Populism and Its Causes

GERALD NEUMAN: Welcome. I'm Gerald Neuman. I'm one of the directors of the Human Rights Program, and we're very pleased that you're all here for what we think will be a very exciting conference over the next day and a half, or half and a day, on the subject of human rights in a time of populism. We actually started thinking about this conference quite a while ago, after first Brexit, then the US election, then watching a series of elections in Europe-- some of which might be thought to have turned out better than others. And the rise of populism as a very common issue in the world scene, which has implications for human rights, both in terms of what are the policies that populist governments in power adopt with regard to their own populations. And also, the issue of the rise of populism in countries and regions that have been very supportive of the international human rights system. I'm thinking particularly in terms of the United States and the European Union as supporters of the international human rights system, in which there were now administrations coming into power that may have very different attitudes towards the international human rights system. And what does that mean for the system? So we wanted to think more deeply about the questions of populism and its relationship to human rights. What the causes of the rise of populism may be, what the effects may be, both domestically and in foreign policy. Look around the world at some examples in different parts of the world of the phenomenon of populism. Not thinking that we would find uniform answers to all questions in all the different parts of the world. And then, what lessons the human rights system might learn from the rise of populism. And what steps the human rights system should take in order to deal with some new challenges that may be arising as a result of populism. So that is the program that we're going to be following for the next day and a half. I'd like to thank our co-sponsors. The Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Kennedy School, the Institute for Global Law and Policy here at the law school, the HLS Advocates for Human Rights, the Harvard International Law Journal, and the Harvard Human Rights Journal. And we'd also like to express our appreciation for support that we've received from the Asia Center at Harvard University for this conference. So with that in mind, we're going to move to the first panel. And you have programs. And fuller biographies of the speakers are in the programs. We'll try to keep introductions to a minimum. But briefly, if I can introduce the panelists on this panel. First, immediately to my right is Peter Hall, who is the Krupp Foundation Professor of European Studies and the Department of Government here at Harvard and the author of numerous books and articles on European politics and comparative political economy. Next, Ruth Okediji, who is the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Professor of Law here at Harvard Law School, and a renowned scholar on international intellectual property law and the role of intellectual property in social and economic development. And third, Matthew Stephenson, who is Professor of Law here at HLS, an expert on the application of positive political theory to legal institutions and an international consultant and advisor on anti-corruption. And with that, let me give the floor to Peter. Thank you. PETER HALL: OK, thank you. Let me just see if this, do I, do I point this at, what do I point this at? This? I don't point it at anything, I just click it. All right. Well, let me begin by thanking Gerry for including me in this very interesting event. I'm not a lawyer, as you just heard. I'm a scholar of European politics. And I'm going to speak about the rising sources of support for populist parties in the developed democracies. I think some of what I have to say may travel to the developing world, some of it may not. And I hope these very general remarks that I'm going to make are, provide some useful background for the discussions we're going to have more specifically about human rights and some of the consequences of support for populism. Can you hear me? Is this coming through the? It's fine. OK, so of course, to talk about the sources of rising support for populism in 15 minutes is a little bit like trying to recite the collected works of William Shakespeare in 15 minutes. So I can only make a few points. And each point I make deserves more elaboration than I can give it, but my hope is to be a little bit provocative. And I'm going to treat three topics. Now the suspense ends and we see if the slides work. So they do. So first of all, what is contemporary populism? Gerry asked me in particular to make some remarks about that. Why do more and more people vote for populist candidates and parties? And thirdly, not quite the same question, why now? What are the macro level developments that inspire rising levels of support for such parties, particularly in the developed democracies? Populism has, of course, been around for a long time, including in this country in various forms and certainly in Latin America. At one time or other, populism was seen as a Latin American sport. But it's now a transnational phenomenon that I think is of great importance. So how should we define populism? It's a highly contestable topic. I'm not, I'm sure that not everyone in this room will agree with my views. But let me just simply state them. Populism has normative connotations, as we all know. Positive for some, negative for others. And yet each group on either side of that issue wants to define populism somewhat differently. And maybe they should be welcome to do that, as Humpty Dumpty would have advised. But the approach that I would take to this is to ask, what is the real world phenomenon of such importance that we need a label for it? And in my view, for at least the European democracies and this country, this would be radical right wing candidates who are mounting new kinds of appeals in the contemporary era. And some commentators in the blogosphere, and of course, there's a huge set of blogosphere work on this, some of those commentators suggest we should call these right wing populists fascists, in order to preserve a positive connotation, a more positive connotation for the word of populism. But fascism entails dictatorship, and that's not the case for most of the parties and candidates that I look at. So I would define populist parties or candidates as ones with a distinctive set of appeals. Namely those who claim to speak for a broad people. Not all people, but a broad people. A people whose voice is said to have been ignored by the political elite. A political elite that's presented as corrupt or incompetent. And of course, that definition owes a great deal to Jan-Werner Muller's study of populism, to Cas Mudde, who's looked at it carefully in Europe. And in those terms, populism comes in both left wing and right wing variants. However, in the developed democracies, there's more diversity on the left, where it's much harder to assign that what we might call radical left parties to the populist category or non populist category. And of course, the right wing variant is further distinguished by a virulent nationalism, which typically presents a globalization in its many dimensions as a force to be opposed, and which demonizes a set of out groups, including most notably, immigrants of other races and religions. So note that on this definition, politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Bernie Sanders in this country, represent an important phenomenon in their own right, an important political phenomenon in my view certainly. Namely, radical critics of the inequalities of capitalism, but they're not populists per se, at least according to this definition. Now on this definition, over the past two decades, support for populist candidates has risen significantly in the developed, as well as the developing world. And indeed, I think this is one of the most important political phenomena of our time. So where are those votes coming from? Let me begin with two caveats. First, I'm going to emphasize the transnational commonalities in what I think is a global populist movement. I think there is a transnational populist movement. This is probably the only issue, only one of two issues maybe with which I agree with Steve Bannon. But national variations inevitably feed into this. As Tolstoy might have said, all nations are unhappy, but every nation is unhappy in its own way. Recent flows of immigration in countries such as Germany matter more than they do in some others. Corruption is more of an issue in east central Europe than it is elsewhere. Votes for Brexit had something to do with English nationalism. So there are elements of national distinctiveness, which stand in the way of monolithic generalization. But the second caveat is this. Where populist causes or candidates win elections, as they did in the case of the Brexit referendum, as some would argue they did in the last presidential election here, where they do, they inevitably do so on the back of a broad and multiply motivated coalition. So as we know, more than 90% of Republicans voted for Donald Trump. And many for reasons that do not explain, for instance, why the French might have voted for Marine Le Pen. So I think those are two important caveats. And for this reason, I think one of the most interesting dimensions of support for populism in the developed democracies, is why it has been so strong among white working class voters. Not least because that particular appeal spells political disaster for the traditional center left. And in my view, the ethnographic literature provides crucial clues about why this might be the case. To take only one well-known example, think of Arlie Hochschild's interviews with folks in Louisiana. I think those interviews reveal something important. They suggest that many of these people feel left behind, in this now familiar phrase. That is to say, socially marginalized. And