- Welcome everyone to tonight's discussion of the current Dangers
to American Democracy, sponsored by the Institution
for Social and Policy Studies. My name's Alan Gerber. I'm the Sterling Professor
of Political Science and Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. And today, I'm honored to share with you the insights of our expert
panel on this important topic. One thing about ISPS, I just wanna remind everyone, ISPS is a nonpartisan
research institution. And you can go to our website
to find out more about our mission, and our
activities, and upcoming events. There's gonna be a portion of our events, which is question and answer. And so, I wanna encourage
you to send questions for the panel at any time. So, starting now through
the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom screen. And so, we're gonna try and
cover a lot of questions. So, keep the questions, if you can, brief and to the point. And so that'll give us the opportunity to answer as many questions as possible. And I just also wanna remind everyone that today's event is being recorded. And we hope to be able to
share a link to this event as soon as possible. So, now, I wanna introduce
tonight's panelists in alphabetical order and briefly. Jacob Hacker is the Stanley Resor, Professor of Political Science, co-director of the Ludwig Program in Public Sector leadership
at the Yale Law School, and a faculty fellow at ISPS. He's an expert on American
politics and policy, a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences. And recently, he created APEX, the American Political Economy Exchange, which is a new program at ISPS. Susan Stokes is the
Tiffany and Margaret Blake, Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Sue serves as director of the
Chicago Center on Democracy. She's a member of the
National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. And among her just many
important accomplishments, Professor Stokes is a
co-founder of Bright Line Watch, which is a periodic survey of experts and the public on the state
of American democracy. And third, we have Milan Svolik. Milan is a Professor of
Political Science at Yale, and a faculty fellow at ISPS who studies the politics
of authoritarian regimes, democratization, support for democracy, and democratic backsliding. His book, the "Politics
of Authoritarian Rule," received the Best Book
Award from the comparative democratization section of the American Political
Science Association. So, with that, we now
turn to our panelists who will speak just one
after another without additional interruption by me. So, with that, Jacob, please take it away. - Great, thanks so much. So, it's a real pleasure to be here and to talk about this
somewhat depressing subject. And there is a reason why
I have up this picture from a 1980s, don't do drugs commercial. That was seared into my
memory as I was a child because I used to wake up early and watch Saturday morning cartoons. And so this announcement,
come on, this is your brain. You've probably seen this one before. This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. You know, I was watching TV you know, at 6:00 AM before my parents woke up. So, then, I was always
wondering when somebody was gonna actually get me breakfast. But there's a reason I'm showing this because in a lot of ways, I
think that what's happened to our democracy can be well
summed up by thinking about how it is that a set of polarizing, and egalitarian changes in
our political economy have changed the way our
political institutions work, or as the case may be, don't work. So, if you think of the ad
for today, it's, you know, here's your political system, and this is your political
system on extreme inequality and hyperpolarization. You take a context, a system,
and a set of institutions that was set up in one
era with one set of goals, and you transport into it a very different set of circumstances, and it creates extremely
different outcomes. And unfortunately, very,
very unsettling outcomes for many of us. And so, the way I like to
think about this is that our political institutions
we're actually very well suited to helping the United States become a global economic superpower
in the manufacturing era, and actually lead the transition towards a modern knowledge economy. But those institutions
have proved much less well-suited to dealing with the strains and dislocations that have
emerged out of that transition. And there are two kind
of parts to this story that I'm just gonna telescope
here and we can talk about. So, the first part is that these strains, both the shifts, the social,
and demographic shifts and the economic shifts that
have occurred over the last 30 years or so, have fueled
a great deal of discontent and given rise to what Paul Pearson, and I have called the Backlash
Coalition in our work. And this coalition is not synonymous with, but overlaps substantially with the contemporary Republican party. And what's important is
it includes not just those who have been on the kind of front lines of the economic changes
that have taken place, those who have faced dislocations, those who are concerned about the changing character of the nation, but it also includes a significant portion of the American economic elite. Paul and I called this
plutocratic populism in our work. And the idea is that
although there's a sort of common right-wing populous story here, there's actually a surprising amount of, if not direct support for
this right-wing populism, at least and indirect support for it from some of the biggest
winners in the economy today. Those who benefited the
most from these changes that are creating such backlash. And the other thing that
I wanna emphasize is that our political institutions
have not proven very capable of dealing with this
hyperpolarization and inequality. And there's kind of two
parts to this story. So, first, just on the backlash coalition, I think it's really important
to keep in mind that we don't have to choose between the kind of common economic story
about how the decline in manufacturing, the
concentration of prosperity in cities has led to discontent. And the equally common, and I think, also very
persuasive narrative that this has a lot to
do with concern about the shifts in America's
racial and ethnic makeup, and the sense of status
loss that come with it. I mean, these are both going on and there's a lot of research that shows how they come together. So, for example, the work of David Otto and his colleagues shows that areas hit by big manufacturing losses
shift dramatically to the right, unless they're relatively diverse, in which case they shift to the left. But most of the places that have been hit have been much less diverse. And the other thing I would say is that it is pretty important
to keep in mind that our media ecosystem, and particularly, the prominent role of right-wing media that's really important in this
story is pretty distinctive. And has really accentuated the nature of this backlash and the intensity of this backlash coalition. The other thing to say
is that this backlash, and this will get me to the institutions that this backlash coalition is concentrated in non-metro areas, which are overrepresented, as I'll show in our political system. Now, I just mentioned that
there's also a big role for politically active wealth, and I cite a couple studies
here that are very recent that show that despite the
shifts that we've seen, there still is a large
amount of support among the top executive class among corporations for the Republican party, even as it become more
right-wing populace. And so, this poses a
really acute challenge. And the first thing that
I just wanna mention is that this challenge is reflected in, and manifested in the fact that we've seen the Republican party move
much more dramatically to the right over the last generation than we've seen the Democratic
party move to the left. And you can see this if you
look across countries that, you know, the Democratic party is kind of a conventional center left party, maybe slightly more center than some. The Republican party is
really far to the extremes. And I'm sure Sue and Milan
will talk about this, but the other thing I
wanna mention is that the sort of political institutions have accentuated this vulnerability or accentuated these trends because they have essentially overweighted those who are most discontented
