Is Populism a Threat Or a Chance for Democracy?

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Is Populism a Threat or a Chance for Democracy?

Paper for the workshop

“The state and future of representative democracy—a comparative perspective” at Villa Vigoni

Michael Zürn, Director at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and Director of the Cluster of Ex- cellence “Contestations of the Liberal Script”, [email protected]

Is populism a threat to democracy? Is populism a reason for anxieties about democracy? Or is the rise of populism a source of democratization, since it gives anxieties about the future a voice? In the self- description of leaders of contemporary populist parties, the response to the latter question is to the positive. For instance, Alexander Gauland, co-chair of the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AFD), has recently argued against the dominance of a globalized elite and portrayed the AFD as the real representative of the German people competing democratically in elections.1 In his view, AFD supporters are democrats fighting against the impositions on national sovereignty by cosmopolitan elites. Indeed, populists base their influence on electoral success. In many democracies in Western Europe, the so-called radical right-wing populist parties (RRPPs) receive fifteen to twenty-five percent of the vote share—such as the AFD in Germany, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti, DF), Party for Freedom (Partij voor de Vrijheid, PVV) in the Netherlands, the National Rally (Rassemble- ment National) in France, and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Some populists have even made it into government either as chief executives by capturing a mainstream party (as in the United States [US]) or as part of a coalition government—such as the Swiss People’s Party (Schweizer- ische Volkspartei, SVP), the Northern League (Lega Nord) in Italy, and, only recently, the Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ). Populists outside of Western Europe are more often in power, but even then, they still maintain elections that are open for opposition parties—names like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Narendra Modi in India, or Vladimir Putin in Russia come to mind. In any case, populists display significant electoral support, and their power stems from the electorate.

As Christoph Möllers (2017, 8) states, “[t]he election of authoritarian figures is not per se undemo- cratic.”2 The appeal of many populists is to bring the normal people and silent majorities back into power and to challenge those liberal elites who do not care about the “ordinary (white) man on the street.” Wolfgang Merkel (2017) likes to speak of a “representation gap,”3 pointing to the fact that many supporters of populist parties feel excluded from the political process. Similarly, Peter Ucen even sees the “parties of new populism” as “non-radical challengers mobilizing disappointed electorates against under-performing and morally failing established parties.”4 Along the same lines, Hanspeter Kriesi sees populism as a “productive force that serves as the catalyst for a profound realignment of the West European party systems—a realignment that brings West European party systems more in line with the transformed conflict structures of West European societies.”5 From this perspective, it appears that the populist challenge revives democracies; voter turnout increases and the political confrontation is back. Chantal Mouffe even demands a leftist populism to revive democracies. She considers the current political phase as a “populist moment” in which the neo-liberal “hegemony is being destabilized by the multiplication of unsatisfied demands.”6 She continues as follows:

To stop the rise of right-wing populist parties, it is necessary to design a properly political answer through a left populist movement that will federate all the democratic struggles against post- democracy. Instead of excluding a priori the voters of right-wing populist parties as necessarily

1 Gauland 2018. 2 Möllers 2017, 8. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3 Merkel 2017. 4 Učeň 2007, 54. 5 Kriesi 2014, 361–62. 6 Mouffe 2018, 7. 1

moved by atavistic passions, condemning them to remain prisoners of those passions forever, it is necessary to recognize the democratic nucleus at the origin of many of their demands.7

Others are less optimistic about the effects of populism. They see populists as endangering democracy. Jan-Werner Müller pointed to an anti-pluralist understanding of populism. In this view, “[p]opulism … is a very particular political concept, according to which morally pure and homogeneous people always stand in opposition to immoral, corrupt, and parasitic elites, although these types of elites do not actually belong to the people.”8 He argues that such a view of politics undermines democracy. Many representatives of the mainstream parties also see authoritarian populists as a challenge to liberal democracy. Even the President of the Federal Republic of Germany expresses concerns about the threats to democracy caused by authoritarian populists.9 Against this background, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser and Cas Mudde point to a third position. They see the “populist Zeitgeist”10 as a two-edged sword.11 On the one hand, they share the view that populist parties tackle issues neglected in liberal democratic political systems of our days. In this sense, they have democratic potential. On the other hand, they also see that populists aim at undermining the liberal pillars of modern democracies. Taken together, they seem to share the self-description of some populists as illiberal democrats: “In essence, populism is not against democracy; rather it is at odds with liberal democracy.”12 In this contribution, I want to address this debate by asking whether contemporary populism is part of the democratic process or endangers democracies in Europe and beyond.

The answer to a question that contains two contested terms depends on the conceptualization of these two terms. In this essay, I first discuss the meaning and institutions of democracy by sketching an understanding of democracy that is widely shared. In the second section, I then go on to discuss the concept of populism. While I concur with the ideational approach of populism, I challenge the notion of populism as a thin ideology that needs a host to be effective, and consider authoritarian populism as a regular ideology. In this view, socially relevant ideologies are co-constituted by social cleavages. Authoritarian populism then represents one side of the globalization cleavage. Based on these concep- tualizations, I argue in the third section that a change in the working of democracy may indeed be causally relevant to the rise of populism. In this sense, populists may serve as a pre-warning indicator to re-think democratic institutions and processes in the age of globalization. Yet the rise of authoritarian populism as such is a danger for democracy. It aims at and has already led to a weakening and decline of liberal democracies. Most importantly, authoritarian populists are most successful in revers- ing Woodrow Wilson’s political agenda of making the world safe for democracies. Authoritarian populists are quite successful in weakening the liberal international order, which was conducive and necessary for the success in the consolidation of democracies. I aim at demonstrating that the effect of authoritarian populism on democracy so far has been clearly negative.

7 Mouffe 2018, 14. 8 Müller 2016, 42. 9 For instance, The German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has voiced this concern in a number of speeches very eloquently. See e.g. Fritz Stern Lecture in March 2019, “Geht der Demokratie die Vernunft aus?” at the American Academy, Berlin, or his keynote at the 27th Wissenschaftlicher Kongress der Deutschen Vereinigung für Politikwissenschaft in Frankfurt a.M. 10 Mudde 2004. 11 Kaltwasser and Mudde 2015, chap 5. 12 Kaltwasser and Mudde 2015, 95. 2

1. On Democracy in a Global Age

According to the late David Held, “persons . . . should be free and equal in the determination of the conditions of their own lives, so long as they do not employ this framework to negate the rights of others.”13 Based on this principle of autonomy or self-determination, democracy is a process of public will-formation and decision-making in which everyone object to such a decision has the same opportunity to participate freely and equally. At the same time, democracy needs to produce normatively justifiable decisions (no negation of basic rights). Such a double anchoring rejects both purely republican understandings of democracy that focus on the decision-making process only as well as purely liberal interpretations that regard individual rights as pre-given to the democratic process. This view considers autonomous individuals with the capacity to govern themselves and the democratic process as mutually constitutive, and thus is in line with the idea of co-originality of rights and democracy14 as well as with the notion of democracy as absence of domination.15 The democratic process thus consists of two principles.16 The affectedness principle states that all the persons affected by a decision should have a say in the making of this decision. The deliberative principle requires that all decisions are justified by arguments referring to common goals.17