marginalized in both economic and in cultural terms. So movement from a manufacturing to a service economy, and some would say now to a knowledge economy, have left many people, as we well know, without the kind of secure middle class living that they might have once anticipated. And cultural frameworks that have seen the elite embrace post materialist values, and I'm thinking of many people in this room, have left other people with more traditional values feeling like strangers in their own land, as Hochschild argues in her book. So with Noam Gidron I've been doing some research to see if this notion that support turns on feelings of left behind, see if that travels beyond the ethnographic studies in which we see reports of that. And to do this, we assess whether people feel socially marginalized with a question that asks them about the subjective social status. Namely, where they think they sit on an overall social ladder. There's that question on the slide. And we find in this work, two things. First, white men without a college education feel more marginal to society today than they did 30 to 35 years ago. In 11 of the 12 countries for which we can find evidence for this on this measure. So there is some evidence. It's a modest decline, but there's some evidence of a decline in this sense of subjective social status. An indication that over time, there are groups of people, particularly white men with less than college education, who feel less central to society. I might note, by the way, that when we look at women without a college education, their subjective social status has increased dramatically in these countries over time. They feel more central to society on this measure at least, than they did in the late 1980s. So that's the first thing we find. Second, even when we condition our estimations on a whole bunch of other factors that might affect how a person votes, based on data from 26 European countries in 2012, we find that this sense of social marginalization, this sense that I'm no longer at the center of my society, inclines people to vote either for parties of the populous right or parties of the populous left or radical left. Not necessarily populist. So a lot more could be said about this, and I'm happy to say more if there's time. But let me turn to the third question I want to address, which is why now? What kind of developments at the macro level have been leading people toward these populist parties? And of course, we could spend days arguing about this. And there's many kinds of evidence. Of this, I can't see my slides very well. Of necessity, my answer to this question is going to be more speculative, because this is actually a very hard issue on which to develop systematic evidence. We can think first about what might be called demand side developments. By that, I mean developments that give rise to the deep political discontent that clearly underpins rising support for populism. And then I'm going to say a few words about what we could call supply side developments. Namely, the ways in which public policies and party strategies impinge on this support. And my remarks are based on a growing body of evidence, but they're going to be so brief as to be virtually telegraphic. Thanks. So long-term economic developments clearly matter. Nothing I'm saying here is going to surprise anybody in this room. In particular, the loss of secure, reasonably well paying jobs-- often, though not always in manufacturing-- have left many people without secure jobs or incomes. The kind of incomes on which they could comfortably raise a family. And there's clear evidence that those circumstances, those economic circumstances are closely related to support for populist parties. But note that those who are worse off in economic terms, tend to gravitate towards parties of the radical left, while those who vote for parties or candidates of the populist right, tend to be a few runs up the economic or social ladder. And in some sense I think, worried about falling farther down that ladder. And there's some evidence that what bothers these supporters of populism, right populism in particular, the most, is not the immediate economic circumstances of their household, but rather a sense that they and their children no longer have the opportunities that they once thought they could expect. And they're not entirely wrong about that. Raj Chetty's data that I've just put up here, many of you will have seen, suggests that the younger cohorts in this country have much lower levels of opportunity than people who were born when I was. So these people's complaints are not so much about their personal household circumstances, as they are about the direction of society as a whole. For them, something that we could think of as a social contract is unraveling. Now some think that the relevant economic developments have to do mainly with the outsourcing that is associated with globalization. My own view is that technological change is more important for the economic insecurity that's central here. And that's important, because while protectionist policies can provide some elements of protection, if you like, against outsourcing, trying to stop technological change is a recipe for reducing general standards of living. So it matters what the sources of this are. But lest we think that populism is simply an unfortunate and inexorable byproduct of economic progress, we should note, and I would certainly argue, that many people's lives have been made worse by the neo-liberal policies pursued by Western governments, and some non-Western governments in the past 30 years. So if the root cause of discontent lies in the disappearance of what I would call decent jobs, and I think it does, we should remember that public policies can make existing jobs more or less decent. With minimum wage laws, with measures that facilitate or impede the organizing of trade unions, with regulations that impose certain obligations on firms or those who employ workers. So I think Western governments are reaping the fruits of what they have sown. And of course, cultural developments also matter here, and much could be said about that. But I'm going to allude to them only briefly in the context of developments on the supply side of the economy. So for 40 years after the Second World War, partisan competition in most Western democracies took place along a familiar left-right axis of the sort I portray in this diagram. In which support for state intervention and redistribution was central to the left side and opposition to that was central to the right side of this spectrum. I think as we all know, beginning in the 1980s, this traditional left-right cleavage was cross-cut by a second cleavage, often called a values cleavage, that separates people with a post-materialist or cosmopolitan values from people with more traditional values associated with conservative religious ideas, anti-immigrant sentiments, ethnic views of the nation and the like. And in that context, over the course of the 1980s and '90s, electoral competition in Europe, and I think in this country too, take place along the diagonal of this diagram. Because center left parties moved to support cosmopolitan values. And on the other end, that dimension is anchored by radical right parties espousing traditional values, but also laissez-faire economic policies. An important point. And you'll have noticed something interesting about this diagram. Namely, there are parties in all three of these four quadrants. Although only a few in the upper right quadrant. But there are no political parties in the lower left quadrant. And there are a lot of people in that lower left quadrant, namely people who want to see some kind of economic protection, but have relatively traditional and sometimes anti-immigrant views on values issues. So over the last decade or so, what's happened is that these radical right parties, which have always been traditional. Not to say authoritarian in their positions on values issues, have moved away from their laissez-faire positions, their low tax, small state positions on economic issues, and begun to argue for more redistribution, more kinds of social protection. Sometimes it's trade protection instead of more social benefits. But it's nonetheless a clear message. And of course, you can see what's happened. And I think that that is true also in this country, although I don't have time to say much more about it I'm going to close very quickly here. This has had two effects. First, well the other, I suppose the other development that I want to emphasize here, is that over the same period of time, over the past 30 years, there's been a convergence in the economic platforms of the center left and the center right. To many people, the center left and the center right looks like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And I would argue that on economic issues, that's true, even in the US, where nonetheless, polarization is so widely a feature of our political system. And that's had two effects. First, it means that many people wonder whether anybody speaks for them. Whether the parties are indeed simply Tweedledum and Tweedledee. And secondly, it means that the mainstream parties, which have been so similar on economic issues, have in an effort to distinguish themselves from one another, shifted to emphasize values issues. And that's what this slide indicates. And of course, by centering political competition around values issues, those parties have played right into the hands of the populist right, which wins votes primarily on values issues. So in fact, I think we're facing something like a perfect economic and social storm with serious consequences for the Western democracies, as well as the developing world. And I'll look forward to hearing more about that from the other panelists. Thanks. GERALD NEUMAN: Thank you. RUTH OKEDIJI: Thank you, Gerry, and thank you to everyone who's here. I want to focus my remarks building somewhat on themes that Peter has already articulated, but locating them in particular