with the transformations in our society and economy
that are taking place. So, there are two pictures here. One shows you that you know,
the Senate, as you all know, has this bias towards
the Republican party. The Republican party
is essentially not one, has not represented a majority
of the nation's citizens in the Senate since the 1990s. But of course, it is held the Senate for a lot of this period and is very favored to
hold the Senate again soon. And it's very difficult to update policies to deal with some of the
strains that we're facing when there is this like very, this system that is very prone to gridlock when parties are polarized. So, there is this kind
of majoritarian threat that's emerging that we see in particular, and I think Milan will talk about this in the degree to which there's
been very aggressive use of state level election administration to try to advantage the Republican party. So, you can see at the state
level in this picture here, that you know, back in
the 1970s, the Democrats, if anything, had an edge in gerrymandering of state legislative districts. Of course, that's shifted
dramatically in their states like Wisconsin or Ohio that are just very heavily skewed in favor of the Republican party despite being relatively evenly balanced in terms of partisan division overall. And of course, that feeds into national
political institutions because of course, this is where districts get
drawn for national politics. This is where politicians are drawn from. So, I don't feel like I could
do this without at least saying a word about it,
whether there's an opportunity to escape this vicious cycle. And in our prior work, Paul and I have written about the role of business quite a bit and argued that if business
which once was a much more moderate force in our politics
were to do that again, that that would be really beneficial. I have to say I don't see that happening and I'm not sure it
will have as much effect as we once thought it would, given how far the Republican
party has moved to the right, and toward a kind of populist stance. Ultimately, right, I think, the right corrective in our
system would be electoral. And there's a lot of talk
about the fact that Republican party is kind of exhausting its capacity to mobilize its voters. But of course, there's this real challenge of whether or not the,
there'll be able to be enough of a response given the
bias of the institutions to see really corrective efforts as opposed to further
erosion of democracy. And so, as I say at the end,
I think that this is an area where you really need to
see broader mobilization around electoral and economic reform, and political reform. And in that, as, A. Philip
Randolph famously said, "Organization would be critical." Thank you. - Hi, everybody, thank you for coming. It's great to see you. And I'm delighted to follow on Jacob's really
interesting presentation. I think that there's quite
a bit of overlap between his insights and mine, which I'm gratified because
he knows a hell of a lot more about American politics than I do. I'm gonna put some of this in a slightly more comparative framework. I'm a comparative politics person. So, basically, you know, what we've seen in the last
eight years or so in the US is what we call democratic erosion or democratic backsliding. And that, basically,
means that the US like, about two dozen other countries, democracies around the world
has experienced a decline in both horizontal accountability, which means the ability of
coequal branches of government to monitor and influence the actions of the executive branch. And vertical accountability, by which we mean the ability
of voters to be well-informed, and to make use elections
to make decisions about who their leaders are going to be. So, despite the fact that in 2020, Donald Trump was defeated, American democracy remains fragile. And that isn't just because a seemingly more
anti-democratic version of the former president is poised to become the GOP's
presidential candidate. It's also because the
structural causes of erosion have not disappeared. And it's had enduring effects
that also continue to, you know, persist, and probably make further
erosion that much more likely. So, (clears throat) just to put
what's happened in the US in a somewhat more international context, the world has experienced
a wave of backsliding since the late 1990s. And this figure is a sort
of a illustration of that. So, the light blue line is the numbers of coups
happening per year, and the white line tracks the number of eroding events each year. So, and the instigators of the backsliding come in two basic flavors. One is right-wing ethno-nationalists, people like Trump and Victor
Orban of Hungary and elsewhere. And the other are leftwing populists, people like Andres Manuel
Lopez Obrador in Mexico or Jacob Zuma in South Africa. So, focusing now on
the wealthy democracies as is the United States, obviously, why have they experienced
an upsurge in right-wing ethno-nationalist parties? Well, you know, with a great
deal of simplification, I'm depicting the stances
of major political parties in a lot of, you know, this sort of describes
I think in general terms a lot of wealthy democracies, and how they've kind of array themselves in the past couple decades. I'm depicting their stances
on three dimensions. The vertical dimension is sort
of a traditional large state, small state, you know,
heavy taxes, light taxes, one the horizontal dimension, it has to do with economic
nationalism or globalism. And then, the sort of the front
to back dimension is about national identities and the extent to which those are salient in the position of political party and defined in kind of
exclusive or inclusive terms. In the context of the later 20th century
de-industrialization, left parties have shifted
toward more globalist and somewhat less redistributive stances. So, that's depicted here as
the sort of the difference between what I'm calling the
legacy left and the new left. And in so doing, they
had incentives to do so. I won't go into why, but a result of this shift has been that their brand as parties
of the working class became somewhat diluted. (clears throat) The shift in a sense opened up a space in the southwest and
front corner of this cube occupied by the ethno-nationalist, right? So, think of the mega faction
of the Republican party in the US, Brexiters in the UK, Sweden Democrats, and many
other parties of this ilk. Not all of them have gained power and some of them have gained power, that's not led to an erosion
of their democracies. When they get access to power, why do some of them erode
democracies and not others? So, a key risk factor, and this is very much in line
with what Jacob was saying, a key risk factor that we're finding in sort of cross national
statistical research is income inequality. So, this figure draws
from a cross national regression analysis where the dependent variable
is the probability of erosion and happening beginning in any given year. And the horizontal axis is genie, the genie coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality. In this case, it's
post-tax, post transfer. And you know what you're
basically seeing here is that there is a, you
know, a strong upward trend as countries become more unequal. The possibilities of
probabilities of erosion become stronger. Obviously, there are a lot
of other factors going on, and there are other things
that I would mention. One of them being a kind of contagion or demonstration effect that we also see. And I think it helps to account for the kind of the wave
function that we saw earlier. But what you see here, you
know, at the highest level of income inequality countries like South Africa and Botswana, the probability of erosion
rises to around 30%. In countries that are very equal, so, you know, think the
Scandinavian country, Sweden, other Northern European countries, the probability drops to
the low single digits. Our calculation for the US was about, in 2017, was about 9%, which
isn't a very big number, but it's a terrifyingly big
number as an annual probability of the beginning of an erosion event. And it's also kind of an
order of magnitude larger than the calculations of the probability of democratic instability when scholars kind of plugged
the US characteristics in that period into old models that were designed to explain military coups. Okay.