The deliberative principle conceives the democratic process as more than just the aggregation of interests. All majoritarian aggregation rules imply the danger that some given interest coalition in society prevails, which aims at decisions that imply a violation of the rights of others. According to the deliberative principle, decisions, therefore, must be justified with reference to common goods as well as rationality and impartiality.18 The affectedness principle, on the other hand, is normatively sound but is seen by many as too idealistic, who instead emphasize the community principle.19 The affectedness principle is criticized for the difficulty in assessing the degree of affectedness needed and for the need to redraw political borders with each decision anew. These are valid but practical objections. The critique of the community principle is more principled, however. The community principle potentially disempowers people who are affected by the externalities of the decisions by a community to which they do not belong.

Against this predicament,20 I will pursue a Dahlian approach and take the affectedness principle as the normative underpinning, and the community principle as the heuristic to approach the affectedness principle.21 While the affectedness principle pushes towards large communities, the deliberative principle limits this tendency by emphasizing the need for a demos or a public sphere, i.e., a group of people who consider themselves a community and are willing and able to communicate with each other about common goals and measures to achieve them. The appropriate spatial balance then depends on technological and social developments. According to Robert Dahl, the development of new means of communication and the rise of nationalism led to a spatial reconfiguration of democracy in

13 Held 1995, 147. 14 Habermas 1992. 15 Keane 2009. 16 Zürn 2000, 186. 17 Forst 2011. 18 Elster 1998, 8; Schmalz-Bruns 1995. 19 Johan K. Schaffer 2012. 20 See Merkel and Zürn 2019 for a discussion of the two perspectives. 21 Dahl 1989, chaps 2 and 9. 3 the 18th century. It is only then that the nation became the space for organizing democracy and allow- ing for collectively binding decisions. In this view, a national political system is to be considered democratic if it fulfills four conditions.22

 Effective participation: According to this criterion, citizens should have an adequate and equal opportunity for expressing their preferences and reasons.  Voting equality at the decisive stage: Each citizen must be ensured to have an equal voice in the final decision, be it direct (via referendum) or indirect (equal representation).  Enlightened understanding: Each citizen should have adequate and equal opportunities for evaluating the matter at hand.  Control of the agenda: The people should have the final say about the agenda of matters that are to be decided by means of the democratic process.

Robert Dahl’s Democracy and Its Critics was published in 1989, arguably just at the beginning of another spatial revolution. Up to this period, it was possible to think about national political communities sustained by dense within-border interactions and marginal across-borders interactions.23 These communities stood in a mutually constitutive relationship to the nation-state and thus are an expression of the national constellation.24 If globalization is defined as the extension of social spaces—which are constituted by dense societal transactions—beyond national borders, it inevitably leads to a loosening of congruence between political and social spaces, and thus to a weakening of the national constellation. The loosening of congruence leads, on the one hand, to a democratic input problem. If the extent to which people outside a political community are affected by the decisions of a political community increases, the affectedness principle gets more and more violated. On the other hand, the globalization of social spaces decreases—on the output side—the effectiveness of many national measures. The solution to some environmental problems, problems of tax evasion, the regulation of financial markets, and many other issues require governance beyond the nation-state to be effective. Dahl’s four principles of the democratic process thus need to be supplemented by two additional criteria.

 Accounting for externalities: In issue areas in which externalities of the national decision are large or where effective governance requires the cooperation of many political communities, international institutions become a democratic necessity.  Democratic control of international authorities: To the extent that international institutions include decision-making procedures that go beyond the consensus of all member communities, these institutions need to be democratized in line with the first four criteria.

With these six criteria in mind, I will now take a closer look at the potential and dangers of contemporary populism for the democratic process. The understanding of the democratic process developed in this section is broad and inclusive so that the analysis of contemporary populism’s impact on democracy does not depend on a very specific definition of democracy. At the same time, this understanding of the democratic process still excludes some theories of democracy for which the following analysis thus may not apply. In any case, the six criteria of the democratic process make the analyzed effects of contemporary populism on democracy transparent.

22 Dahl 1989, 109–12. 23 Deutsch 1969. 24 Habermas 1998. 4

2. On Contemporary Populism

In 1954, the US sociologist Edward Shils proposed to use the term populism as a description of anti- elite trends in the US more broadly.25 Populism then became important as a concept to grasp a certain type of social movement and exercise of power as it emerged in Latin America from the late 1930s on and lasted until the end of the 1960s. In various countries, politicians took power while emphasizing “the will of the people,” which include Getúlio Vargas in Brazil and Juan Perón in Argentina. They stressed a common identity across Latin America and denounced any interference from imperialist powers, especially the US and the allied elites in the country.26 In the 1980s, leaders such as Carlos Menem in Argentina, Fernando Collor in Brazil, and Alberto Fujimori in Peru were considered to stand in this tradition but implemented neo-liberal policies in close coalition with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the second half of the 1990s, the third wave of populist movements emerged in Latin America, although this time alongside an explicitly socialist program that opposed the free markets and challenged the role of the US in the region. Prominent examples included Hugo Chávez in Vene- zuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. In between the second and the third movements in Latin America, the first electoral successes of right-wing populist parties led by charismatic persons such as Jörg Haider and Pim Fortuyn took place in Western Europe, and the anti-elitist protest in the US grew strongly symbolized by people like Ross Perot. From then on, movements and parties criticizing liberal elites gained momentum and achieved significant successes in most elections around the world.

The concept of populism offered a conceptual tool to analyze these movements and parties. Against the background of the Latin American experience, the political-strategic understanding of populism was dominant for some time. In this view, populism is defined “as a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, and un-insti- tutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers.”27 With the rise of populist parties in Western Europe, the ideational approach gained momentum in the study of populism. In this view, populism is “defined as a set of ideas.”28 In this ideational view, populism is more than only a strategy that emphasizes the short-term interests of the people on the street, but also the instrumental abuse of simple narratives to achieve and maintain power. Populism, in this view, is bound to a substantial political vision.

