Populism Versus Democratic Governance

Populism Versus Democratic Governance

Description

The current populist wave presents an existential challenge to democracy. Populism claims to be the true expositor of the will of the people, enabled where it can through the electoral conquest of government office. An engaged electoral majority claiming its due appears as both the realization of democratic aspirations and its demise. It is a short step from the will of the people to the tyranny of the majority. Undoubtedly, the rise of elected governments is the historic legacy of the period after the fall of the Soviet Union. Using a relatively austere metric of whether the head of state and legislature are elected, Freedom House captures the dramatic transformations at the end of the twentieth century. In 1987, there were only 66 countries that were considered electoral democracies. By 2003, there were 121 electoral democracies, a number that has remained more or less stable, with the most recent figure being 123 countries that can claim a head of state and legislature elected through substantially free and fair elections. The first cut inquiry is consistent with a parsimonious account of democracy as being governance by an elected head of government, chosen by at least a plurality of the population under stable rules of selection and broad eligibility for the franchise. Such a definition would embrace both parliamentary and presidential systems, it would allow for plebiscitary powers as in Switzerland, it would tolerate requirements for plurality versus majority vote for officeholding, and it would accept a host of limitations of the franchise based on citizenship, age, incarceration, and so forth. Such a definition would even allow for a nominal head of state that is not elected, as with the Queen's authority in Australia. For the most part, such a standard account of democracy is not necessarily incompatible with populism. There is an authoritarian streak to both left- and right-wing populist movements, which, with alarming frequency, threatens some of the preconditions of democratic governance. Populists tend not to tolerate opposition parties; they tend to use police and prosecutorial power against adversaries; they tend toward suppression of dissident speech, either through curtailment of access to the media or through legal retaliation; they tend to push the boundaries of executive unilateral authority. Certainly, questions of intensity and degree may take the Venezuela of Nicolás Maduro or the Hungary of Viktor Orbán outside the boundaries of democracy. But elements of aggressive use of incumbent power are seen in many regimes that still function as democracies, even if beleaguered ones at times. Thus, unfortunately, the formal processes of governmental selection tell only part of the story. While the number of electoral democracies has nominally remained high, the number of countries that afford relatively free political rights to opposition groups, rival political parties, minorities, and others seeking to dislodge the incumbent regime is much smaller. Only eighty-seven countries are deemed “Free” by Freedom House in affording the political rights associated with democracy and ensuring acceptable levels of transparency and noncorruption in government. The Freedom House data present a simplified picture of elections as a matter of form in terms of elected heads of state and as a matter of substance in terms of the institutional attributes of democratic governance. The focus on political freedoms and transparency of government hearkens to the basic Schumpeterian notion of democracy as fundamentally a system of retrospective accountability by which an informed populace can remove from office those who have lost the confidence of the voters. The measure of political freedom is an important point of demarcation for liberal democracy from illiberal regimes in which opposition electoral prospects are compromised, if not totally illusory. But the populist challenge to democracy is not simply a matter of illiberalism. Certainly there are xenophobic streaks to current populism, together with overt antagonisms on racial and religious grounds. And there is a manifest lack of commitment to civil liberties, starting with freedom of the press and continuing on to freedom of expression and worship. The interplay of these factors is the subject of extensive definitional inquiry, as well addressed by Jan-Werner Muller and taken up in many current debates. But populism also responds to the perceived failure of democratic regimes to protect the laboring classes from economic dislocation. The combination of the economic downturn after 2008 and the impact of globalized trade on wages in the advanced industrial countries tarnished the legitimacy of democratic regimes as an insider's game, a means of institutionalizing elite prerogatives. Rather than attempt another comprehensive account of populism, I want to shift the focus to the engagement between populism and democratic governance as an institutional account of how democracies function. Post 2008 anti-elitism as a social commitment translated to a robust anti-institutionalism in terms of state authority. The aim is not so much to provide definitions of either populism or democracy as to call attention to the features of democratic rule that have commanded attention for the era of democratic ascendancy over the past two centuries and that now seem subject to deep challenge. Without claiming apocalyptically that this era of democratic ascendency has come to a close, it is nonetheless worth examining how it operated to see the sources of contemporary disrepair. Here the suggestion is that there may be more inherent conflict with populism, turning not so much on the ultimate issue of an elected head of government but on the limits on the exercise of power.

Source Publication

Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?

Source Editors/Authors

Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, Mark Tushnet

Publication Date

2018

Populism Versus Democratic Governance

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