- So, I'm sorry. could you define a
democratic erosion event just to kind of give folks a sense of what you're talking about, some concrete examples of what you mean? - Yeah, so, actually our measure of this heavily depends on work by Melis Laebens who was a graduate student
in her dissertation that she wrote at Yale a few years ago. And so, what she stresses is this, I mentioned at the
outset a kind of decline in both horizontal and
vertical accountability. And concretely, we measured this with data
from varieties of democracy, which is a Swedish
organization that collects data on all kinds of things
related to democracy and other kinds of governments. So, basically, if you
already are a democracy, meaning that you've had
a peaceful transition of power sometime in the last five years, and you experience a certain
a large enough decline in measures of horizontal
and vertical accountability, you get counted as that
would be the beginning of a kind of a period of erosion. So, this includes countries,
you know, kind of familiar set of countries like Hungary under Orban, as I mentioned, Poland until recent, then, the polish under
the peace governments, the US under Trump, the Mexico under the
current government, Bolivia. These are now talking more about cases of, as I mentioned before, sort
of left wing populist erosion. I'm happy to answer more
questions about that if that would be helpful. Okay, so, I alluded earlier
to three wealthy democracies, all have nurtured right-wing
ethno-nationalist parties. Only the United States, by the method that I just described counts in our calculations and
in most people's books is a case among these
three of democratic erosion beginning in 2017. The UK was kind of a close call. And it is a country where income
inequality has risen a lot since the last decades of the 20th century and approaches the level of the US, and it was a kind of a close call. And I can talk more about why. So, there were elements
of democratic erosion, but not to the degree that
we saw in the United States. And then, Sweden is another country where there's a very powerful, and very electorally successful right-wing ethno-nationalist party, which is now sort of implicitly part of a governing coalition. But there's no democratic
erosion in Sweden, there's no challenge to the
integrity of the judiciary; there's no questioning of elections as mechanisms of vertical accountability. The press doesn't get beaten
up and so on, and so forth. Okay, so, why does
inequality encourage erosion? I'm probably running low on time. Let me just say very
briefly that one reason, and this is something that Milan can talk a lot more
about is that countries that are polarized by income also tend to have more polarized politics. And for reasons that
Milan and his colleagues have explained very well, polarization tends to
encourage democratic erosion because voters are more
willing to sort of say, "Yeah, I don't really like
the fact that this guy is beating up on the press or undermining judicial independence, but God forbid that the
opposition come to power." So, that's one reason. And you can see here that
these countries sort of line up in terms of the level of polarization. Again, this is coming from VDM data. A second reason has to do
with what we're calling, so, the effect of income
inequality on a kind of cynicism or skepticism about the ability
of political institutions to make any real difference
in people's lives. And this is kind of a mood that again, is kind of encouraged
by backsliding leaders, and leads to what we're
calling institutional nihilism. And you can see that we're
finding that in, you know, sort of measures of
institutional nihilism agreement to survey questions like, do you agree that we
cannot fix the problems in our political institutions? We need to tear them down and start over. And when you expose people to, you remind people about how
unequal their country is, the US, and we did this in Mexico as well, you tend to get higher levels of agreement with those kinds of responses. So, just to finish up, if you know, if we wanna have heroes
who are gonna go out and fight against democratic erosion, we've got our current
president who's made a priority of trying to convince people that democracy is really worth it. But the other guy here is Sean Fain, who is the leader of the UAW. And he and other labor
leaders have have, you know, led us into a period of some
relative successes in strikes, and in the ability of unions
to begin to chip away at this, you know, kind of
extreme income inequality that our country has experienced, and that contributes to the erosion of democratic institutions here. So, with that, I will close. - It's an honor to continue
here, and join Sue, and Jacob in offering my perspective
on how to diagnose what might be the dangers
to the US democracy. I would like to do so by
introducing a few elements of a study that I did
jointly with Matt Graham, who is our former graduate, and currently, an assistant
professor at Temple University. We were trying to figure
out to what extent Americans are willing to prioritize
democratic principles over partisan ends. And crucially, also, to figure
out what do they believe about others' commitment
to democratic principles, and whether those beliefs
are warranted in facts. And here, I'm showing you a slide that summarizes one
scenario that represented a representative sample of Americans with, and we were trying to figure out, we're trying to find a way to gauge their commitment to democracy
based on this scenario. So, the scenario for instance,
summarizes a situation, a real-world situation
that happened in Missouri. So, this was a study that we conducted both in 2020 and 2022. And this is a scenario from 2020 where the Missouri legislature
was considering changing how it does redistricting. And there were two groups advocating for different ways of doing it. The status quo was that there's
a nonpartisan demographer, but there was also another
group called Fair Missouri that was advocating for
the return of the ability to direct redistricting
to the state legislature, which was controlled by Republicans. So, in effect, partisan
redistricting by Republicans. So, this is a real-world scenario and we asked respondents to decide how they would allocate 10 cents between these two groups. What we're interested in
is to what extent people are willing to allocate
the money to the group that advocates to more democratic, the less partisan, what we
call the principled option, in this scenario that's Clean Missouri, that advocated for
nonpartisan redistricting. As opposed to one that may
advance their partisan interests. In this case, if you're a
Republican, you face a trade-off between an option that would allow you to further your partisan interests, but crucially at the expense of democracy. And so, let me show you
what happened depending on whether you were faced with
such a partisan trade-off, or such a trade-off between partisanship and democratic principles. And the first, maybe
illustrate what's going on is I'll show you what the
Democrats did in this scenario. In this scenario, the Democrats, both partisan, and democratic interests are clear here. That is they don't want
Republicans to be able to gerrymander, and so they should donate
most of their money to Clean Missouri, which is advocating for
nonpartisan redistricting. And that is indeed what happened. So, next slide here shows the amount donated on the horizontal axis to what we call the principled option. That is the option that
was more consistent with democratic fair play. As you can see, Democrats when faced
between these two choices in the state of Missouri
were overwhelmingly donating most of their endowment
to the principled option, to the group that advocated
for non-partisan redistricting rather than one done by a partisan, in this case Republican
controlled legislature. It reveals, I think two
things, first of all, the Democrats in this scenario
knew very well where either democratic principles or their partisan partisan interests lie. They donated most of their
money to the principled option. But now, look what happens
when we asked Republicans to donate 10 cents, and
how they would donate it, remember this is the group
that here faces attention between their partisan interests
and democratic principles. You see that a majority
of Republicans in fact, decided to donate less
to the principled option to Clean Missouri, and more to the partisan option, to the group that advocating
returning redistricting powers to the Republican controlled legislature. The median donation was
only 3 cents out of 10 to the principled option, and the mean donation was about 4 cents. In other words, the average individual donated a majority of her endowment to the partisan rather
than the principled option. And only 29% of subjects
of Republicans in this case donated to the option
that's more consistent with democratic principles. And this in effect highlights how I view the main
threats to US democracy. At one level, it is the fact
that this is even possible that voters in this state get to choose how redistricting is done. And I think, in the comparative context, the United States is
unique in the sense that state level institutions, legislatures, sometimes in conjunction with
the governor have the ability, and as a result the opportunity
to shape the fundamentals of political competition, including how redistricting
is done, who can vote, and so on. This is very unique around the world, and it simply creates an
institutional opportunity to rig the game in one's favor. The other condition that
I would like to highlight is in effect the shape of this histogram. That is that the vast
majority of the type of voter that in this scenario faced a trade-off between her partisan interests
and democratic principles decided to side with partisan interests. And that is what we find
throughout the study, both about Democrats and Republicans. And I see that as the other
main structural condition that represents a threat to democracy. And that is that most people
when facing a conflict between partisanship and
democratic principles are willing to side with the former. Thank you. - Great, thanks very much panelists. So, the panelists, I guess we
should join as a panel now. And just, I have a couple quick
questions to kick things off and then we can turn to
questions from the audience. So, I wanna just ask Sue,
just a clarification question. Regarding income inequality, do you find that the income
inequality relationship between income inequality
and democratic erosion, does that hold for high-income countries as well as low income countries? So, right. Now, that's the question. - So, if you interact in,
I let this one answer, I don't think it's the answer
to the question you're asking, but we also look at GDP
per capita separately, you know, as another
factor and find that it- - Question about interaction, yeah.