There are different versions of capturing the ideational base of populism. Most fundamentally, it represents the idea that ordinary people should determine their destiny and are capable of doing so. This idea is common to all movements usually described as populism, including early American beliefs in grassroots democracy, notions of Basisdemokratie as in early Green parties, and anti-elitist tirades against corrupt elites in Washington and Brussels, as well as anti-imperialist rejections of interference from foreign powers and international institutions. This conception is important to understand some of the intellectual roots of contemporary populism. It is, however, too broad to capture the specifics

25 Allcock 1971. 26 Kaltwasser and Mudde 2017, 27–31. 27 Weyland 2017, 50. 28 Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018, 3; Mudde 2004; Müller 2016. 5 of contemporary populism. It has been shown that such a broad definition of populist beliefs does not correlate with the choice of contemporary RRPPs.29

Against this background, Cas Mudde’s definition of populism became the dominant one in studying contemporary populism. He defines populism as “an ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogenous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people.”30 This emphasis on anti-elitism and popular sovereignty, however, is considered as a thin ideology, i.e., a specific set of ideas that is distinct from thick ideologies such as fascism and liberalism, because it has limited programmatic scope—it is a belief system of limited range.31 Because populism is a thin ideology, so the argument goes, populism can host “real ideologies” and thus we can distinguish between left-wing populism and right-wing populism. In this way, it is possible to put different movements such as RRPPs in Western Europe, the socialist authoritarianism of Chávez and Maduro, leftist parties in Southern Europe positioning themselves against neo-liberal policies imposed by international institutions, and American-style neo-protectionism into one box. The move allowed for a distinction between potentially democratic leftist movements and atavistic right-wing populism.32

While I follow the ideational approach and consider populism as more than just a political strategy of leaders independent of their underlying political vision, I want to challenge the notion of “thin ideology” that focuses mainly on the division between the “the pure people” versus the “corrupt elite” for three reasons. The first one points to the underspecification of the concept. The definition produces too many “false positives,” such as the revolutionary movement in the late German Democratic Re- public (GDR), which stated “Wir sind das Volk,” or the movement that led to the overhaul of the Mu- barak regime in Egypt. Second, the notion of thin ideology distorts the meaning of anti-elitism in populism. The claim to empower “the people” is most often translated into a demand for delegating the power to a leader or the leaders of the populist party.33 An election poster for Heinz-Christian Strache, once the leader of the FPÖ, has unmistakably stated this: “HE wants, what WE want” (“ER will, was WIR wollen”).34

Moreover, the thin ideology concept implicitly considers it as more important whether a party is on the left or on the right than if it is populist or non-populist. As Mudde and Kaltwasser put it, in the cases of right-wing and left-wing populism, the thin ideology of populism is “attached to other ideo- logical elements, which are crucial for the promotion of political projects that are appealing to the broader public.”35 The labels of right-wing and left-wing populism thus posit both types of populist movements on the traditional right versus left axis. This move neglects that the political space has become two-dimensional deriving from the two dominant social cleavages in our times.36

I question the distinction between thin and thick ideologies by taking a cleavage perspective and lo- cating contemporary populism within a two-dimensional political space. From a cleavage perspective, no ideology speaks to all conceivable issues and questions, but ideologies are a response to the urgent

29 Iakhnis et al. 2018. 30 Mudde 2004, 543. 31 Freeden 2003. 32 Mouffe 2018; Koch 2019. 33 Weyland 2017, 53. 34 See Müller 2016, 42. 35 Mudde and Kaltwasser 2018, 3. Emphasis added. 36 Kriesi et al. 2008; Kriesi et al. 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2017; de Wilde et al.2019. 6 issues of the era and developed in interaction with opposing ideologies. In this perspective, the ideational side of a cleavage is part and parcel of a broader ideational environment consisting of competing ideologies. Therefore, no ideology speaks to all issues at all times. An ideology counts as fully developed (or thick) as long as it develops a narrative that binds together the issues relevant for a given cleavage, i.e., all the issues that are contested and tackled by competing ideologies.37 This perspective does not exclude that some of these ideologies develop further over time, become dominant in society, and adapt over time to new social challenges and contestations. In this sense, the liberal ideology that emerged in contrast to absolutism in the 19th century evolved into a liberal script as a dominant “set of ideas and institutional prescriptions about the organization of society” that then “includes cultural norms, ethical values, instrumental reasons, institutions, cultural routines, and habits.”38

Cleavage theory, in general, apprehends the history of modern Europe as a sequence of four social cleavages, each of which caused by a social revolution.39 In this perspective, cleavages are triggered by social revolutions that create socio-structural divisions. In the case of the new cleavage, the underlying social revolution is globalization. While the cleavage between capital and labor produced by the industrial revolution has dominated politics in the 20th century by producing a left versus right cleavage, the latest thrust in globalization from the mid-1980s on has produced a new cleavage. The rise of authoritarian populism, therefore, is anchored in a new societal contradiction as it is captured by cleavage theory. The new cleavage can be labelled GAL versus TAN,40 demarcationist versus integrationist,41 or cosmopolitan versus communitarian.42 The new cleavage divides societies into two positions regarding issues like globalization, the role of borders, and popular sovereignty. Together with the older cleavage regarding the relative role of markets and the state, it leads to a two-dimensional political space.43

If we consider contemporary populism as consisting of those groups that represent one side in the new globalization cleavage, it can be labeled “authoritarian populism.” Authoritarian populism, despite all its limitations in terms of both consistency and scope, then is an ideology of its own. It is a political ideology that can be described as majoritarian and nationalist directed against liberal cosmopolitan elites.44 It is majoritarian by pitting a homogenous will of the majority against liberal rights, tolerance, and pluralist will formation; and is nationalist by pitting the significance of borders and the national will against an open world society with strong international institutions. These beliefs are bundled in the construction of a firm antagonism between the corrupt and distant cosmopolitan elites and the decent and community-based local people. Contemporary populists thus have an authoritarian bend. They are “anti-liberal” in the sense that they question individual and especially minority rights. They question the “rights of others” to limit the “rights of the majority.” They are “anti-internationalist”

37 Mair 2006. 38 Börzel and Zürn 2020. 39 Lipset 1960; Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rokkan et. al. 1999. 40 Marks et al. 2002. The acronym stands for Green, Alternative, Liberal (GAL) versus Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist (TAN). 41 Kriesi et al. 2008. 42 de Wilde et al. 2019. 43 As opposed to a widespread convention going back to Inglehart’s notion of post-materialism, I do not label the two axis as “economic” (left versus right) and “cultural” (authoritarian versus liberal). There is no question that the second, more recent dimension is closely associated to globalization, and it pits the cultural, political, and economic losers and winners of globalization against each other. At the same time, being right or left is more than just an economic issue; it also contains cultural and political meanings. 44 This is close to the definition of Caramani (2017) as well as of Steiner and Landwehr (2017), which describes contemporary populism as consisting of majoritarianism, unintermediateness, and anti-pluralism. 7 since they unconditionally support national sovereignty and the rejection of any political authority beyond national borders, in spite of significant externalities and deep interdependencies. Authoritarian populism also is “anti-pluralist” in the sense that it usually contains a de-proceduralized and thus homogeneous notion of the majority. There is most often a reference to the silent majority—to those who, according to Richard Nixon,45 do not express their opinions publicly. The collective will is known without public debates and without procedures for assessing it. Authoritarian populism is thus defined by anti-liberalism, anti-internationalism, and anti-pluralism bound together by pitting the pure people against a corrupt cosmopolitan elite that belies the “natives.” It is these authoritarian-populist movements that grow epidemically across the globe in all electoral political systems.