in the sub-Saharan African space. I find the subject both deeply perplexing and somewhat uncomfortable when thinking about sub-Saharan Africa in large part because values politics is not something that has been characteristic in most sub-Saharan African countries. Now one might say, this is because democracies are still young and fledgling, largely unstable. One might think that the real issues tend to be principally economic, and therefore, democratic values have not been deeply entrenched. And one might think that in fact, what's going on in most of sub-Saharan Africa is the question of how to integrate their economies more significantly and materially into the global economic order. I think all of those observations are correct. But I think they also mask something that is much more fundamental and that has, in my view, something that's squarely laid at the feet of international human rights. And in particular, the reporting and the credibility mechanisms that are associated with norm setting in the international human rights corpus. In my comments, in my written comments, I highlight the fact that international human rights law has long had an Africa problem. That Africa problem is one that is both a problem of legitimacy, the extent to which African leaderships in the post-colonial state viewed international human rights both as a source of leverage for its anti-colonial struggle. But it was also deeply resistant to the international human rights framework. In part, because it was presented as a neutral set of values that had universal appeal. And while it was politically expedient for many countries to embrace the Universal Declaration and certainly in the heyday of post-colonial statehood it was accompanied quite sharply by deep discontent and by deep resistance in some quarters of the United Nations system. And so I start off first by putting on the ground what I think is really going on in the sub-Saharan African space, where one might on the surface say, that there have been significant democratic wins in the last 10, 15 years. We've seen Nigeria, for example, now pass democratic governments twice with relatively peaceful elections. We've seen Namibia engage actually in e-voting for the first time. Again, a very stable transition. And then there's Kenya. And I put this picture of the famous handshake, for those of you who've been following what's been happening in Kenyan politics. And I start here with what I think is part of the consequences of what's happening in Western liberal democracies and the spillover effects or at least the reaction and perhaps masked effects of what's happening the sub-Saharan African continent. So Kenya, again joining the list of countries where democratic elections ostensibly have been free, fair and have been stable most importantly, as you know dubbed Raila the people's president. The idea being that corruption is what produced the presidential results that brought the re-election of the old president. And there was, of course, deep chasm protests efforts by the people's president to ensure that the legitimacy of the democratic process remained in challenge. For the first time on the continent, a judiciary ruled that there had to be a revolt of the presidential elections. And of course, the same outcome occurred. Raila continued to contest the outcome of the elections, generating sufficient angst and division by appealing in many ways to what are, I would say, some populist tendencies. The idea that it is us versus them. I belong to the people. This is an educated elite that depends on technocratic expertise in making judgments. And of course, the economic conditions across the continent and in Kenya as well, continue to reveal deepening economic divide between the haves and the have nots. And so the people's president continue to generate significant credibility, significant appeal. Destabilizing what one would otherwise call a fairly fair and transparent, at least certainly by sub-Saharan African standards, election outcome. Kenyans went to sleep one night and woke up the next and there was-- actually, this is poignant because we're not sure how long the handshake will last, so it's completely fine. But went to bed one morning in a society that was deeply divided, in which people who were in favor of the opposition really felt that they had a voice that represented who they were, their everyday struggles. These were the ordinary people who had been left behind by the political elite, and whose interests and whose priorities were marginalized and sidelined in national politics. And there was also the sense that there was a legacy of leadership. That from father to son with a ruling class essentially that had crystallized over the years of independence. And that there was no way for the average person or ordinary politicians, in fact, to begin to represent the people in what was essentially an iron cage of politics. And so the people of Kenya went to bed one night, woke up the next morning, and here was the famous handshake that has reverberated around the continent, and in some ways, around the world, leaving the people's president essentially in some kind of detente with the ruling class. What that handshake means, I will reflect on as I go through the talk. My sense is that the sense, the form of populism, this deep dissatisfaction arising from political economic insecurity, is a strange thing to associate with populism or quasi populism in the African context, because economic insecurity has been the status quo since the post-colonial state emerged. I will say, however, that there is something different about the sense of economic anxiety that has tinged the political class and that has stirred what we would historically have simply referred to as tribal interests. Now there are lots of things that Africa cannot teach Western developed mature democracies. But the one thing Africa can teach is tribalism. Tribalism has long characterized the political process. And it is very much shaped around the sense of us versus them. The sense of superiority, be it on racial grounds, be it on caste grounds, be it simply as the result of the colonial state and the way in which power was allocated amongst different ethnic groups. But one thing about tribalism is, it's always been a zero sum game. It has never been about pluralistic politics. And certainly in the 1960s and the 1970s, there was an effort to try to transform tribal politics into some form of a pluralistic democratic process, in which representative voice and representative vote would carry the day over and above tribal affiliations and tribal tendencies. That has not been successful in sub-Saharan Africa. And in fact, within the ostensible political process, tribalism goes and runs quite deeply in the way in which power is shared, in the way in which power is transferred, and in the kinds of political institutions that in essence, make it very difficult for claims about human rights violations in the process to become the focal point of international human rights institutions. So one of the challenges, of course, is that when you have an appeal to the kind of deep dissatisfaction arising from political or economic isolation and insecurity, that becomes amplified when you can tie or connect that dissatisfaction with the ruling elites' allegiance to neo-liberalism. And that has, of course, been the situation in most of the African economies in which we have seen stable transitions of power, but we've seen the emergence of opposition forces, opposition figures who have become heroes in the minds of the average person or in the minds of a significant population to demand access to political governance. And to demand access in particular, to the kinds of rights, economic and social and cultural, that have long eluded the average citizen of an African country. I think the populism of this kind of historic tribalistic kind of exclusionary force has long impeded the development of what I would call a thick corpus of human rights governing, and shaping, and defining the way in which the African post-colonial state has engaged in democratic governance. In fact, the emphasis of course, in the international human rights field on political rights, even in the face of significant economic and developmental challenges, has not helped. In fact, it has enhanced the sense that what is needed is not liberal policies and is not democratic institutions, but instead, the kind of leader that is going to simply declare rights and the interests of his or her political tribe. And in this case literal, his or her linguistic and sociological tribe. And to elevate that above adherence or allegiance to pluralism or to international engagement. Put simply, I think that there is room for the argument that when you look at the way in which African leaders, especially those who are brought before the International Criminal Court, for example, appeal to these populist tendencies, the argument has always been that I have kept us immune as a country or as a people, from these foreigners. We have not in the immigrant sense, but in the sense of foreign agents, in the sense of foreign expertise, international institutions who have been part of the norm setting process, that has sought to elevate democratic process perhaps over and above. And as I make an argument, to the detriment of what I think is real fully grounded and fully matured opportunities for democracy to evolve in the pluralistic sense. So there is room, I think, for the international human rights system to be charged in some way as being an ally of these failed neo-liberal policies that have characterized the kinds of intrusive recommendations by the IMF or the World Bank or of international institutions, that have left millions and millions of average Africans in squalor and in deep poverty. Now, one of the things that African states try to do in this tension between the use of international human rights instruments to advance independence and sovereignty, and at the same time to resist the sense of the other and of the