How do populist leaders win power, how do they maintain it, and what should the rest of us do about it? These are the questions political scientist Susan C. Stokes sets out to answer in her new book, The Backsliders. Building on her own important academic work and that of her colleagues, she offers a persuasive analysis of contemporary populist success and the democratic erosion that often follows.
According to the traditional view, poor and nascent democracies are the most vulnerable to erosion, primarily via military coup. But the briefest reflection on contemporary geopolitics — and especially the condition of the oldest and richest democracy — highlights a much broader phenomenon.
Stokes argues that it is economic inequality that motivates voter support for populists. For half a century now, post-colonial globalisation has wrought vast changes upon global economic systems and the states within, Australia included, with the result that equality has steadily decreased even as incomes have risen. In some of the countries that might be thought to have benefited most, including the United States, this impact has been most profound.
Stokes distinguishes between two classes of countries — rich, well-established democracies, where labour-migration inflows have driven support for ethno-nationalists, and developing democracies where capital inflows have driven support for “left populists.” These leaders, in turn, have often sought to erode the democracies that elected them by undermining or asserting control over parliaments, courts, electoral bodies, the press and other rival pluralist institutions, and maintaining public support for this program with political polarisation and vocal denigration of the institutions of democracy.
While The Backsliders is very much an academic monograph, reliant more on statistical analysis than sparkling prose, Stokes’s evidence is compelling. She convincingly demonstrates these broader processes of populist success and democratic erosion, adequately explaining edge cases and sufficiently addressing counterarguments.
And yet — this is also a deeply unsatisfying work.
At the heart of the problem is the question of just what democracy is and why we should value it. For Stokes, the merits of democracy are largely ends-based. Democracies tend to do better than autocracies in terms of economic growth, social welfare, the protection of rights, peaceful transfers of power and, of vital importance given the broader topic, economic equality. But the definition of democracy that emerges from her analysis moves beyond a narrow, classical vision of democracy — government reflecting the public will — to a more constitutionalist conception of government limited and delineated by separated pluralist institutions, minority rights and a free press. All are essential features of a liberal society, yet they are intended as a means of constraining the tyranny not just of a would-be autocrat but also of the democratic will of the majority. The phenomenon Stokes identifies might be better termed liberal erosion.
For Stokes the appropriate response to insurgent populists is distancing or gatekeeping on the part of democratic institutions. This is a well-worn argument, similarly advanced in recent years by scholars of populism like Nancy Bermeo, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, and Larry M. Bartels. It is not entirely without merit — with a tame Republican Party, a compliant Supreme Court and an ineffective Democratic opposition, the failures of distancing in the American system are obvious.
Yet the limitations of American democracy are nothing new; it has been archaic, unresponsive and deeply partisan for decades, and fixating on the actions of populist leaders and the responses of voters and institutions to them risks neglecting the root causes of their appeal in the first place.
The weight of the book focuses on this argument: if populist leaders seek to drive political polarisation and denigrate institutions to maintain public support as they erode institutional constraints, then what is needed is a bridging of partisan divides and a noble resistance by those institutions. There is a good whiff of Robert Dahl’s concept of politics-as-elite-competition here — that what we really need is better elites, with stronger moral fibre and more-convincing rhetoric, to ride out the threat and politely point out to the rest of us the errors of our ways.
Ignore for the moment that a large part of the point of the separation of powers is that we cannot (and hence should not) rely on better elites — that we should plan for the worst and hope to be pleasantly surprised. Return instead to Stokes’s (and, as it happens, Dahl’s) ends-based argument for democracy. What should we do when democracy evidently isn’t maintaining an equal society? When inequality is growing and an increasing proportion of the polity is being left behind? When these same citizens look at the system and conclude that the ends it is producing are not their ends, and decide to vote for someone, anyone, else?
In situations like this, political gatekeeping simply kicks the can down the road; the pressure will continue to build until the underlying tensions are resolved or (dare I say it) the system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Stokes’s own evidence shows that it is this underlying inequality that makes voters susceptible to the rhetoric of populists and amenable to the dismantling of the institutions that have allowed this state of affairs to come about — and this is what makes the book so frustrating.
This is not to say populism is the answer. As Stokes demonstrates, populists generally fail to deliver when it comes to governance despite some examples of popular approval (the Philippines and El Salvador) and even of policy success (Ecuador and Bolivia). This may be a function of a lack of competence, a cynical lack of commitment or, indeed, equally cynical gatekeeping on the part of elite institutions. But if establishment politics is failing and populism is incapable, how can we pursue a better society and a more robust democracy?
Stokes invokes Sweden as an example of a polity that has resisted democratic erosion despite a moderately successful populist party, the ethno-nationalist Sweden Democrats. Australia is in many ways a comparable case. In neither country has gatekeeping proven ironclad; in both the populists were constrained only until electoral conditions prompted a change in attitude by mainstream conservative parties, through coalition-formation in Sweden and preference deals in Australia. What makes Sweden and (to a lesser extent) Australia fundamentally different is that they are more equal and (as a result) less polarised societies.
Yet they are also different in how they accommodate a diversity of political voices. The long-term presence of populists in their parliaments is a function of proportional electoral systems (in Australia’s case, in the Senate, a number of state upper houses and the Tasmanian parliament). This more representative reflection of the breadth of public opinion is a pressure valve with multiple impacts. It forces parties of government to take broader views into consideration, whether in coalition formation or the passage of legislation, and in doing so demonstrates a responsiveness of government to the needs of a wider electorate. It also lessens the upheaval experienced in less responsive systems when shifts in support reach a tipping point and old parties (or factions within them) collapse, to be replaced by new, often populist entities.
Yet these characteristics receive only the lightest of touches from Stokes. While inequality is highlighted as the fundamental factor in populism’s electoral appeal, a discussion of how “Policies that Reduce Inequality Also Strengthen Democracy” is granted a mere 300 words in a work of some 50,000. Electoral policy must make do with a single paragraph on the penultimate page.
These are far from simple problems. Inequality is increasing in both Sweden and Australia, with housing, employment and other insecurities presenting generational challenges that elites cannot talk their way out of. And recent election results here and abroad demonstrate the enduring appeal of populist answers, be they ethno-nationalist or redistributionist.
What these cases do show, as does the comparative evidence presented by Stokes, is that inequality — and the democratic erosion that often follows — is not inevitable; it is a function of political decisions, arrived at democratically or otherwise. But nor is democracy guaranteed; its principles rely on public commitment, in turn enabled by an equitable society.
How then should we be responding to populism? For a start, by listening to those who vote for populists. If we wish to maintain the benefits of democracy, we must ensure that they are shared throughout our societies. That means open and inclusive democratic institutions. It also means economic policy that advances the interests of all. •
The Backsliders: Why Leaders Undermine Their Own Democracies
By Susan C. Stokes | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 264 pages