In more concrete terms, the new juxtaposition can be described as one between liberal cosmopolitans and authoritarian populists as a nationalist version of communitarian thinking.46 Authoritarian populism is then the ideology of the “somewhere” developed against the liberal cosmopolitan ideology of the “nowhere.”47 Liberal cosmopolitans advocate open borders and a transfer of public authority to the regional or global level to combat regional or global problems—e.g., climate change or uncon- trolled financial markets—effectively.48 In this view, individual and minority rights are seen as universal and prior to the decisions taken by local majorities. Authoritarian populists, on the other hand, emphasize the constitutive role of communities and identities for the development of social attitudes. In this view, both distributional justice and democracy depend on the social context that most often are territorially delimited. Borders thus are seen as meaningful and even constitutive for justice. At the same time, any transfer of authority to supranational institutions is viewed with skepticism. The costs for democratic self-determination at lower levels are emphasized, and authoritarian populists are therefore critical of international institutions and regional integration processes. Finally, authoritarian populists tend to subsume minority rights—and even sometimes individuals’ rights—under the will of the majority.

It is, of course, still possible to distinguish leftist and rightist versions of authoritarian populism. While the former is above all directed against open borders and global markets, the latter focuses mainly on the exclusion of people who are not members of the imagined community. In practice, the distinction seems to blur over time, however. Some of the so-called right-wing populist parties, such as the the National Rally led by Marine Le Pen, have—in economic terms—by now established an agenda that is protectionist and state-interventionist, which puts them rather on the left side of the class cleavage. At the same time, the Unsubmissive France (La France insoumise), led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a so- called left-wing populist, comes across almost as much nationalist and anti-liberal as Le Pen. Indeed, the recent uprising in France by the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) has shown how smoothly these two movements merged. At the same time, it is doubtful that parties in Southern Europe—also labeled left-wing populists by many analysts, such as Podemos in Spain or the Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) in Greece—(still) belong to the camp of authoritarian populists. These parties evolved against the background of extreme austerity policies and, when it came to stepping up the plate, both turned

45 He invoked the term “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” in his television “Address to the Na- tion on the War on Vietnam” on November 3, 1969 (see: http://watergate.info/1969/11/03/nixons-silent-majority-speech.html). 46 Zürn and de Wilde 2016. 47 Goodhart 2017. 48 de Wilde et al. 2019. 8 out to be much more liberal and much more internationalist than most contemporary populists.49 The inclusion of so-called left-wing populist parties such as Syriza and Podemos—even though they show no signs of an authoritarian vision of society—is therefore rejected by an understanding of populism as authoritarian.50

Many party systems in consolidated democracies—stable liberal democratic institutions since World War II with meaningful checks and balances—nowadays are described by referring to such a two-dimensional space.51 Green parties and authoritarian populist parties represent the spearheads of the new dimension. Most but not all of the political parties taking an authoritarian stance are right-wing populist parties. There also some self-proclaimed leftist parties and movements which display the features of authoritarian populism. Most of the far-left parties in the northern parts of Europe, such as The Left (Die Linke) in Germany, seem to be divided between the new leftists, who reject most ideas of majoritarianism and nationalism but stand for a redistributive political program, and a version of authoritarian populists that are especially critical of globalization and open borders in general. In many Western European party systems, the new divide also cuts through the programs, policies, member- ships, and electorates of catch-all parties. It is especially the center-right (Christian Democrats) and the center-left (Social Democrats) that need to handle this tension. While these parties are relatively split along these issues, the exact distribution of power within these parties varies. Whereas liberal cosmopolitans dominate the conservatives in Scandinavia and Germany, the side inspired by nationalist communitarianism plays a larger role in the British Conservative Party and the US Republican Party, for instance. The social-democratic catch-all parties (center-left) seem to be especially affected by the divide because their programs traditionally have both strongly cosmopolitan (internationalist) and strongly communitarian (“people’s home”) roots. Except for the US, authoritarian populism in consolidated democracies is either in opposition or the junior partner in a coalition government.

A look at the TIMBRO populism index in Europe is useful to capture these developments. TIMBRO includes 267 parties who put forward ideas that can be described as “authoritarian populist” such as “the lack of respect for division of powers and minority rights; the impatience with democratic procedures; and the alarming perspective on politics as a conflict between a homogenous people and a corrupt elite.”52 According to this data, the average voter support per country is at 22.2 percent. “If the average is based on 264 million European voters as a whole, instead of being divided among the 33 countries53 that are included in the study, the average moves up to 26.8 percent.”54

49 There seems to be a common impulse to avoid putting Syriza and Podemos into the same drawer as the PVV in the Netherlands and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, or even Orbán’s Hungarian Civic Alliance (Fidesz). While Mudde and Kaltwasser achieve this goal by setting up a secondary distinction between host ideologies, Syrize and Podemos do not fit my definition of authoritarian populism in the first place. 50 Manow (2018) also used the distinction between right-wing and left-wing populism. He has identified the left-wing populism as specifically located in Southern Europe due to the specific challenges inscribed in the political economy of these countries. These are different from the challenges inscribed in the political economy in Northern Europe, which nurtures the rise of right-wing populism. The result of the elections to the European Parliament however casts significant doubt on this thesis. While right-wing populism grew further in Northern Europe, it also popped up strongly in Southern Europe parallel to a declining support for the so-called left-wing populist parties. Against this background, it makes more sense to consider parties like Podemos and Syriza as directed against the austerity policies after the financial crisis instead of a part of the populist tide. 51 Kriesi et al. 2008; Kriesi et al. 2012; Hooghe and Marks 2017. 52 Authoritarian Populism Index 2019, TIMBRO, 9. 53 The countries include the 28 members of the EU, plus Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Serbia, and Montenegro. 54 TIMBRO 2019, 6. 9

Figure 1: Average Share of Votes for Contemporary Populist Parties 1980–2018

Source: Authoritarian Populism Index 2019. TIMBRO, 2019.55

In addition, TIMBRO uses Mudde’s distinction between left-wing and right-wing populism. The electoral support for radical right-wing parties moved up constantly since the 1980s from a little more than one percent to about 16 percent in 2018. Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary, Krasnodębski’s Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS) in Poland are the strongest authoritarian-populist parties in Eu- rope. Left-wing parties declined from ten percent to about seven. There was a surge for the radical left after the financial crisis between 2009 and 2014. “The increase was driven mainly by the exceptional successes for left-wing populist parties in Greece, Italy, and Spain.” As pointed out before, I do not consider Syriza or Podemos as authoritarian populists. There are no signs of a generalized rejection of European or international institutions and also no indications of anti-liberal or anti-pluralist stance. While there are without question authoritarian populists who lean to the left regarding socio-economic policies, the share of these parties is in most places insignificant with possible exceptions in France and Italy. In any case, in Europe, authoritarian populist parties— but not other forms of radi- calism—rises epidemically.