foreign and of the expert coming in to shape cultural and normative identity, was to develop a distinct and culturally relevant or regionally distinctive African Charter of Human Rights. The African Charter of Human Rights has been critiqued and celebrated for lots of different reasons. But what I want to identify is one consistent critique has been the claw-backs, right? The idea that African states were limited in many ways, or could be limited in many ways to simply recognizing and protecting human rights up to the degree that national law allowed that too. Now, in systems where tribalism reigns, and in systems where de facto and de jure discrimination against members of other minority groups or ethnic groups was concretized by economic policies that allowed those who did not have access to be further distance from the means of economic progress nationally only served, I think, to concretize the resentment that average populations faced-- When talking about the promises that human rights and the aspirations of the human rights regimes. These clawbacks, and if you think about the ways in which Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Gambia's Jammeh were in fact used to justify either throwing out the white farmers or Jammeh in particular, elevating only members of his own ethnic group in all of the elite positions, really became a source of division in a way that made people distrust the political process, and made them more willing to embrace these kinds of economic nationalist tribal sentiments that had become a part of the political process. Now the problem, of course, is that the excesses of the elite political class were not captured by human rights monitoring or by human rights enforcement. Why? Because the emphasis on political rights tended to elevate processes and institutions above the material choices the governments were making that were systematically disenfranchising and marginalizing large areas of the populace. If you look at the annual human rights reports, starting from the US Department of State to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, all of these have been for the last 25, 30 years, been singularly preoccupied with political processes and political institutions, without recognizing the quite embedded tribal and non pluralistic and largely alienating tendencies that these policies were creating and fomenting the interest in, what I would call, a quasi populist appeal to reject anything that looked to be consistent with a neo-liberal order. At least in the sub-Saharan African context, I think building human rights initiatives and priorities around political rights, tends to ignore the structural conditions that are a prerequisite to the exercise of personal liberty. And I think there are three countries that illustrate this quite powerfully, and that have been problematic from a human rights perspective in thinking about how to address the lack of interest and the lack of monitoring on economic and social rights, and this emphasis on political rights. So Zimbabwe I've already mentioned, most you are familiar with what is happening in Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. But what most reports have not picked up on in the transition, in the recent transition of the ouster of Robert Mugabe, is of course, that power was transitioned not necessarily in consistency with a real full-fledged robust democratic process. But rather in reaction to Mugabe's own preference for handing power over to someone that had already been self-selected. So had there not be the intense, the intense entrenchment of the ruling elite, there may have been no one for Mugabe to hand power over to. The fact that someone existed that was willing to accept that power, and that the people recognized as an inevitable heir to Mugabe's non-democratic rulership, is in itself an ironic testament to the way in which process and institutions have been elevated over the substance of whether or not democratic inclusion and pluralistic policies are allowed to flourish within the continent. South Africa, of course, the same thing. Angola, in fact, the same thing. It suggests that law, and particular human rights law, and economic inequality have long co-existed in the sub-Saharan African continent. And that the democratic processes that would have constrained the kind of unlimited power grabs and the way in which economic policies have really marginalized large groups of people on principally ethnic grounds, have been ignored in the emphasis in the human rights realm, in focusing on reporting on political rights. One final point, and then I want to close up. And that is the way in which human rights organizations have shaped the human rights debate in sub-Saharan African countries. So that even domestic non-governmental organizations and human rights organizations have felt an inability to articulate the cause of the deep decay of pluralistic politics, and the way in which tribalistic politics have become the status quo. And that is because there has been no capacity in many ways, to report on the economic and the financial and the corruption that tends to accompany many of these populist campaigns. So I guess I would wrap up by saying in terms of some observations, my own sense is that the human rights regimes really need to begin to think more closely, and there needs to be some reflection on how group and economic, social and cultural rights might assume a more significant role, at least in the shaping of the global human rights agenda. To translate those rights not only on paper, but into meaningful institutions that allow a check and balance on the kinds of policies that have produced the deep political and economic insecurities and dissatisfaction, and a legitimacy that many on the African continent perceive of the normal average, what we would call democratic processes that elect leaders, but leave people in a deep state of poverty. GERALD NEUMAN: Thank you. Matthew? MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON: Great. Thanks so much. So I think in many ways what I have to say today is going to be a little bit narrower, but I think very closely related. So I'm not by any means an expert in human rights. I generally like them and think there should be more of them. But the main reason that I'm here, is that my principal research focus these days is on corruption and anti-corruption. And Gerry and the other conference organizers had a sense, which I share, that corruption is a big part of the story with respect to the rise of these populist leaders. And so in this opening session, I wanted to try to maybe lay the groundwork for a little bit more discussion of how that issue factors into this other constellation of issues, by raising a couple of questions about this relationship between corruption and the rise of populism. And then maybe a little bit more indirectly, the human rights issues that are going to be the central focus of the discussion. The first of these questions is, you can think of it as a broad, actually, set of questions, but I'd summarize it by framing it this way. In what ways might corruption or the public or rhetorical response to corruption contribute to the rise of populism? Particularly the more authoritarian or quasi authoritarian versions of populism. I think that as many as are likely aware, many-- not all, but many populist leaders-- left and right wing populists, but I'm focusing more on the right wing populists-- have deployed the rhetoric of anti-corruption as a significant feature of their campaigns, and many people have attributed the emphasis on that issue-- attributed to the emphasis on an issue, at least part of the appeal of these populist movements. So for those of us in the United States, Donald Trump's drain the swamp campaign slogan is probably the most familiar, but folks like Viktor Orban in Hungary and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines and numerous others, have talked very explicitly about corruption. Both Peter and Ruth referenced this in their presentations, the idea that the existing elite or the existing government is corrupt. And that one of the reasons to give power to these populist leaders or movements is a sense that the existing political elites are so thoroughly corrupt or have so failed to solve these deep rooted corruption problems, that the populist alternative starts to seem more appealing. While we don't have really good rigorous evidence testing the hypothesis that corruption contributes to the rise of populism, there is pretty good evidence that's suggestive of the validity of that hypothesis. There is good evidence, for example, that in those countries with higher levels of corruption or perceived corruption when you do surveys related to, though not the same as the kind that Peter was talking about in his work-- trust in government is lower. Belief that democracy is the right system of government is lower. Willingness to entertain more radical alternatives to the status quo is higher, and so on and so forth. So that may be one direct mechanism through which corruption, especially unchecked systemic corruption, can lay the groundwork for a populist party or leader or movement to make headway. Another maybe indirect channel through which corruption or failure to check systemic corruption might contribute to the rise of populism is the idea, again for which we have decent, though certainly not conclusive evidence, that systemic corruption contributes to a bunch of the other problems that Ruth and Peter have talked about, that are often thought to be contributors to the rise of populism. So economic inequality, for example, seems to have broadly speaking in the data, a correlation with corruption. The frequency of macroeconomic crises seems to be associated with widespread corruption. People feeling like they don't have adequate access to health care or education, or that their jobs are insecure, or that the only people who can get good, stable jobs are those who are well-connected or pay bribes, are the sorts of things that