing on norms polarization, political parties?

Joe Wright

So there's a lot of work on sort of trying to change the beliefs or attitudes of individuals and that may work may not I mean, that there's not a ton that I've seen of strong evidence that informational interventions that is providing different or counter inform nation we'll change people's minds in the long run.

Michael Berkman
That's why I really liked the notion of epistemological polarization, you just can't get through in a way that communicates a different set of facts. And yeah, sort of different reality. But But go ahead.

Joe Wright
I was just actually yesterday looking at some was a reporter a study that the big takeaway from from lots of informational experiments was that if you basically give information to people that they their political opponents, the individuals who they consider to be their political opponents are actually not such bad people, then you can temporarily reduce sort of effect of polarization. But that has very sort of little impact in long run, because we're just sort of inundated with this larger information environment that sort of says, the other team is really bad. Yep. And so I'm, I'm skeptical that there's sort of there's the solution is just to change the information environment. And what our book is, I think, if there's one takeaway is that it is important to think about democracy being upheld by the elites in the ruling party, and what are the incentives that those elites have for standing up to the leader when the leader decides I'm going to undermine democracy? And are the ways that we can shape those incentives that give them access to power to resources that aren't dependent on the actual leader of the party? That is can they have? Can the parties have some sort of resource that's collectively controlled by elites within the party that is distinct that they can use to stand up to the leader in that in that party? And know one of the questions I have is like, Will primary voters if you want vertical accountability, will primary voters vote for people who aren't just going to be loyalists? And that's a tough question in the United States. And that's one of the processes by which we see this personalization of the Republican Party happen.

Michael Berkman
Just to pick up a little bit on what you're saying about American politics, a lot of our listeners, talk to us about different kinds of reforms that rank choice voting, ways that we might get to multi party systems, multi member districts, whatever, whatever that might take. Do you see particular political reforms? That would be particularly helpful?

Joe Wright
Yeah. So on the one hand, I can see where, you know, rank choice voting, you would have probably done in Trump from the get go, or certain sort of approval voting, where he was the first choice amongst a minority,

Michael Berkman

But not a second choice among anyone. Right. Okay.

Joe Wright
So I could see where that and one of the questions when you look at this, broadly across the whole globe is, is well, we see personalist parties arise in certain kind of electoral rules, that structure, you know, that are multi party systems versus these two party systems like the United States, which is ultimately about the electricals that they develop there as well. Yeah. And so we see him all over the world. And so there doesn't seem to be strong evidence that it's a particular kind of political rules that are giving rise to these things in the first place, even though, you know, you can do the backward logic in the US case and say, well, provable voting probably would have done in Trump from the beginning. Instead, what we find it you know, the natural question is what, why did these things arise in the first place, and there are two two sort of things that we linked to one is, we do see a rising trend in programmatic pa parties just falling apart, or declining, both share programmatic parties over time, and that is sort of giving a window of opportunity, if you will, for these parties to sort of gain an electoral advantage. You know, these things were happening, lots of places that just didn't win in lots of places, until you see the sort of the electoral decline of programmatic parties in an animal in a lot of democracies. But the second factor, which is sort of structural and maybe the listeners may be keen on is that we do find some evidence that countries where political campaigns are more likely to be financed publicly with that, as with tax dollars, where parties are able to access that tax, those tax dollars, that avenue of financing party actually is less likely to lead to personal parties arising in part because a lot of the personals parties arise, because the leader of the party has access to a ton of money, maybe because they're super rich, maybe because there's a super rich person behind them. Maybe it's because they're their own media company, but they have some sort of resource that sort of lets them replace the political party, a traditional programmatic party with lots of good local branches to help them get votes out and stuff like that. So, campaign finance reform that sort of equalizes the playing field in terms of financing campaigns may may be helpful.

Michael Berkman
And does your study pick up what happens with personalist parties say after the leader is gone? Do they come back?

Joe Wright
We haven't seen this, we haven't studied this systematically. So I'll just speculate rather than give you anything informed by evidence, typically, typically, you know, anecdotally they actually just disappear. Now that doesn't mean that the the some of their children or leaders, family members, don't try to pick up the the, pick up the crumbs and try to reconstitute it at some point. But they, you know, plenty of these things, plenty of these parties, once they gain power, they actually lose power in elections and ultimately end up biting by election losses that just happened in Senegal recently, actually, this year. And, and so we'll see what happens right in a place like that will the party that that leader had created be able to reconstitute itself and start to win elections, and that part of the reason they aren't so good at that is because they tend not to have real strong local branches in the first place. And so as those local branches sort of get less and less powerful, then it is less and less likely that the bill to reconstitute themselves when they lose power. And that's actually a really bad thing for democracy. Because then they say, I can't lose power, and then went back another day. And when you get political elites and political parties who think that this is my only chance at power, and I can't lose and win another day, then they have huge incentives to cling to power no matter what.

Michael Berkman
I'm glad you say that, because one of the ways that we really think about democracy is that parties lose, as we said before, but then they come back to play another game. Yeah. And and that's what you kind of lose. That's a I think, a terrific place to stop. We talked for a long time. I really appreciate it, Joe. Yep. Thank you for joining us on democracy works. Good luck with the book. For Democracy Works, I'm Michael Berkman. Thank you for listening.

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