This general picture does not change if we look beyond Europe at all those political systems that con- tain meaningful elections. In many of the more precarious electoral democracies—with regular elections, but an often weak separation of powers and significant instability—authoritarian populists are

55 This table includes both authoritarian populist parties and extremist parties. While the authoritarian populist parties have grown over the last 20 years (from about seven percent to slightly over 20 percent in average), extremist parties became weaker (going down from roughly three percent to two percent) (TIMBRO 2019, 30). 10 or were already in power: Putin in Russia, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Chávez and Maduro in Venezuela. While the pathway of taking power by these leaders varies enormously in these cases, all these authoritarian populist governments stand for a decidedly anti-liberal and anti-cosmopolitan program emphasizing popular sovereignty and the betraying of the interests of the nation to corrupt cosmopolitan elites. They all fulfill all criteria of authoritarian populism. A sample of 16 electoral democracies, selected on the basis of regular inclusion in the World Value Survey, shows the epidemic rise of authoritarianism on a global scale. The results point to the same development as the data referring to Europe cited above.

Figure 2: The Rise of Authoritarian Populist Parties in Sixteen Electoral Democracies

Source: Zürn 2020.

Three conclusions from this section need to be highlighted. First, authoritarian populism is a thick ideology. It provides the ideational foundation of a new cleavage between liberal cosmopolitanism and exclusive versions of communitarianism. Second, as a thick ideology, authoritarian populism does not depend on socialist or conservative host ideologies. While there are leftist or rightist versions of authoritarian populism, the core of these movements consists of nationalist majoritarianism. The common core allows the fusion of rightist and leftist versions as in a coalition government in Italy and or the Yellow Vests in France. Third, among all radical parties potentially critical of the political mainstream, it is authoritarian populist parties that have grown almost everywhere and in an almost epidemic way. They have a significant vote share in Western European party systems, they play the role of the coalition partner, and they control power in Hungary and Poland. The development is even more 11 accentuated in less consolidated electoral democracies beyond Europa. In both settings, authoritarian populism has spread. The question now is to what extent they weaken democratic processes or contribute to a revival of democratization processes.

3. Authoritarian Populism and the Democratic Process

Representatives of mainstream parties in consolidated democracies portray the populist challenge usually as a threat to democracy. They stress the undermining of reason and truth, as well as the anti- liberal goals of authoritarian populists. Yet, especially political scientists have argued that the democratic threat constituted by authoritarian populism may easily be overestimated. Some even see a democratic potential in the rise of authoritarian populism. In this view, populist parties bring back people that feel excluded in the political process and thus close a “representation gap” in consolidated democracies.56 Along this line, Kaltwasser and Mudde list some positive effects of populism on liberal democracies: They can give voice and mobilize people that do not feel represented by the political elite, and they can improve the responsiveness of the political system.57 A third positive effect may be the revival of contestation as a constitutive element of democracy. According to Ernesto Laclau58 and Chantal Mouffe59 democracy requires the open confrontation of political projects and cannot be reduced to a deliberative attempt to find a common way. Regarding the targeting of European and international institutions, it has also been argued that contestation and politicization can be a pre-req- uisite of democratization.60 Most of these positive effects point to unintended side effects of authoritarian populism. On the contrary, those who express democratic concerns about authoritarian populism often point to what authoritarian populists want and do. In the remainder, I, therefore, distinguish between indirect side effects of authoritarian populism for democracies and the direct effects of what authoritarian populists do.

Indirect Effects: Increased Responsiveness and Contestation

The argument that authoritarian populist parties give voice to people that do not feel represented in democratic political systems relies on the observation that their representativeness and responsiveness have declined in the last decades. In this view, the rise of authoritarian populism is due to deficits in the practices of democracies in our times. Indeed, the most important explanations of authoritarian populism point to deficits either in the economic, cultural, or political realm of globalized democracies.61

First, the economic insecurity perspective emphasizes the distributive consequences of economic globalization and post-industrial transformation.62 According to this view, it is growing inequality and the rise of precarious working situations that led to the rise of authoritarian populism. There can be little doubt that economic transformations in the age of globalization have, to some extent, affected the willingness to vote for authoritarian populists. It is especially older people with less education who are

56 Merkel 2017. 57 Kaltwasser and Mudde 2017, 83. 58 Laclau 2005. 59 Mouffe 2018. 60 Zürn 2014; Deitelhoff and Zimmermann 2019. 61 Inglehart and Norris 2017; Mudde 2007; Mudde and Kaltwasser 2012; Lengfeld and Dilger 2018; Taggart 2004; Van Kessel 2015; Wodak et al. 2013. 62 Eichengreen 2018; Gilens and Page 2014; Manow 2018; Mouffe 2018; Elsässer et al. 2018. 12 negatively affected by the globalization and digitalization that vote for authoritarian populists in consolidated democracies.63 While it has always been true that people with these features have a higher likelihood to vote for radical right-wing parties, the changed structure of the world economy explains why the number of people negatively affected has increased in consolidated democracies.64 On average, the degree of inequality in OECD countries has increased; especially the difference in wealth between major cities and the rural areas is much more accentuated than three decades ago.65

While the economic transformations and the rise of globalization’s losers in consolidated countries certainly contribute to an explanation of authoritarian populism, the success of authoritarian populism cannot be reduced to the economic realm. Some aspects of the rise of authoritarian populism remain puzzling from this perspective. For instance, the relationship between the losers of globalization and the political program of authoritarian populists is perplexing. Why do the losers of globalization support authoritarian populists instead of parties of the new left, who often promise social protection more clearly? If neoliberalism is the major enemy of communitarians, why vote for projects like Brexit or candidates like Donald Trump, both of whom are quite obviously increasing material inequalities within the societies? Another issue is the variation in the relative strength of authoritarian populism across countries. Why do we see little variation in the strength of authoritarian populism between Scandinavian countries with much less inequality and Anglo-Saxon countries with much more accentuated economic inequality?66 One may argue that it is not the level of inequality but the speed of change that leads to the strength of authoritarian populism. But then it is puzzling that in those exceptional countries with no or little change in the GINI index over the last two decades successes of authoritarian populists could be observed.67

Second, the cultural backlash perspective suggests that authoritarian populism is the result of a reaction against value changes indicated by terms like post-materialism, feminism, and multiculturalism that have spread across the world.68 In this view, the changed valorization of different cultural practices has led to a defensive response by those who stand for traditional values.69 Cosmopolitan elites contributed to the weakening of communitarian values of self-discipline and reduced the urge to be a decent member of the middle class in favor of individual self-realization and expressive identities. In this perspective, then, the rise of authoritarian populism is an expression of the feeling of cultural marginalization of those who do belong to the new culturally defined milieus.