might contribute to the appeal of populist leaders. So for this reason, there is I think a plausible hypothesis that failing to address systemic, entrenched corruption in a society may lay the groundwork for the rise of these kinds of populist leaders or movements. I'm certainly sympathetic to that hypothesis. I think broadly speaking it's probably true at least some of the time. But I do want to raise a few qualifications or caveats about that idea, that there's this kind of causal arrow leading from unchecked corruption to the rise of populism, especially what you might think of is as right wing or quasi authoritarian populism. The first point is something I'll return to in a moment, because it's going to be related to the second kind of question I want to pursue. But I'll raise it here and bracket it. And that's that we need to be careful not to assume too quickly that when populist leaders or movements rail against the corruption of the elite or say they're going to drain the swamp and deal with a society's corruption problem, they mean by corruption what people like me, who study this in an academic sense, mean by corruption. I think when I was listening to Peter's presentation, when he was talking about how populist parties, especially in Western Europe and the United States, are railing against the corruption of the elites, it's not clear that they mean bribery and embezzlement and things of that sort. There's is a different broader sense of corruption. So I think that we need to be careful to be sensitive to the fact that the word corruption means many different things in many different contexts. And the appeal of a kind of drain the swamp slogan might not actually be because people are worried that bribery, and nepotism, and embezzlement are extensive. That might be a kind of political code word for a different sense of corruption. Second thing, it's an important caveat, is that while I think there's a plausible case to be made that failure to really deal with and root out systemic corruption, especially in some of the developing countries of the sort that Ruth was emphasizing more in her presentation, may contribute to the rise of these dangerous populist movements-- There's a concern that under some circumstances, aggressive anti-corruption efforts may themselves lay the groundwork for the rise of insurgent populist parties. And this can occur in a couple of ways that are distinct, but nonetheless related. The first is that the exposure of widespread corruption through media investigations or prosecutions can, under some circumstances, end up discrediting the political establishment across the board. So these investigations, we think they're good, they're exposing corruption, but under certain circumstances actually, it makes people even more cynical about the existing political class. Makes them even more open to the idea that some kind of outsider with no political background or history is the way to go. The second thing that can sometimes happen is at least in extreme cases, anti-corruption investigations and prosecutions have caused the collapse, the entire collapse of major political parties, sometimes multiple political parties, leaving a power vacuum into which charismatic figures can enter. So I think Italy in the 1990s is probably the lead example of this sort of thing happening, where the so-called tangentopoli or Clean Hands investigation, did a couple of things. One is, it caused essentially the collapse in Italy of the center left and the center right. Because they had been governing Italy since basically the end of the Second World War, particularly the center right, and the exposure of corruption in those parties was so widespread, the parties basically ceased to exist. Which, and it also substantially increased the cynicism of many Italian voters about the political class generally. And I'm not an expert in Italy, but I've spoken to people who are, and there is the argument that this is one of the things that opened the field for someone like Berlusconi. Because the traditional parties were gone, he was perceived as this incredibly successful businessman, very charismatic and ran very much as I'm an outsider who's different. Now of course, I'll get to this more a little bit in a moment. Berlusconi himself, is not exactly a paragon of integrity. But there was something about the way in which this root and branch demolition of the traditional political parties to an anti-corruption investigation created a dangerous power vacuum. Brazil actually right now is the country where I'm most worried about this replicating. The parallels, I think again, as an outsider to both countries, between the so-called Lava Jato or Car Wash investigation in Brazil, and the Clean Hands investigation in Italy are eerie in many ways. And there is a concern, at least I have, that this I think in many ways really much needed and to some degree, heroic effort that Brazilian prosecutors and judges are undertaking to root out corruption in Brazil could, if the right steps are not taken, create the kind of openings for a Berlusconi-like figure or worse. And I gather we're already seeing evidence that this is happening. So that's, I think an important qualification or caveat to the idea that if you only root out corruption, then of course, you'll dampen the appeal of populists. Another consideration I want to put on the table, it's a little bit different, but I feel like it's worth raising, especially when you consider countries like the ones Peter was focusing on a bit more and the ones Ruth was focusing on. And it has to do less with the actual legal or policy response to traditional corruption, than the language or rhetoric that people, including people, like people in this room, the civil society community, academics, journalists, commentators and others use to describe the failings of a political system. Whether it's the excessive influence of special interest groups and money in politics or various other kinds of systematic unfairness. And let me lay out the question I want to raise by articulating two hypotheses about the 2016 election and surrounding events. And they go like this. Hypothesis number one is that the United States is at the very least a plutocracy, if not a kleptocracy. It's fair to characterize its institutions as those that are systemically corrupt in a variety of ways. Not through illegal corruption necessarily, like bribery or embezzlement, but through all sorts of ways that those who are wealthy or powerful or otherwise, are able to manipulate the system for their own ends. But, the argument continues, the traditional mainstream parties were reluctant to use the language of corruption to describe the failings of the US political system. And this created the space on the left for candidates like Bernie Sanders, and on the right for candidates like Donald Trump to seize that terrain, to use that rhetoric that would resonate with many American voters to call to call the system corrupt. On this view, the great failing of the elite, the establishment, the mainstream, whatever you want to call it, was the reluctance to use the rhetoric of corruption to describe the systemic failings of the US political system. So this is an argument articulated by our law school colleague, Larry Lessig. It's been advanced by the former journalist, now writer and researcher, Sarah Chayes, that have made that argument quite explicitly. And it is certainly a plausible argument. The alternative argument, though, is that this position, though I'll call the Lessig-Chayes position, has it exactly backwards. And that the real problem was the overuse of scorched earth rhetoric to describe the very real and genuine failings of the US political system in ways that inadvertently managed to discredit that establishment conventional way of doing things. So the tendency to describe every policy failure as the result of the shadowy cabal of special interests, the Tweedle Dum, Tweedle Dee language. I think I'd actually take issue here with Peter's point that the two major parties in the US and Western Europe really are on economic policy, basically the same. But that idea that there's no difference between the two major parties because they're all neo-liberals have been captured by corporations-- the idea that just the kind of what I think of as the sort of fashionable cynicism of, oh, they're all a bunch of crooks and liars and corrupt. This is the argument. That it wasn't the under-use of the rhetoric of corruption to describe the failings of the system that opened the door for politicians like Trump, it was the overuse of that rhetoric and the de-legitimization of the kind of boring, dull, un-sexy kind of politics. That it's about incrementalism and coalition building, and differences in policy agendas, and so forth that made it seem much more appealing to have someone who's just going to come in and blow the whole system up. So I'll close this part of my talk, and I don't have that much time left. I do have one more question I want to address. But the underlying dilemma as I see it, is corruption itself can undermine the legitimacy of the political establishment, thereby opening the door to an insurgent populist. But at the same time, attempt to attack corruption, whether it's through actual prosecutions or through the use of strong rhetoric to describe the existing system, can also under some circumstances, discredit the establishment and open the door to insurgent populists. And I think a challenge is figuring out how to navigate that dilemma. The second question, which I realize I have less time, but I'll try to get it across quickly, it has to do less with the rise of populism, and what happens once the populist movement or leader gets into power. I don't think it would be a terribly surprising observation to anyone in this room, that many of these populist leaders, whether or not they ran on a drain the swamp kind of platform, are not exactly paragons of integrity. Whether you're talking about Berlusconi in Italy or Orban in Hungary or Thaksin in Thailand