- Right. I don't remember. So, my co-author on that paper is another recent Yale grad named Eli Rau. Yale is full of amazing
graduate students who... And I don't remember, I'm gonna find out. But income itself has a sort of suggestive
but unstable effect. You know, the genie effect is just like, we couldn't get rid of
it no matter what we did, you know, it was sort of
however you measure it, however you measure
the dependent variable, you know, the only way we got rid of it was like unplugging our computers. So, it was pretty remarkable. - Have you tried kicking the computer? Yeah.
- I do. (laughs) - Okay, so, and then my second question, and this is really for all the panelists, this is obviously the
idea of democratic erosion in the United States is a
very frightening prospect. And at one level, it's obviously, I'll just say with it's very frightening. On the other level, you know,
you wonder whether or not this is a bunch of political scientists engaging in catastrophizing, and whether this is a real thing or not. And so, I mean, each of you or any of you, could you spell out what
you think of as pathways that you think are plausible,
maybe, one or two scenarios that you can think of that would
produce what you've defined as democratic erosion? I'm using Sue's term, but democratic backsliding, I think that's what Milan
was referring to it as. And then, you know, just a
little bit about the plausibility in your view of those scenarios. Anyone can just start. Yeah. - Sure, I can jump in real quick. So, I share that general
orientation that often I fear that, you know, that
we who are focused so much on politics can get
ourselves much more upset than those who are casual observers. But I think in this case, if anything I feel like we're
understating some of the risks and I would say there are two pathways. So, the first thing to say is, I think this is very consistent
with what Sue was saying is that your concern is
erosion, not collapse, right? The way democracies tend to end, you know, and a whimper, not a bang in the contemporary as Ziblatta and Levitsky
have shown in their book. And so, what you're really
worried about is this sort of self-reinforcing process. And I think both of us are arguing that inequality polarization, and the distinctive character
of American institutions, I would say all three of us are, but certainly Sue and I
were emphasizing this, have created a kind of more, what I call a vicious cycle, right? Where there is real possibility
of self-reinforcing, erosion of democratic institutions. And I don't discount the possibility that there would be a more
like dramatic single event. And you know, there's a lot of concern and I share that concern about authoritarian minded president
bent on revenge (chuckles) against political enemies, and much more savvy about
how to use the institutions of American government
could well get a lot farther than said president did while in office. But I wanted to highlight
that I think the trends that we've seen that are really
linked to this other form of democratic erosion too, namely the sort of creeping
humanitarianism that Milan talked about in that the
supporting of policies that and institutional changes
that sort of chip away at the the hallmarks of democracy. And that, I think because it
builds on some of the features of our political institutions
that can be exploited for partisan gain is in some
ways a kind of more insidious and difficult to counter form of erosion. And so, you know, I don't know
if people a generation ago would've expected the level
of really extreme partisan gerrymandering that's taken place and been sanctioned by the court. Certainly, before the contemporary urban rural split occurred, there wasn't nearly as much
of a bias in the institutions that are now portioned in
favor of less urban places as we have today. Or you know, the kinds of challenges that have taken place at the
state level to election result. All those seem to be
pretty fundamental shifts. And then, if we step beyond
kind of institutions, I mentioned, and I really
wanna emphasize like, the kind of claims against
democracy that are becoming and against partisan
opponents that are being used in extreme media,
particularly on the right, but on both the right and the left, I think it's also a
really significant erosion of core aspects of our
democratic heritage. So, that, to me, is- - Thank you.
- Yeah, that's a long answer to a short question. But I don't wanna say we
should all be freaked out. It's not like in that scene in a airplane, if you remember that '80s funny movie where like there's a sign
that said don't panic when the plane started going down, and then, at one point,
it just shift to panic and everyone jumped up
and started screaming. I'm not saying panic, but I'm saying be concerned and be focused on what
are the real sources of this erosion. - Good, Good. Thank you, Jacob. Sue, what what are some
of the scenarios that in the US context you
think of as worrisome? And then, Milan is now back. - So, one of the things that I
worry about in the US context is the unshakeability of
Donald Trump's electoral base. And it's sort of seeming
kind of insularity from any kind of, you
know, negative information or negative facts about the candidate, about the party, about the policies. When you look at other countries that have had periods
of erosion and kind of, and kind of set them aside, one of the things that you see is that, you know, parties lose elections, and eroding parties lose elections, and they really kind of, it's possible to undo
some of what happened, you know, and you don't have the same, sometimes you have
challenging of the election. So, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil
was very much like Trump in that he claimed before the election that there was gonna be massive fraud, but he didn't really
double-down on that claim afterwards so much and that's probably because he was really
worried about prosecution, and he is being prosecuted. So, but you know, the UK is
an interesting experience because they really did
have a very close call, maybe closer call than
we realized in the US. So, the proration crisis where Prime Minister Johnson
closed down the parliament, which is not something that never happens, but it was found that he had
done that in a unlawful manner. I'm not sure what
unlawful and illegal are, the difference between them, but that's what the
court decided in the UK. And so, that's kind of a big thing. And then, they also have
engaged in you know, restrictions to ballot access. You know, like the US a country in which there's very
little electoral fraud. In fact, the elections are much more heavily regulated there. And the right to protest
has been curtailed in ways that have been lasting. In fact, we saw a lot of drama around that the last few days. But what happened to Johnson
was that he was dumped by his political party. And he was dumped by his political party. And granted it's a, you
know, parliamentary system, it's easier for the party to
get rid of his prime minister. You don't need a new election, you don't even need a
party election there. But the reason he was dumped
was that he was very unpopular or to put it the other way around, had he had the persistent
kind of level of popularity that Donald Trump has in the US, they might well have hung onto him, and then we might have seen
more of an unraveling in the UK. So, that's a real source
of concern for me. - Great, thank you. Milan, do you have
anything you wanted to add? - I apologize, I just
appeared for a minute there. And was it the question
about what are the? - Yeah, the question is
are there any scenarios that you might, that
you know, that just... Basically, are there any scenarios that you are especially worried about? You've mentioned state level machinations in your presentation. Is that what you're
concerned about mostly? Or what are the things you're
concerned about in terms of scenarios for democratic backsliding? - So, those state level, you know, disenfranchisement, gerrymandering that was happening before
the Trump presidency, it's happening now. And those are the
institutional opportunities that are unique to the United States and that are being taken
advantage of by both parties. And I think that's very concerning. And maybe, let me add two other elements that I think are structurally different, let's say, from what was
happening four years ago or six years ago. And the first one is,
I think, that similar to what Sue mentioned, that post-January 6th
republicans are different. And maybe, one way I would
describe this in concrete terms that we see it in the study
that I briefly previewed. As I mentioned, we conducted
two studies, one in 2020, just before the 2020 election, and another one in the 2022 election. And what we saw in the
study conducted just prior to the midterms that is
after January 6th, 2021, is that we saw that republicans are unwilling to punish. So, whereas in 2020 they were, but in 2022, they were unwilling to punish one type of undemocratic behavior, and that is denying the
outcome of elections, questioning the fairness or
the conduct of elections. When their candidate was claiming, and these were real world
candidates that were, simply questioning the results of the 2020 presidential
elections or some other elections, Republican voters were