Cultural explanations appear to account for a larger share of authoritarian populism than economic explanations.70 Yet, some questions remain if the cultural backlash explanation is to be followed. First of all, the empirical success of the thesis depends on the insertion of some attitudinal variables that are very close to the concept of authoritarian populism. Moreover, there is a certain danger in this explanation because it conflates cause and effect since cultural struggles often intensify after the rise of populist parties.71 Furthermore, this explanation does not account for the fact that international

63 See e.g. Hobolt 2016 for an analysis of Brexit voters, or Koopmans 2019 with respect to socio-economic features of communitarians. 64 Rogowksi 1989; Milanović 2016; Iverson and Soskice 2019. 65 Rogowksi 2019; Broz et al. 2019. 66 Piketty 2014. 67 OECD 2015. 68 Betz 1994; Fukuyama 2018; Hochschild 2016; Oesch 2013; Treib 2019. 69 Reckwitz 2017. 70 Inglehart and Norriss 2017. 71 Manow 2019. 13 institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the IMF are the common targets of all authoritarian populists even though neither of them is the spearhead of post-material thinking, femi- nist theory, or multiculturalism.

These objections finally lead to the political explanation of authoritarian populism. In this perspective, it is the political and institutional dynamics during the last decades that led to a relevant share of the population to see the political institutions in current day’s democracies as too detached and not ac- cessible to them.72 Accordingly, the rise of first cartel parties that weaken the representative functions parties73 and the non-majoritarian institutions (NMIs) on the national and the international level has locked in policies that are in line with liberal cosmopolitan thinking and has decreased the responsiveness to other demands.74 The perception that the political institutions responsible for these decisions are out of reach of the silent majority is, in this view, decisive for the rise of authoritarian populism. It is not the unfavorable policies alone that cause dissatisfaction; it is the perception that these policies cannot be altered within the “old system” that is decisive in instigating authoritarian populism.

While empirical studies have shown the importance of the political explanation, it also has its limitations. In any case, all three explanations point to a relevant part of the current dynamics and can to some extent explain variations. Together, they point to the demand side of authoritarian populism. Economic, cultural, and political developments have left some people behind and created a sense of a society in which they are not sufficiently represented and which is unresponsive to their demands. Authoritarian populists have utilized this diffused sense of exclusion and mobilized these groups.

Does this prove the thesis about the democratic potential of authoritarian populism? To be sure, it points to the possibility that authoritarian populists may be causally related to something that can be labeled democratization—an improved representation and responsiveness—in the long term. But it is only a potential, and in case the potential gets realized, it would take place indirectly via a reaction of other actors. The necessary changes thus depend on other actors than authoritarian populist parties. There are few signs that authoritarian populists are interested in creating an inclusive welfare state necessary to counter growing inequality. Authoritarian populists parties are interested in protecting the natives economically in more traditional occupations but show little interest in achieving a fairer distribution in society as a whole. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump are the best witnesses for this. Authoritarian populists also have not shown any interest in an open and self-reflective debate about lifestyles and culture in a denationalized society. The German AFD or the Austrian FPÖ illustrate this point vividly. They rather aim at a return of the hegemony of a traditional middle-class dominated society, the “nivellierte und formierte Mittelstandsgesellschaft,”75 including all its cultural connota- tions. Finally, they do not show any interest in democratizing modern multi-level and multi-institutional forms of governance, but they focus on the domination of the national executive via electoral victories to weaken all other democratic institutions. PiS in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary are good examples.

72 A set of important recent contributions point in this direction; see Elsässer et el. 2018; Giger, Bernauer & Rosset 2019; Storz and Bernauer 2018; Kaltwasser and van Hauwaert 2019; Singer 2018; Schäfer 2019. 73 Mair 2006. 74 Zürn 2018 and 2020. 75 Schelsky (1953) has coined the term to label the society in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. It is mainly read as a statement about the absence of class conflict, but it also points strongly to a homogenized normaliza- tion culture, as clearly expressed by the term “formed society” coined by the short-term chancellor Ludwig Ehrhardt. Also see Reckwitz 2019. 14

Against this background, it is clear that the democratization potential is not a feature of authoritarian populist parties. It is a possible (but far from certain) outcome of an interactive process. If these democratizing outcomes ever take place, then it would be against the resistance from authoritarian populists. Authoritarian populists may be causally responsible for indirectly bringing necessary changes on the agenda, but if they are on the agenda, authoritarian populists tend to battle changes that point into the direction of democratization. The relationship between authoritarian populists and democratization, therefore, is similar to the one between the fascist regime and modernization in Germany as identified by Ralf Dahrendorf: It smoothed the way to modernization as a non-intended side effect of targeting old and established practices.76

The general point of this discussion is that in assessing the effects of authoritarian populism on democracy, it is necessary to focus on interactive processes. The effects of democracy will be determined mostly by counter-mobilizations and counter-strategies of political forces that oppose authoritarian populism. Therefore, a full-fledged theory of the democratic effects of authoritarian populism needs to incorporate how different types and modes of counter-mobilizations affect outcomes. Such a take focusing on interactive processes triggered by the rise of authoritarian populism unleashes a set of new research questions. For this paper, it is most important to balance the potential democratizing effects discussed above by pointing to dynamics that may undermine democracy without authoritarian populists taking power. The work by Steven Levitzky and Daniel Ziblatt points towards such dynamics in the history of American democracy. It clearly shows how the rise of actors who challenge unwritten rules of deliberations and decision-making processes can trigger dynamics that lead to polarization and the undermining of unwritten rules that are decisive for the working of democracy.77 Similar processes can be observed with the rise of authoritarian populism in the Western European democracies as well. The general pattern is the following: The challenging party breaks taboos; the mainstream parties re- spond by excluding the challengers from procedures that are defined by informal rules; the challenging party gets into power in other places and uses the same mechanism of excluding their major oppo- nents. As a consequence, emotions may kick in, leading to additional escalation and the mutation of goals beyond the initial issues.78

Interactive processes triggered by authoritarian populists thus do not only carry a democratic potential, but they can also involve escalation dynamics undermining democracy. While it is certainly right that politicization and contestation of presently de-politicized and uncontested issues is a necessary element of democratization, it is wrong to assume that any form of contestation and politicization leads to democratization.79

Which of the two interactive dynamics is stronger and prevails? Do strong authoritarian populists, when they are in opposition or part of coalition governments, cause an improvement or a deterioration in democratic quality over time? Interactive dynamics take time. It is, therefore, necessary to look at consolidated democracies in which authoritarian populists play an important role for some time already. Four countries come to mind: Austria (where Haider took over the FPÖ in 1986 and received almost 20 percent of the votes in 1990), France (where the Front National received almost ten percent in the parliamentary election of 1986), Netherlands (where Fortuyn’s list received 17 percent of the

76 Dahrendorf 1965. 77 Levitzky and Ziblatt 2018. 78 See Alter and Zürn (2019) for a more general elaboration of such processes regarding backlash politics. 79 Zürn 2014. 15 votes in 2002), and Switzerland (where Christian Blocher took over the SVP in the 1990s, making them the strongest party in Switzerland for quite some time). In none of these four consolidated democracies with strong authoritarian populist parties in opposition and as a coalition partner in governments have the democracy measures of V-Dem improved between 2008 and 2018.80 On the contrary, in all of those four countries, the quality of democracy decreased, although not to a statistically significant degree. This probe questions the argument about the democratic potential of authoritarianism. It is not authoritarian populists who carry the potential of democratization, but the political processes triggered by them. Moreover, it seems that the negative dynamics are at least as strong as the positive ones.