or the Kirchners in Argentina or Donald Trump in the United States, very often you see these people engage in really substantial corruption of their own. Which raises a puzzle-- why doesn't this behavior alienate the supporters of the populist movement more? If what they're really upset about, as this is the point that Peter alluded to, is the idea that a well-connected, entrenched elite is unfairly benefiting without exhibiting the virtues of hard work and so forth, and the system is rigged, why isn't the Kirchners or Thaksin or Trump benefiting their families and their cronies the ultimate expression of that corruption that the populists are allegedly really upset about? And also, you see in opinion polls over and over again, people say they really don't like corruption, it's really bad. So what's going on? If at least part of the appeal of the populist is the opposition to this kind of corruption, once they win office and we see this behavior, why don't they seem to lose that much support at least in the short to medium term? And I don't know the answer, but let me throw out a few hypotheses. And again, countries may vary, as Peter and Ruth both emphasize. So I'm not, no pretense of anything universal. But a few possibilities. One is that, well, maybe and this is the point that I alluded to before, the rhetoric of corruption or anti-corruption wasn't really what the populists were appealing to. They weren't appealing to a worry about corruption in the conventional form. Corruption was being used as a kind of code word for effete cosmopolitan snobs, and Jews, and immigrants taking your jobs, or depriving you of your rightful place in society, or the social status to which you think you are entitled. It didn't really have to do with giving contracts to friends, and hiring relatives, or taking bribes. I think that's certainly possible. I think another possibility is that even though voters don't like corruption, many voters, including the ones to whom the populists appeal most strongly, if there's one thing they dislike more than corruption, it's moralistic scolds. And I think one of the things we sometimes see in these cases, again Italy is I think a useful example here, but there are others as well. When elites like us go on and on about the corruption of this leader, it is sometimes perceived as holier than thou, self-righteous, moralistic scolding, which people resent. And they might resent it as well, if they themselves, have occasionally bent or broken the rules. They might experience these attacks on the leader for the leader's lack of integrity as attacks on them from a group of people who often they perceive as don't even have the standing to raise those kinds of concerns. So again, in Italy the attacks of the Italian left, the Communist Party in particular on Berlusconi, were often greeted as sanctimonious and hypocritical. Some have taken this one step further and suggested that one of the tricks that at least some of these populist leaders managed to pull off is what you might term for lack of better words, the politics of absolution. That is, in societies where corruption is pervasive, and a lot of people have done stuff that's technically against the rules, what the more skillful of these populist leaders manage to do is establish kind of implicit mutual forgiveness. To tell the people, you guys are great. Everyone is always telling you you're bad, that our society is terrible, but you guys are great. And just do what you want to do. And the implicit bargain is I forgive you and you forgive me. Right? You steal a little bit, I steal a lot, but we're kind of on the same team. Maybe related to that too, is that even though people say don't like corruption, they might in some perverse way admire the charismatic populist leader who seems to be living the kind of life that they wish they could lead, if only they could. Again, to come back to Italy, there's apparently a lot of evidence that Italian voters thought that a lot of what Berlusconi did and a lot of the way he behaved, including all of his mistresses, was at least to Italian men, considered like, wow, he's living the dream. And apparently Trump has a similar appeal with many Americans. And it relates to the earlier point that sometimes the more one criticizes the vulgarity, and the lack of integrity and so on and so forth, it can end up leading to this dynamic where people who actually identify with that person experience these attacks as attacks on them. Saying that they're bad people, too. And it does seem to be, though, this strange paradox-- and I don't have the answer, but I hope it will be part of our conversation going forward-- where voters generally, and the supporters of populist movements in particular, will tell you that they care deeply about corruption, that one of the real reasons they're drawn to these outsiders is the feeling that they have to do something to clean up the systemic corruption of the system. But they don't seem to be bothered by what seems like pretty clear and convincing evidence of drastic corruption by these leaders themselves. And it's a real puzzle about how these shysters are able to pull it off. And I hope we can maybe make some progress in figuring out why that is. GERALD NEUMAN: Thank you. Our panelists have given us a lot think about, and now I would like to include the people in the discussion. Can I ask, are there people on the floor who'd like to speak? I'd like to remind you that this event is being recorded, so don't speak if you don't wish to be recorded. If you, could I please ask you to ask an actual question and to keep your remarks within certain brevity and to identify yourselves when your take the floor. Or I'll identify you. Richard. AUDIENCE: I want to just build on Matthew's point on the issue of once you open an anti-corruption kind of campaign, that actually could open up the insurgency. And I think that perfectly happened in the case of the Philippines, with Aquino's opening up the investigation, and in the process discrediting the whole system. But looking at the populist art of governance with the Duterte already in a position of power, I think the other thing we have to look at is the fact that how they can effectively deploy conspiracy theory. They say that whenever you expose corruption within the populist administration, they'll say that this is just a conspiracy of the regime to bring us down. And the other way of also people justifying this is saying, well, they're under siege, so they have to bribe other people in order to protect their projects. So I thought maybe that's another aspect that we could look at, and I think is relevant to Italy and other countries too. RUTH OKEDIJI: Well, I was just going to say something about that, and this is really Matthew's point, but I think that's really important. But that goes back to the point about legitimacy. By the time you see populist insurgents come up, there's already the scorched earth tactics. Over the course of time there has been this gradual erosion of faith and trust fueled by economic inequality, fueled by a sense of isolation, as Peter mentioned. Fueled by all sorts of different things. And this is the essence, really, of tribalism. It's the idea that if we don't save ourselves, nobody will save us. Right? And so once you lose legitimacy it doesn't matter how much you expose corruption, because the answer will be you're just trying to get rid of someone who's going to take care of our interests, and therefore we don't believe you. Reinforcing as Matthew says, the power and, in fact, the credibility of the populist regime. MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON: Yeah. I mean, definitely. The phenomenon you point out happens all the time. I mean, Ruth probably could have talked about this at much greater length, because several of the specific examples that she used in her presentation, and also discussed in her paper, fit this perfectly. Robert Mugabe was like, the maestro of the conspiracy theory. Everything was being engineered by the CIA. Jacob Zuma in South Africa, though complicated the situation as the same kind of populist leader, also, every time corruption was exposed, was saying this is all a CIA plot. Right? That was his line. So a couple of things about that-- one is that maybe slightly more encouragingly-- I was speaking to an expert in South African politics at a conference not too different from this one back in the fall, who suggested at least the Zuma example suggests that over time, this stops working. That it worked really well the first couple of times that Zuma deployed it, and then after a while, eventually he was forced to resign, it started losing its traction. The second thing, and I think this relates very much to your point and some of the larger discussion, there is no Archimedean neutral point in politics. But at the same time in certain polities, it seems like there are some institutions, whether formal or informal, that are more trusted. Or at least a cluster of them are trusted to give some version of the truth. So in South Africa, the Office of the Public Protector, at least when Thuli Madonsela was running it, kind of had that credibility, and was a counterweight to Zuma, even though she didn't have that much in the way of institutional power. Still, I think she had enough credibility. One of the concerns is that when you lose those independent voices, precisely the phenomenon you describe can take place. And I think this is to your point, the populists will try to undermine and discredit those-- so everything is fake news, right? And again, in this country we go for 30 years where people generally, but particularly one political faction has been talking about media bias over and over and over again, to the point where people might be more receptive now to the claim that anything you hear that's negative about your guy is actually the product of fake news, or conspiracy, or propaganda. I think you actually see this in Israel right now where, again, Netanyahu-- not a populist, necessarily the sort