willing to go along with it in some cases that carried a premium. And so, that's very different from the kind of partisan asymmetry that we have observed before. But actually, voters on
both sides were willing to overlook democratic
defects on their own side. This is very different now. And maybe, the last comment
I would have is that another feature that is different
from just a few years ago is that both sides are
increasingly willing to justify their own undemocratic behavior by pointing to the other
sides on democratic behavior. So, to maybe, give one concrete example, the Democrats when they
redistricted the state of New York just before the 2022 midterms, that redistricting was ruled
as unconstitutional in New York because it was gerrymandered. But the rationale that was given is that we have to do this because Republicans are doing this elsewhere. And if we don't do this, we'll be hurting ourselves politically. And if you look at some
of the commentary on this, and reporting what was interesting, that is the journalist
sometimes noted and you know, and no voter is going to punish their own party for gerrymandering. So, there's no political cost to this. And I think this kind of tit for tat where one side is saying
we have to play dirty because the other side
is already doing it, can kind of spiral out of control. - Okay, well, that is a really
a great way to transition to the questions 'cause I find that really
(chuckles) disturbing, I mean, the idea that sort
of norm violation leads to a kind of spiral of escalation, you know, of norm violation. That is, I would just say, I'm sorry, maybe I should stop here. But I would say the scenarios
that seem most disturbing to me for extreme problems
have that feature to them where people start down
on a set of things, they start down a path, which through a series of, I have to do this because they did this, or if I don't do it, they'll do it. That logic can lead you
very far down the road in a scary direction. And anyway, on that note, why don't we turn to our audience. Rick Harrison has synthesized
some of the questions. And so, I'm gonna read
some of them to you. And let me just go ahead. And anyone who wants, I
don't think any of these, at least the first bunch are not directed to any particular panelists. So, whoever thinks they
have something insightful to say should please share
that with our audience. Okay, here's a question. Peter Turchin has written that, "We are in for a period
of ongoing instability because of four underlying
societal forces, popular commiseration
leading to mass mobilization, potential, elite overproduction," which that's his famous hypothesis about elite overproduction, "failing fiscal health and
weakened legitimacy of the state and geopolitical factors. And so, some of those
things were mentioned by, I guess, Jacob mentioned at and as well, Susan, and also, I guess, Milan as well. What do you think about the
implications of this thesis? What do you feel about the thesis? Do you find this a useful, this a lead over product, especially a lead over production
and legitimacy problems? Do you find that a useful framework? And how does that help you
think about these questions? I'm very interested in
hearing what you think about a lead over production. But anything in this question I'd be interested in
hearing your reaction to. Are you familiar with this
elite over production thesis? Okay, we don't have
enough time to go into it. But basically, if I've got it right, when you produce more political elites than you have places for them in society, that's the tinder for political conflict and potential major changes
in the political system. And this, I think, goes
back to, is it Pareto? Who talked about elite
fractures being the foundation for a political change as opposed to mass based political change. Obviously, you know, what a great comparative
politics scholar I am. So, any (chuckles) comments
from our colleagues on that? I'm tempted to say we're
gonna edit this part out of the video. Okay, next question. So, any comments please? Yeah. - I don't know if I have anything to say on elite over production, but I will say that the
role I think both Sue and I were emphasizing the
degree to which the concentration of economic rewards is
quite consequential. That's one kind of elite. Actually, I think, probably
one of the big problems in our politics today is this
linked to what you were saying about norm erosion is the
people who go into office increasingly have to be
partisan warriors, right? And so, you know, I think we really can't understate the role of elites in this process. So, in both shaping how
non-elites are thinking, but also, in turn their own struggles. And so, one thing that
I think is quite clear is that the pool of people who are going into public office now is very much shaped by both this very bifurcated media ecosystem
that I alluded to. And by the sense, that there's a struggle
that's existential struggle that each party is engaged in. And I do think there are differences between the parties in this regard. And I've been studying the
Democratic party a lot lately 'cause I was studying the Republican party for so much in my career. And I do think one thing that is different is that the Democratic party
still has a lot of people who, for one of a better way of putting it, kind of wanna do policy. And that has a kind of cohesive, it induces a kind of
cohesion across the party. If you look at the
Republicans say in the house, one of their big problems, right? Is that they lack this kind
of common denominator of, well, we just wanna like do policy things through government, right? There's sort of one faction
that's trying to win favor on conservative social media. There's other factions that
would like to do policy things. There's others that would think the Supreme Court's
really all that matters. You know, and so, I
think creates a much more fractured party and I think fractures kind of bad. Like, I think that in
general you want parties that can behave a bit more cohesively and will discipline of
course their members when they're behaving in ways that sort of reflect poorly
on the party overall. And so, not to to paint
the Democrats as being really high performers in this regard. But I do think one thing that
we should be thinking about is like what, you know, how
does a Republican party, because our system does not
work without two parties that are relatively well functioning. How do we get the
Republican party to function as a more cohesive party,
and not just in the way that Milan suggest they
might function as a party. So, I'm sorry that I was
exactly on elite overproduction, but I actually think it's really important to think about the elites
in American politics, and how they play into this process. - Okay, Sue, Milan, do you have anything you wanna say? Or like, we should move
on to the next question? - Sure, next question sounds great. - Okay, next question. Do you think that the
candidate selection mechanism? So, we've got the situation
in the United States where we have Donald Trump and Joe Biden likely to be the
next presidential candidates. That's a function to a great extent of the political institutions
for selecting office holders. Is there anything in your
research that suggests that they're better and worse ways in terms of the political institutions that might help us to
avoid democratic erosion? So, just to amplify on this a little bit, you suggested these deep
structural economic factors, attitudinal factors. Are there any institutional
factors that might be helpful? I mean, Milan of course, discussed the state level
institutional authority. But sue any of your
comparative politics work that might give us ideas about better and worse political institutions? Or Milan, anything that you would suggest? - So, you know, I think that there are, it's commonly viewed that
there are aspects of the way that we select candidates and
elect office holders in the US that contribute to polarization, and to party, and discipline
that Jacob was just discussing. And there are some kind of
structural aspects of that. So, the United States has gone through sometimes called the great sort where we have an increasing kind of homogenization regionally, and I electoral district of
in, so, less heterogeneity in terms of political
preferences and other factors. So, that tends to produce representatives who are not vulnerable to losing elections or to the other party, but rather that the dynamic tends to be within their own party. And that that can contribute
to the kind of polarization that Milan was talking about. There actually has been, I mean, there are trade-offs involved in all of these kinds of
institutional factors. So, in Latin America where I
have more regional expertise, there actually has been a
shift toward party primaries, not so much for metaverse of legislature who tend to be elected in
proportional representation on party lists, but for executives, for presidents. And the reason parties
like to do that is that it opens the process and
potentially chooses more popular candidates who will do better
in the general election. And also, I think, gives
voters a sense of ownership having participated in an open primary, and decided, well, I'm
gonna vote it in the PAN primary in Mexico, I'm
more likely then to go on and vote for the pun
candidate in the election. So, there are trade-offs. But there certainly are
some particular features of American institutions,
which Jacob was talking about as well as Milan, that tend