Direct Effects: Undermining Reason and the Liberal Pillars of Democracies

Unless authoritarian populists hold power, their effect on the democratic quality of the political process remains limited and indirect. In contrast, when authoritarian populists do hold power, they can affect the political system directly. How do authoritarian populists affect democracy directly when they are in power, leading the government? While authoritarian populists display significant electoral support, contemporary populists have an authoritarian bend. They are anti-liberal, anti-internationalist, and anti-pluralist bound together by pitting the pure people against a corrupt cosmopolitan elite that belies the natives. Given their authoritarian bend, it is unlikely that they increase the representativeness and responsiveness of their political systems when they lead the government. Judging from the practices of authoritarian populist leaders in power, it seems more likely that they question minority rights and openly attack minority lifestyles. Furthermore, they engage in excluding people perceived to be “non-natives” from the political process; controlling media to a certain extent; attacking (especially constitutional) courts and reputed media outlets; and emphasizing popular sovereignty and national interest to an extent that questions international cooperation in principle.

Are these attempts of democratic backsliding successful? Do authoritarian populist leaders systematically undermine democratic political systems? The success of these efforts varies. Victor Orbán, to take one example, obviously was more successful in his attempts to change the political system than Donald Trump. One reason for this difference may be the degree to which the program of the authoritarian populist power-holder is actually authoritarian. The more important determinant, however, seems to be the resilience of the political system. In this respect, the president of the US, arguably the oldest democracy in the world, has a much more difficult task trying to change the political system than, for instance, Erdoğan. Another important determinant of success is the relative strength of the liberal opposition in the country run by an authoritarian populist government. Again, a lot of variation can be observed. The liberal opposition seems to be much stronger in Turkey and Poland, for instance than in Hungary and Russia.

To see whether authoritarian leaders systematically produce democratic backsliding and whether resilience of the institutions and strength of the opposition affects the outcome, in the remainder of the paper, I look at the eight best-known authoritarian populist leaders in power as heads of government: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Kaczyński in Poland, Maduro in Venezuala, Modi in India, Putin in Russia, Orbán in Hungary, and Trump in the US. These authoritarian leaders govern together more than 2.2 billion people, which is almost 30 percent of the world population. This set of countries includes European, Asian, and Latin American as well as the US from North America. It includes both

80 See Lührmann et al. 2019, 11.See below for a more detailed description of the data. 16 versions of authoritarian populism – the one leaning towards the political right and the leftist version.81 Most importantly, in all of these cases, the head of government is unrestricted from complicated coalition constellation as, for instance, in Italy but we see significant variation in resilience and strength of opposition.

Figure 3: Democratic Resistance

Determinant Resilience (meas- Opposition Expected Resistance to Authori- Country ured in age of the (measured as tarian Change democratic politi- share in the elec- cal system) tion in which the populist leader was elected first) Brazil Medium Medium Medium Hungary Medium Low Low-Medium India High Medium Medium-High Poland Medium Medium Medium Russia Low Low Low Turkey Low Medium Low-Medium USA High High High Venezuela Low Medium Low-Medium

What do these authoritarian populists do to democracies? I take data from the V-Dem Annual Democ- racy Report 2019, which looks at the development of liberal and electoral democracies over the last ten years.82 First, they compare the score on V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) of 2018 with 2008 and identify the cases with statistically significant changes toward “democratization” (democratic improvement) or “autocratization” (democratic deterioration). The LDI consists of two main components. It combines measures for all elements of democracy as identified by Robert Dahl (see above)—which is called the Electoral Democracy Index (EDI)—with the Liberal Component Index (LCI), which focuses on the rule of law, respect for civil liberties, and constraints on the executive by the judiciary and leg- islature. In addition, it contains a set of smaller and less weighted indexes such as an egalitarian component index (ECI), a participatory component index (PCI), and a deliberative component index.83

In seven out of our eight cases, we see a statistically significant deterioration in the LDI between 2008 and 2018. Russia is the only case where the deterioration was not significant. Yet, Russia is at the bot- tom 20 percent of all countries regarding democratic quality with the strongest move towards autoc- racy taking place before 2008 already. Among the eight countries under question, the strongest move towards “autocratization” took place in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Brazil. Given that Russia and Venezuela score very low on the democracy index worldwide, it is only India and the US that show some resistance, which is in line with the resilience-opposition argument.

One may object that it is only liberal democracy—but not democracy—that is challenged by authoritarian populists.84 A look at the different components of the V-Dem LDI does not support this objection.

81 This is Venezuela. In term of socio-economic policies, the PiS party in Poland has also moved to the left in recent years. 82 Lührmann et al. 2019. 83 V-Dem Methodology Document V9 and Lührmann et al. 2019, Appendix A 1. 84 See Kaltwasser and Mudde 2015, chap 6. 17

None of the indexes has improved in any of the eight countries. There is no positive effect on democracy anywhere. Moreover, the liberal component index consisting of equality before the law and individual rights indicators, judicial constraints on the executive indicators and legislative constraints on the executive indicators have deteriorated significantly in only three out of the eight countries under question. The same is true for the egalitarian (equal protection, equal access, equal distribution of resources) and participatory (civil society participation, direct popular votes, local and regional government independence) indices where one possibly could expect improvement according to the logic of improved representation and responsiveness. But once again, we see only deterioration. Yet, in all of our eight cases, we see statistically significant deteriorations regarding the electoral index or the deliberative index. The electoral index refers to the freedom of expression, the freedom of association, the share of the population with suffrage, and clean elections. Authoritarian populist leaders do not increase representation but decrease it in almost all cases with the only exception of the US, where existent institutions have so far shown resilience. Similarly, the deliberative component index consisting only of five indicators (reasoned justification, common good, respect counter-arguments, the range of consultation, engaged society) has deteriorated significantly in six countries. The only two exceptions here are Hungary and Russia—the two cases in which deliberation ceased before 2008 due to the long-term control of power by authoritarian populists.