that we're talking about, but he and his supporters are very clearly trying to do things to discredit the police. Which in Israel, has traditionally been a very independent institution. More independent, independent from the attorney general and that cabinet. And to make various legal and other changes to discredit the significance of the police recommendations that Netanyahu and his associates be indicted. Right? So I think the point, I'm really glad you raised the point, because I think this is critical, and it actually goes to one of the issues I read. Why don't people care about corruption? Well, if they don't believe that it exists or everything is a plot, then it's not going to have the same kind of impact. GERALD NEUMAN: Peter, can I ask-- do you want to respond to what's just been said? Or-- PETER A. HALL: Not yet. GERALD NEUMAN: To any of what Ruth and Matthew have said? PETER A. HALL: No. GERALD NEUMAN: Or later? PETER A. HALL: No, other than to say it's been very interesting so far. [LAUGHTER] GERALD NEUMAN: Note the qualifier. So far. In the back. I can't quite see you. AUDIENCE: Thank you so much. Excellent presentations, all of you. I'm just curious to know, the role of these disenfranchised groups. You're talking about the Palestinians and the Israelis, you're talking about blacks, Latinos and here, the concept of building a wall to keep them away, and how does that play out? It seems like we're going, instead of corruption, it seems like you're getting more traction by really isolating these groups and really throwing the weight of the state, so to speak, or the weight of the power against this group to get the populace involved in the process, and getting to rally on your behalf. And I wonder, and you see that obviously in Germany and now here, is really very strong. And I wonder how you in the formulas you involve corruption and a lot of other factors, these groups have to do with race in the spectrum of these populous figure coming up? PETER A. HALL: OK, there's nothing I can speak to. So I quite agree with you. I think that while Matt has made a totally convincing case that issues of corruption are important here, certainly in the European countries I look at, and I would have said in this country too, it's the ethno-nationalist character of the appeal that it is in some ways the best candidate to be the central feature of these parties. And indeed, the studies do show that if you look at what's set of attitudes are most commonly and strongly associated with support for populist right parties, then anti-immigration sentiment is the attitude that comes out most strongly in those estimations. Now but what that is exactly and where it comes from is, I think, still something of a puzzle for us. And there seem to be a number of different things going on. I again, I'll try, I'll be brief, but let me just say something about that. So to some extent, this seems to be a genuine response to rising rates of immigration. Which has been a dimension of globalization, and in some ways that's why I think globalization is such a powerful trope for the radical right. Because it has multiple dimensions, and they can be seen as a negative. So in a country like Germany, and I think also in Italy, if we think about the last election, I think there's no doubt that a concern about rising rates of immigration plays a role in support for the populist right parties. On the other hand, as I'm sure you know, if you were to look across the regions of Europe and look for an association between the number of immigrants in that region and a right populist support, you would find no association. In fact, it's the areas of the UK with the largest numbers of immigrants who were most likely to vote to remain in the European Union. And of course, you can see why that would be the case. There's a way in which familiarity shifts people's views about the other. So the fear of immigration in Europe is strongest in the regions and the localities with the fewest immigrants. There's a way in which immigration is a specter associated with a certain kind of fear. And so that suggests that in addition to this one kind of channel, which has to do with a direct response to contact with rising rates of immigration, there may well be something else going on which has to do with the way in which, as many psychologists would argue, increasing economic insecurity tends to generate resentment against outgroups. It tends to lead people to look for outgroups, people of other races and religions, and immigrants are the natural candidates for that. And of course, this is exploited by populist right parties. And so there's a kind of endogenous effect in which, you know, if you look back at British electoral surveys, you'll find lots of anti-immigrant sentiment among the ordinary British working class people into the early '60s, which is the earliest we have these surveys for. So there is also an element of this being activated. So yes, I think you're right. And I think that there are some really interesting dynamics we're only beginning to understand there. GERALD NEUMAN: If I could just abuse the position of the chair for a moment, and ask Peter as a follow-up to that, in discussing populism as an issue about the relationship between-- PETER A. HALL: Can you-- is your mic on? Can people hear? GERALD NEUMAN: I think my mic is on. Maybe my mic is not close enough to my mouth. In discussing populism as involving a relationship of critique against elites, the role of immigrants and immigration is if I understand it, as an unaddressed problem as to which the political elites have been corrupt or incompetent, rather than the immigrants themselves being viewed as the elites against which the populist charge is directed. Or am I not under-- How should that be thought about? PETER A. HALL: My reading of the evidence, which is, I haven't contributed to this, but I've read a fair bit of it, would be no. The, I hate to break it to you, but the resentment of immigrants is a resentment of immigrants, not just a resentment of elites for allowing in immigrants. You know, there are strongly prejudicial views. There's probably a little bit of both, right? But in the surveys that I look at, it's people who talk about not wanting to have a Muslim as a neighbor or not thinking that there should be any more just religious displays and the like, who are most likely to be strong supporters of populist right parties. So I think that in some ways, it would be much easier to deal with if this were ultimately a critique of the immigration policies of elites. I will say for this group, the human rights group, that I think that this issue, the centrality of the immigration issue here, certainly in the developed democracies I look at, poses in some ways the most fundamental political dilemma for those who are committed to human rights and political progressives, in particular. How should they be responding? Should progressive center left parties be responding to very significant levels of concern about immigration by cutting back on immigration? And I think the issue's become even more difficult when we think it's not just a matter of closing the borders, it's also a matter of how you treat religious minorities inside countries like France or Germany or Austria, for instance. And there are serious issues there, which I think can't be totally resolved by simply saying, well, of course, we have to defend the cosmopolitan values and the human rights values that we think are the most important in the world. Because there's a possibility that if you do that, you won't be on the political scene anymore. And there won't be anybody to defend those values. So it is a genuine dilemma, as opposed to something easily resolved. GERALD NEUMAN: I'd just like to clarify that what I'm meant to be asking was not about the social phenomenon, but about the understanding of populism. And to the extent in which elites are treated as a key element in the definition of populism. PETER A. HALL: Oh, I see. Yes, well, you're right. GERALD NEUMAN: Identifying the elites, it's the incumbent elites who are not dealing with the immigrants who are seen as the problem. That's the, that's how that maps on to that definition of populism. PETER A. HALL: Yes, I think so. GERALD NEUMAN: Michael. PETER A. HALL: Sorry. GERALD NEUMAN: Sorry for the inclarity in my phrasing of the question. Michael Posner. AUDIENCE: Hi, yeah, Mike Posner from NYU. Peter, when you spoke initially, you talked about demand side and supply side. And on the demand side, one of the things you said, at least this is what I heard is, a big part or an element in addition to the anti-immigrant and issues you just described, a big part is that there are a significant number of people who are economically in trouble. And they're anxious about their own personal situation. And then you said on the supply side, liberal democratic parties or liberal left parties have in a sense ceded the ground on that discussion and are talking about values. And that's worked to their disadvantage. I am interested in knowing, are there in any countries you've looked at, are there examples of where center left parties have taken on the economic issues and rather than just saying we're sorry about it, come up with an affirmative agenda that says here's how we would deal with it, which is better than the other side? To what extent in any situation have you seen a successful response to that phenomenon? PETER A. HALL: I can't think of great success stories. It's a great, it's a very good question. I should have an answer for you that I don't have. I will say that I think it's not as if there are no differences between center left and center right in these countries, including in the US, as Matt said. But those differences in recent decades have had to do mainly with levels of social benefits. And if we took the view that many conventional economists take of populism, some economists take of populism, which is that it's a revolt against globalization, and the root cause was a failure to compensate the losers