to increase polarization. I'm just gonna add one other thing. This is kind of adding to the mix, the super interesting
conversation about polarization. So, one of the drawbacks of
polarization as a strategy of democratic odors is that
it mobilizes your base, but it also mobilizes the other guys. So, you know, Donald
Trump says the Democrats are an angry mob who
want to open the border, and so on, and so forth. And you know, that gets
his folks revved up, and it also tends to
get Democrats revved up. So, there's a another strategy that we have been
detecting in our research, another kind of rhetorical strategy that we call trash talking democracy. Milan has heard about this (chuckles) where it's not so much you
don't badmouth the other party, you badmouth the institutions. So, you know, the courts
are full of corrupt actors, the press is incompetent. You know, the opposition and
the legislature are, you know, the legislature is, you know, unworkable. And so, the impact of that is to, we find just as an empirical matter to kind of tamp down any kind
of enthusiasm or optimism about institutions working. And that's also something
that I think is very, is sort of exaggerated
in the American context because we do this, this goes back to what Jacob was saying, we do have a whole, you know, big chunk of one of our
major political parties who are people who really
don't believe in government, and don't believe in public policy, and sort of make the failure
to provide good services, a kind of self-fulfilling function. There's a wonderful book
by an American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild about why is it the people in
cancer alley in Louisiana who understand perfectly well
that they're being poisoned by the petrochemical industry. Why did they support Tea Party anti-environmentalist lawmakers? And one of the reasons is that they see that even at the state
level that, you know, the kind of EPA equivalent
in the state of Louisiana does a terrible job. They don't get anything done. They don't actually protect them. Of course, that's a result of defunding, and you know, a kind of
starving of the institution. But then that becomes evidence that there's no point in electing,
you know, environmentalists. Representatives are
trying to push agencies to do a better job because
you have before you, you know, evidence that these
institutions don't work. - Thanks, Sue. Milan, do you have any comments? - Maybe just some comments on
this institutional question. So, I don't see much of a, you know, I don't see clear evidence
favoring or not favoring a system with party primaries over a
system without party primaries. But what strikes me as
being directly relevant to democratic erosion is the fact that the very tight two-party
system that exists in the United States creates a very stark
choice for voters, right? So, if one party's proposing a candidate that has authoritarian tendencies, but at the same time, represents
in a meaningful sense, also the policy preferences of voters, then a supporter of
those policy preferences faces a tough choice. They might vote for a
candidate who is democratic, but on the other side,
politically as in advocating for policies that they disagree with, or they must put up with a
candidate who is, you know, violating democratic norms, but also, happens to advocate
for the kind of policies that they like. And this is a very stark binary choice that's in effect a product
of the two-party system. And that in most places, which have multiple parties
does not have to be as stark because in addition, let's say, to a conservative who is authoritarian, there will be also a party that also has conservative leanings but is perfectly compliant
with democratic principles. And so, in some sense,
democracy has a very high price in the United States
for a subset of voters who face these kind of trade-offs. And so, in terms of
institutional solutions, I'm kind of very much interested in what's going to come
out of the ranked choice voting experiments,
(Alan speaks faintly) which still in the US
function in the context of the two major parties. But because they do not have
a stark diversion pressures, they do not face voters
who may have somewhat eclectic combination of preferences. They may not be aligned exactly the way the two major parties are. They may be sincerely voting for their first preference without having to sacrifice their vote. - Great, thank you. I mean, I guess, another issue related to what you were saying, Milan, is that when you have two parties, if you trash the other party, it's a sum zero game. Whereas if there are multiple parties, trashing the other party
may or may not read down to your benefit to the same extent. - I think that would be
the interaction effect between Sue's comments and my comments. - Excellent, thank you. Wonderful. Next question, to what extent, if any, might the effects of disinformation, apart from the effects
of objective conditions such as inequality affect your analysis? So, I guess, the general question is to what extent is
the erosion of democracy affected by the information
environment that, you know, we're now experiencing? - I mean, I should say I've
mentioned right-wing media, and media in general a number of times. So, I'll just emphasize
that again and say that, one way that inequality has factored in, or at least this is what
Paul and I argued in our book "Let them Eat Tweets,"
is that that inequality by creating essentially tensions for both parties coalitions, but particularly, for
the Republican coalition with its longstanding ties to business, but it's increasing reliance
on working class white votes. For that party to try to shift the focus of conflict from
kind of first dimension material size of government
issues towards more what sometimes called
second dimensions issues around race cultural conflict. And I just wanna be clear, if there's a lot of
second dimension appeals made by Democrats as well, but I think it's really
important to see how that strategy, right? Has been both. So, that's not a direct effect
of inequality, if you will. It's an effective inequality that's mediated by political strategies, competition between the parties. John Roemer, our colleague, now retired, made a argument along
these lines many years ago, which is basically if you introduce these second dimensions of conflict, then you're gonna get
these cross class parties. They're gonna be cleaved much more around cultural and social issues. And with the Republican
party in particular, there's just no question
that that strategy, right? Which took the objective change, but then translated into
a certain kind of response has been greatly furthered by the rise of a distinctive
right-wing media ecosystem. And so, it starts as Talk radio, it runs up into and through Fox News, which now is a moderate player in some of the right-wing media circles. There has been a ton of
research on this that shows that there is a lot of disinformation and misinformation in this
more isolated ecosystem. Perhaps the most persuasive argument that I've seen about this, because of course, these can become like
essentialist arguments, like, somehow, the right wing is gonna be, is more prone to dishonesty. But actually, the best argument I've seen is just the nature of the
ecosystems themselves. So, the left of center
ecosystem is kind of broad one that includes a lot of
mainstream media, right? It's just much more likely to police very inaccurate and extreme stuff, right? Right-wing media system is
a more self-contained unit. That's true both in terms
of how these media nodes kind of interact with each other as Yochai Benkler has shown in his work. But it's also true in who actually consumes the media, right? So, if you're someone
who dabbles a little bit in this range of media, which is true of a lot of
people in the center, right? Then, you're gonna get
exposed to a bunch of stuff. If you look at the people,
particularly the most strong supporters of kind of, we've sometimes talked to 'em
about them today as you know, MAGA, Make America
Great Again, candidates, those folks are much
more likely to congregate among the most conservative media sources where they're not
necessarily getting exposed to some of that contrary information. So, again, I just think
it's really important that we understand that our
institutions are distinctive. And also, if you look across countries, there are very few countries, I think Israel is really the major example that you see in the
cross national research where there's so much distrust, particularly among conservatives of mainstream media sources, and where there's so
much reliance on a kind of distinctive brand of
media of bipartisans. - Great. Milan, and Sue. Do you have anything to add about the communication environment? I can't tell if Milan, are you looking to get rid of your mute? Or are you? - I apologize. No, I don't
think I have anything to say. - Okay. Sue, do you have
anything you wanna add? - No, I agree with. - Terrific. Okay, question. Thank you all for your informative talks. Okay, I agree with that. Go. Okay. What are some actions that can be done or are already being done to counteract the erosion of democracy? Sue. Actually, Sue, could you
also say just a word about what Bright Line Watch is? 'Cause, I think people who
are interested in this topic might be interested in learning
more about that as well as your answer.