Figure 4: Significant Deteriorations of Components of LDI

Electoral Liberal Egalitarian Participatory Deliberative Brazil X X X X Hungary X x X India X X Poland X X X Russia X Turkey X X x X USA X Venezuela X x X X

The finding is clear and compelling. Authoritarian populist leaders do no good to democracy regardless of at which dimension one looks.85 They threaten the democratic quality in all dimensions, especially the electoral and the deliberative component of democracy, which are the two core principles of democracy. It is not illiberal democracy they aim at, but electoral authoritarianism.86

A Distant, but Direct Effect: Undermining the Liberal International Order

All this still overlooks another impact of authoritarian populism, which may turn out most disastrous in the long term. Authoritarian populists are not only anti-liberal, anti-plural, and pitting the decent people on the street against corrupt elites, they are also anti-internationalist. This anti-internationalism translates into a radical rejection of international institutions. Donald Trump as president of the US stands for the most visible version of this anti-internationalism. He questions the three central normative foundations of the global governance system that emerged in the 1990s.87 In the preface to the

85 See also Mounk and Kyle 2018, The Atlantic, December 26, 2018. 86 Levitzky and Way 2002. 87 Zürn 2018, chap 1. 18

National Security Strategy (NSS), he rejects first of all the very idea of global common goods: “My ad- ministration’s National Security Strategy lays out a strategic vision for protecting the American people and preserving our way of life, promoting our prosperity, preserving peace through strength, and ad- vancing American influence in the world.” Common interests, public goods, or global common goods receive no mention, and peace is equated with American dominance. Trump second denounces international institutions as unnecessary in principle. The withdrawals of the US from the Trans-Pacific Part- nership (TPP) and the Paris Climate Agreement are, therefore, framed as “successes” of his policies. Finally, neither the President’s preface nor the NSS as a whole does at any point give the impression that the US is concerned with people, groups, or governments outside the country. A justification of the strategy towards all those affected by it does not take place. Such a position is typical for authoritarian populists who emphasize the national interest and popular sovereignty against the detached European and international institutions, which are under control by corrupt cosmopolitan elites.

The anti-internationalist stance is problematic for normative reasons. To the extent that national policies significantly affect people outside of the national borders, those people should have a say in these decisions. The people living on Pacific islands losing their homes as a result of climate change serve as a vivid example of people being affected by decisions being made elsewhere. At the same time, the absence of strong international institutions makes it hard to achieve policies that are desired by a majority within a country. If, for instance, more effective taxation of multi-national corporations is the wish of a clear majority within a country, the lack of international tax cooperation may de facto prevent such a policy. The dissolving of congruence between social and political space causes significant problems for the practical translation of democratic principles. In this predicament, the unconditional de- fense of popular sovereignty violates the fifth or sixth democratic principle (see section 1). Therefore, international institutions become a democratic necessity in issue areas in which externalities of the national decision are large or where effective governance requires the cooperation of many political communities.

The anti-internationalism endangers democratic political systems for yet another reason, especially if the rejection of international institutions is radical. The world order that developed after World War II and after the fall of the Berlin Wall had a Wilsonian impact—it made the world safe for democracies. The initial set-up after World War II with the United Nations (UN) system and the Bretton Wood institutions was to promote free trade while protecting the freedom of states to enhance and regulate their economies to reduce unemployment. This “embedded liberalism”88 in the economic realm was regionally limited to the Western world and complemented by global but comparatively weak institutions. The UN human rights regime and the UN Security Council responsible for the maintenance of international peace and security respectively are most noteworthy. This set of international institutions protected Western states and allowed for a development of the attractive welfare state model that contained both an open economy to receive the rewards of a global division of labor and strong national institutions to ameliorate the negative effects of free trade. As a result, embedded liberalism deepened over time, became more attractive, and put the Socialist camp under pressure. With the end of the Cold War, we saw an additional rise in the authority of international institutions, strength- ening of decisively liberal features, such as human rights, the rule of law, democracy, and the free movement of people, and an extension of states joining these institutions.

88 Ruggie 1983. 19

The blossoming of consolidated democracies and the third wave of democratization depended on this liberal international order. While comparative scholars tend to overlook this democracy-enhancing international context, scholars of International Relations have pointed to it repeatedly.89 In this sense, the anti-internationalism of authoritarian populists may turn out to be the major threat to liberal democracies. The deconstruction of a liberal international order may lead to the end of a period in which democracies can thrive in a democracy-enhancing context. Without this context, the survival of democracies becomes more difficult.

4. Conclusion

Is contemporary populism part of the democratic process, or does it endanger democracies? While it is true that authoritarian populists may serve as a pre-warning indicator to re-think democratic institutions and processes in the age of globalization, it is wrong to speak in this context of a democratizing potential of authoritarian populism. At best, authoritarian populism triggers an interactive process within democracies that may lead to some reforms of the political system. These reforms, however, need to be pushed through and carried out by other forces than authoritarian populists. So far, we see no signs of such a democratizing effect of populism. In so far as significant changes towards democratization can currently be observed, they do not take place in countries with strong authoritarian populist movements. While it is certainly right that politicization and contestation of present de-politicized and uncontested issues is a necessary element of democratization, it is wrong to assume that any form or even the majority of contestations and politicizations leads to democratization.

The direct effects of authoritarian populism are only negative. The rise of authoritarian populist governments and leaders is a multi-fold danger for democracy. It aims at and has already led to a weakening and decline of liberal democracies. According to the V-Dem dataset, this observation is true for all dimensions of the democratic process—not only for the liberal protection of individual rights against the will of the majority. The major damage seems to occur in the electoral and deliberative core of democracy. It is in this area that all the authoritarian leaders mentioned in this contribution caused democratic backsliding. Moreover, authoritarian populists also weaken the liberal international order. In doing so, they reverse Woodrow Wilson’s political agenda of making the world safe for democracies.

Against this background, it is hard to maintain the view that authoritarian populists have a democratic potential of any sort. The hope for the democratization via left populists, as put forward by Chantal Mouffe and others, also does not hold. While it is true that no significant deterioration in democratic quality took place in countries like Portugal and Spain with strong opposition by a new leftist party, or in Greece where Syriza governed for eight years, these countries also did not experience a positive change toward democratization according to V-Dem. In any case, these left-leaning parties do not qualify as authoritarian populists according to the definition used in this paper. Those left-leaning governments who qualify as authoritarian populists decreased democratic quality not less than other authoritarian populists.90 To stop the rise of right-wing populist parties through a “left populist movement that will federate all the democratic struggles against post-democracy”91 may turn out to be a self-defeating strategy.

89 Ruggie 1983; Milner 1988; Russett 1993; Risse 1995; Schimmelfennig 2002; Moravcsik et al 2009. See especially the forthcoming book by Ikenberry (2020). 90 Mounk and Kyle 2018. 91 Mouffe 2018, 7. 20

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