in the context of free trade agreements. And so in some sense, compensating the losers, the economic losers, is the solution to this, if that means social benefits, then I think that that's a missed diagnosis. You have to decide whether you see this as a response to your question or just me rabbiting on. But because it's not, I don't think it's social benefits that these people mainly want. And I don't think that's at the root cause of the problem. I think the root cause of the problem is what I call decent jobs. A capacity to have a job that pays well enough and has enough security that you can support a family comfortably on it. And you can look forward with a certain amount of optimism towards your future. And the reason I'm emphasizing this and why I think it's germane to your question is, if we could solve this with more social benefits, this political problem could be solved. But all you have to do is look at France, which has more than 50% of GDP runs through government revenue, and there are very significant social benefits. Or look at Denmark or Sweden, where there are also very generous welfare states, but there are also significant populist right parties. It's clear that social benefits, redistribution of the sort the center left has been willing to do, while desirable in itself in my view, is not an answer to this problem. And that is a real challenge. Because if the problem is to create decent jobs in the context of a dramatically changing economy, So. For that, that's why I think, I guess to take it back to why this is an answer or response anyway to your question, that's why I think I can't think of center left governments that have effectively responded to this issue. Because it is so difficult to address. MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON: Can I maybe, a couple of quick additions to that? I'm not sure I would necessarily be quite as pessimistic in so far as one could view those countries where the right wing populists haven't taken over, as countries where the center left or perhaps center right, has been successful, by virtue of the fact that they've designed a package of policies that keeps enough people happy, given their electoral system that the insurgent populists haven't taken over. So again, I think it depends on exactly what you're asking. If you're asking, places where the populists have taken over and then beaten back, that's one thing. But again, there, it's a fairly recent phenomenon. If the question is, are there countries where the populists haven't been able to get a foothold and take over in the first place, arguably because the political elite has done a good enough job in keeping enough people happy, then I think we got a lot of examples of that, right? But that's the optimistic. The pessimistic bit of this actually comes out of Peter's paper, so he could have said it too. But since he didn't, I think it's a point that he makes that's a really good one that's worth making. In many areas of politics we talk about an absolute welfare, but then also relative or positional welfare. And the former, in the former case, you can get win-win. You don't always. Sometimes we don't compensate the losers, and that's bad. But at least with respect to globalization, the economist would say it would be possible with the right package of policies to have globalization, free trade and so forth, and make everybody better off or at least no worse off. Because if you're increasing net social wealth if you do the right thing and you have the right kind of redistribution, you can solve that problem. But if what's going on is a positional issue, then everybody could be getting better off in an absolute sense, but certain people or groups are worse off in a relative or positional sense. And they're still going to be mad. So it was really, I thought it was really great about Peter's paper and the graph that he showed, is when people in different demographic groups were asked to say where they were on the social status ladder, it's not clear exactly from the way the question is phrased whether it's meant to be a relative or an absolute amount. But my conjecture is that most people interpret it at least implicitly, as relative. So they're thinking like, relative to where I was or where I think I should be, this is where I am. And that's harder, because that's kind of zero sum. You can't raise the status of, the relative status of women and marginalized groups, to go back to the previous question, other groups, without decreasing the relative status of traditionally privileged groups. And if you believe, as some people do, that people tend to fight harder about keeping what they have, or get angrier if they feel like they're losing what they have, then the people on the opposite side are made happy by getting something that didn't have, then this might create a kind of psychological political asymmetry. And so I would say, the optimist in me says hey, actually most liberal democracies in the Western world have beaten back the populist onslaught so far. But then the pessimist in me says, yeah, but if we want all these things and I think a lot of us in this group want, which is more equality, more opportunity and greater solicitude for the interests of marginalized groups, that will inevitably threaten the relative position of traditionally privileged groups. And they're going to get angry about it. And it's not clear there's anything we can do about that at that level. RUTH OKEDIJI: If I could-- PETER A. HALL: Totally. Go ahead, Ruth. RUTH OKEDIJI: I was just going to say, because I'd love to hear what you have to say, because I think that Matt's correct, plus one more thing. And that is the values root, right? Because no matter how much you prove absolute welfare, if the issue that's driving is values-related, we're not going to appease those sorts of, I think, considerations. But it's also why I say in my paper that I'm, two things. One, I'm really concerned first that the attack on globalization masks what we are not doing in the United States with respect to social economic and collective rights. Access to education, just basic access to a decent job. We have not invested in the structural conditions that would make it possible for future generations to have the expectations that our generation had, perhaps in lesser quality, but-- and that previous generations have. And the expectation that we should be doing better is the expectation every American has. This is sort of the heart of the American dream. And when people think that their progress is stalled, even if they're better off than they were yesterday, if they're not as well off as they think they ought to be, there will be resentment. And we've got to deal with that values piece of this, and deal with the reality that if you got rid of globalization, it would become very evident that the real culprit is our own failure to have invested in the kinds of conditions that make economic well-being available and expected for every citizen. PETER A. HALL: Is there time to say something? So I entirely agree with what you just said, Ruth. And Matt, I'm extremely glad you said what you said, because I entirely disagree with it. MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON: OK. PETER A. HALL: So you're, in principle, the point is well taken. We should be thinking about positional goods and this issue of relative versus absolute well-being. I think your motivation is much to be admired. And the substance I entirely disagree with. Because I think that there's no reason why, well so, some years ago I tried to draw, I won't take time to try to explain how, graphs of the status hierarchy in various Western societies. So it can be more steep. That is, say people at the bottom of the hierarchy, which basically, this was taking income deciles and looking at the status people assign themselves, the average status in those deciles. So as you might expect in the US, the status hierarchy is relatively steep. But as you might expect, the status hierarchy in Sweden is relatively flat. The status hierarchy proved to be steeper, these measures measure were not perfect, but broadly speaking, the status hierarchy was steeper in Germany. There was a, but the status hierarchy in Germany, if it was as steep as the US, everybody in Germany thought of themselves as having higher status than everybody in the US sort of thing. I don't have those figures here. So my point is that yes, we can think up status in the same way that we can think of income as being on a distribution. And there are going to be people who are at the bottom, and they are going to be people at the top. But those distributions can nonetheless be, broadly speaking, more equal or less equal. And I think that while we could have a longer debate about this, and I'm trying to produce a little bit of spark to end the panel, and I would ultimately concede that there's evidence that people care about their relative positions. But there is some empirical evidence, as you know, for that. Broadly speaking, though, I think that you can improve the situation of the middle and even the bottom, without necessarily making so many people at the top feel like they're the real losers from this. And more importantly, I think you can improve the situation of people at the bottom without making people in the middle feel that they are necessarily losers. Precisely because this distribution of status is variable. I didn't put that very well, but-- MATTHEW C. STEPHENSON: I would be thrilled to be wrong about that. So I hope you're right. PETER A. HALL: OK. GERALD NEUMAN: Well, we're now at a point of reaching a zero sum game between discussion and coffee, and I think coffee should win. So please join me in thanking the panelists. Discussion will continue after coffee. [APPLAUSE]

Channel: Harvard Law School

Views: 4,262

Rating: 4.8961039 out of 5

Keywords: Harvard Law School, HLS, Harvard University, Populism, Human Rights

Id: lvkVc-Tjj5U

Length: 91min 37sec (5497 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 10 2018