- Yeah, for sure. - 'Cause, I think, it's
relevant to the question of, you know, what can you do
about the erosion of democracy? Is a public that's more alert to the the fact that there are threats to our democracy is
probably part of the answer to that question. - So, there, you know, I think participation is super important. So, thinking about what we can
do as individuals who may be, you know, students, or professors, or people you know, working in, you know, non-official kinds of jobs. Participation is very
important if, you know, Milan is completely right, that
we have all kinds of biases and tendencies to turn a blind eye to undemocratic behaviors
by our own parties. But to the extent that it
becomes really crucial, and I think we are really at a crossroads in our country right now
to sort of, you know, recommit to democracy as a
kind of system of government, and set of principles, and make that a kind of central point to your own participation, and the way you talk to
other people about politics, separate from the kinds
of public policy issues that we all care a lot about. Many of us care very passionately about public policy issues. But separate from those kinds of concerns, I think that there is a real
need to sort of think hard and talk hard, you know,
talk with people about what is it that democracy does, and what does it look like
it doesn't do very well. And you know, I talked a moment ago about this kind of phenomenon of
eroding backsliding leaders having a strategy of
denigrating democracy. Not so much democracy writ large, they usually say it's a
good system of government, but these particular
institutions really are hollow, and corrupt, and not worth it. So, don't worry about
it when I attack them. So, you know, I think
there's a dialogue to have with many different kinds of people. I personally feel a strong
need to have a dialogue with the left on this
and with young people. And I started my own household
where I have, you know, teenagers who are skeptical for sure, and who are quick to pick up
on the failures of democracy, even when it works pretty well. So, we have all kinds of, you know, so, the way to defend democracy
is not to whitewash it, is not to say it has worked very well in the history of the United States. It has had all kinds of biases, and has institutionalized
many elements of racism, and sexism, and all kinds of things that we want to overcome. Nevertheless, if you study the experiences of other countries where
people lose the ability to kick the government out
of office by voting them out, that is not a good place to be. It's a place to be where civil
rights are not respected, where the rights to
protest are not respected, where freedom of speech is not respected. So, I think that a kind of thinking hard about the difference
between a sharp critical constructive eye toward our
own political institutions, as opposed to, you know, the kind of institutional nihilism that many political
leaders are only too happy to encourage us to embrace. That's an important starting point. - And could you just say a
quick word about project. - (speaks faintly) Much, yeah. So, in late '20, when was it? I guess, it was coming up
to the election in 2016. A lot of economists got very upset because candidate Trump
was raising questions about the veracity and reliability of official government
statistics on things like unemployment rate. And they wrote a public letter that was signed by many former, you know, Nobel laureates and former presidents of the American Economics
Association so forth, that said, "Hey, you know, where would we be without the Bureau of Labor statistics? Where would we be without
these institutions?" It's not a good thing to question these very important institutions, and question sort of the
scientific basis of economics. And I remember I was having a conversation with our colleague, Gresham Helmke at the
University of Rochester and sort of very smugly saying, "Oh, these economists, they sure wait till the
last minute to do this." And then, it was then, she sort of said, "Hey, have we done anything like this?" So, we circulated a letter
of great concern about, you know, the threat that you know, certain parts of the discourse, and sort of, you know,
attacks on the press that point verbal attacks
on the press attacks on, you know, very virulent
attacks on political opponents, on immigrants, and so forth,
that seemed to represent a potential threat to
democratic institutions in the United States. And that elicited a very,
very strong response. We had, I think, every, almost
every living past president of the American Political
Science Association and just scores of our
colleagues signed the letter. And after the election, we thought, okay, we should do something. And the first thing we decided to do was to put together an
email list of our colleagues around the country, and get them to tell us what they think matters for democracy. So, we have, as those
of you who filled out these long surveys, now, they're in about
27 different dimensions that we talk about what is democracy? And then, that same set of dimensions, you know, how are we doing? How's the US doing on these things? And we've branched out and
done other kinds of questions, and other kinds of studies. But that's the basic. So, it's a collaboration between Dartmouth University of Rochester, and was Yale, now University of Chicago. - Great. Thank you very much, Sue. Again, the question, what are
some actions that can be done or are already being done to counteract the erosion of democracy? Milan, is there something
you'd like to add to that? - Maybe, briefly to
characterize what I think is the main force that is, you know, that acts in, you know,
to defend democracy. And I think that main
force are the voters. I think as voters as
being the ultimate check on any possible politician
that undermines democracy. And I think when we think
about what kind of voters, the kind of study that
I highlighted earlier, I've tried to do several
of those around the world and basically, try to
look at what are the kind of characteristic of the kind of voter that when the kind of party or candidate that they would normally vote for says something undemocratic or proposes something undemocratic, that that voter is willing to say, "I'm not voting for you just
because of that." Right? And I think, there are two actionable
predictors of that kind of voter or correlates of that kind of voter. And the first type is, well, that kind of voter tends to be a centrist or moderate, right? So, they are not hard line partisans because those are unwilling
to abandon the candidates that they otherwise like. So, in other words, centrist
are a pro-democratic force. But the other thing that's even, that I think is more actionable
is that these voters tend to be fairly political informed and democratically competent. They seem to be fairly
good at telling apart undemocratic from democratic, but also knowing basic political facts. And I think, so, I think, if there's hope, it's the hope in this kind of
voter as serving as a check. - Right, so, it it's not causal exactly, it's an association, but it makes sense. - It's an association and
it's one only of about four or five robust predictors
across about 10 countries. And so, I think that that's
the kind of surprising thing is like, regardless of
whether we're talking about Serbia, Sweden, or the United States, this is something that strongly
correlates with the kind of voter who's willing to say, "If it's my side that's
behaving undemocratically, I'm willing to switch
and vote for someone else precisely because they're
behaving undemocratically." - Milan, is this work
part of the APSR paper that you publish with matter? Or is it some other? - This is not published. This is not published.
- Okay. All right, so, this is breaking news. - But it's based on
those studies, basically. Looking now at the correlates
of the kind of voter that sides with democracy. - Okay, but for people who
are interested in reading more about what you've been talking about, the study that you showed excerpts from, that's an American Political
Science Review paper with Matt Graham from 2022. So, there is a paper there, although, this one, which I
showed is also a working paper. - This one?
- Yeah. This one is more focusing
on partisan mistrust. - Great, thank you. Jacob, is there something
you'd like to add? - Yeah, just, I'd just like to say first, Bright Line Watch is a great organization. I'm so pleased that it's out there, and I, at least, think
it has a presence at Yale because there's a lot of us
who admire it and draw in it. And I think that if I could
bring these comments together, I'd say two things. One is, yes, voters are kind
of the ultimate corrective and democratic system, but
the voters need help, right? Both, they need institutions that allow them to have
an effective voice, and they need the kind of information and support to be able to exercise that. And so, there I come
back to this idea that there's a real need for
building up organizations, broad, kind of civic
organizations of the sort that, you know, used. I think labor unions played
a very important role in this regard, as Sue said. But we also have, as Theta Scotch Bulls
work has suggested, right? We had a large number of kind of mass based civic organizations, some of them fraternal organizations, some of them veterans groups
that were much more active in sort of mobilizing citizens, and reforming them around broad issues. And I would say that, I am short-term very
worried as I've made clear, but I have a kind of long-term optimism and it rests on a couple things. One is that, you know, as we've discussed, there's a bunch of ideas
out there for reform, right? It's really what's the
challenge right now? It's like the political, it's like lifting yourself up
by your own bootstraps, right? The political system
isn't working very well. How do we fix the political
system in those circumstances? But we kind of know the formula and I'm really pleased that you, Alan, had created democracy innovations, which is thinking through some of these really innovative ideas for how to improve the performance of. No, actually, I think, how do we get through this period where we can't actually
pursue those ideas? We can experiment, we can think
about state level changes. But I also think, as Milan
was suggesting, right? We can get engaged and
if there's one thing that I think Bright Line Watch
does that organizations do, that Milan's stronger democrats
in the electorate do, right? Is they try to focus attention on what the stakes are, right? That's a little bit of what we're doing, but at least, I don't have illusions about how many people are listening. Well, I can see right
now, 108 of you out there. Thank you for listening. So, and hopefully, you have
lots of friends you can talk to, but I think one of the
things that's happened is we've kind of normalized pretty fundamentally
anti-democratic stances. And we need to essentially say that these are not appropriate. And that's gotta be part of our debates. I actually think it's striking that in the last two big elections. Actually, probably if you
go back to 2018 too, right? There's been a lot of hand wringing, and in the end where there's
been salience of the state about the stakes, right? Where there's candidates
who are really out there denying elections where, you
know, very fundamental rights that people care about are at stake. We've generally, not exclusively, we've seen greater engagement, right? And we've seen a lot of
positive breakthroughs for shoring up those institutions, right? And so, I think that's the hope, right? Is that you get that going, that kind of positive cycle rather than the vicious cycle going. And I believe over the long term we can. - Excellent. Thank you so much, Jacob. And so, I see that we're at 5:23. I do wanna say thank you
for the call out Jacob to the ISPS Democratic
Innovations Program. We have a lot of events that
are planned in the coming several months, including
a fairly large event, a conference event on rank choice voting, and we're having an event on the use of lotteries and
representational systems. And all sorts of things designed to try and think of systems that
would promote honest, efficient, and effective government. And I urge everyone who's
interested in such things to check out the ISPS
website for more information. So, with that, why don't
we see are there any final, like, literally, 30 to 45 second comments that you'd like panelists to make. And if there's any resources or papers or books that you think
would be especially important for people to read who are
interested in the subject, could you share those as well? We're kind of getting close to
the end of our time together. So, why don't we start in reverse order from the presentation. So, Milan, Sue, and then Jacob, please. - Maybe very briefly, I would say that what
I want to keep up with, what political scientists and
what the public think about the state of the US democracy. I keep up with the website
of the Bright Line Watch and especially, their reports on, I'm really fascinated by both
how much actually agreement there is between political scientists and ordinary voters about many things, but also, then the lines of disagreement. So, I find those periodic
studies incredibly valuable, and kind of, especially if
they're around major events in American politics, like, I see it as a social scientific
way to better understand the challenges to democracy. So, I really appreciate that. - Thank you, Sue. - Thank you. Thanks, Milan. One thing I would add is that
we actually have replicated the same set of questions
about dimensions of democracy, you know, what's important
in, I don't know, six or seven different
countries, very varied, Brazil, Poland, the UK, South Africa, bunch of different countries. And it's startling how
similar the results are. So, the view, you know, what really matters for democracy? What's essential? You know, people think
that equality of rights, of political rights, they
think that elect, you know, free and fair elections far and away the most important thing. And also, what doesn't matter so much. So, they actually, the votes
pope is that getting along and being nice to each
other isn't so important. I think, you know, like having legislators who, you know, go out to
dinner together to whatever, not that they don't think it's important, it's not as important. So, there's a lot of
conversions of the ideas about what democracy is internationally, I guess, I would just say
for folks who are interested in thinking about what you can do and less of our kind of
nerdy papers that we write. Another Yale professor, Tim Snyder in the history
department, his book on his, sort of really basically
pamphlet "On Tyranny" has a wonderful set of ideas about very concrete things you can do, like get subscriptions to newspapers and choose an organization
that you wanna champion, and help labor unions, and so on. So, I would take a look at Tim's book. - Great, thanks a lot, Sue. And then, Jacob, please. - Yeah, so first, if you didn't notice, 'cause Sue was talking, I was holding up "On Tyranny," which is right next to my desk. But I was also gonna mention I'm part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Commission on
"Reimagining the Economy." And it's a successor to the, this is an embargoed copy, and the real thing
doesn't have the binder, but it's a successor
to a well-known report that they did on improving the
Health of American democracy. And I think, it is telling
that, first of all, you could get together a
very broad cross section of people from very wide range of fields. And they all agreed that our future and our democracy
depends on thinking about how our we can make our economy work better for more Americans. And that kind of brings us full circle to where both Sue and I began
that, you know, ultimately, like capitalist democracy has this, you know, among rich democracies
has this pretty impressive track record of resilience in the face of a lot of
very fundamental shocks. And it rests on this idea that, as Milan said, that voters have autonomy. It also rests on the prosperity that wealth well-regulated
markets can produce. And it's that, you know,
that complementarity as political scientists call
it, of capitalism, democracy, that with reforms to both
capitalism and democracy should get us forward into the future. - Great.
- And so that, I think it's really great that, and yes, I know, I think it's really great the
academy has put out a report for how we might think about that. - Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jacob. So, I wanna also thank our staff at ISPS. We have the most amazing
staff that allow us to do these events, especially
Pam Green, Rick Harrison, and Kira Wishard who did
all of the arrangements to make this event possible. I wanna thank our panelists, Sue Stokes from Chicago, Milan, and Jacob from Yale. And I also want to thank everyone who attended our talk today, for the wonderful questions they shared, and the interesting conversations those questions generated. So, with that, thank you very much. And I look forward to sharing
additional ISPS events in the future with all of you. Have a nice evening. - Thank you.
