If there is one metaphor that has dominated international punditry for the past decade, it is the “populist wave.” Country after country, we are told, is abandoning liberal democracy and embracing authoritarian leaders and parties claiming to speak in the name of the people.
The supposed “drivers” (or what used to be known, more elegantly, as causes) are by now familiar: immigration, globalization and, in particular, the alleged rise of a “new elite,” or what British political scientist Matthew Goodwin calls a ruling “luxury belief” class. This culturally distinctive group, according to analysts like Goodwin, has the luxury of being morally righteous in taking policy stances that leave working people to suffer the consequences. Its members exhibit both extremely liberal values and high levels of intolerance for anyone who does not share them — namely, those who are often patronizingly called “ordinary people.”
The supposed populist wave, from this perspective, is a reaction to developments that many citizens find threatening or at least alienating. According to professors like Goodwin, who is sympathetic to the populist impulse, such a response is generally healthy. And yet, the recent defeat of Poland’s populist, right-wing ruling party shows that the story might be more complicated than pundits have led us to believe. An important new book by the American political scientist Larry M. Bartels convincingly shows that the whole notion of a populist wave was mistaken to begin with.
Illustration: Tania Chou
Bartels, a highly regarded Vanderbilt University academic whose previous work concentrated on rising inequality in the US, and who is known among social scientists for his distinctly hard-headed understanding of democracy, is someone very much worth listening to. Drawing on data from the European Social Survey, he demonstrates, in Democracy Erodes from the Top, that much of the conventional wisdom about populism today is simply wrong.
Views and attitudes commonly associated with right-wing populism — such as hostility to immigration and opposition to the euro — have not increased markedly in recent years. Moreover, contrary to what many expected during and after the 2009 to 2015 euro crisis, overall satisfaction with democracy and the EU has not declined dramatically.
To be sure, Bartels concedes that the last indicator dipped somewhat in the wake of the euro’s troubles and the austerity imposed on southern European states, but he said that, by the end of the last decade, it was higher than at any point since 2004. Again, contrary to the conventional wisdom, Europeans were as satisfied with the workings of democracy in 2019 as they had been 15 years before. Similarly, trust in politicians and parliaments (never very high, to be sure) has remained virtually unchanged.
These findings seem particularly surprising when one thinks of the countries now routinely identified as “illiberal democracies” (though anti-liberal “hybrid regimes,” or autocracies-in-the-making, would be more accurate). Chief among these have been Hungary and Poland, whose leaders claim a special mandate from populations that (they never tire of telling us) are “more illiberal,” with stronger conservative, religious and nationalistic attitudes.
Here, Bartels’ study is particularly eye-opening. He shows that whatever increases in popular illiberalism one could measure are a consequence, not the cause, of anti-liberal governance by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the leader of Poland’s outgoing ruling party, Jaros?aw Kaczynski.
In the crucial elections that brought Orban to power in 2010 and Law and Justice (PiS) into government in 2015, voters were not clamoring for an illiberal rupture, as Orban tried to suggest with his talk of a “revolution at the voting booth.” Rather, they were expressing dissatisfaction with one side in a two-party system. Both Orban’s Fidesz party and PiS ran moderate campaigns (the latter promised, simply, “Good Change”), and issued virtually no statements about constitutional transformations. Nor did they run on anti-EU platforms — though Kaczynski certainly did try to stoke fears of refugees, claiming that they were carrying dangerous diseases.
Yes, Bartels argued that sympathy for Fidesz was already associated with a generally “conservative ideology” before 2010. Yet neither hostility toward the EU nor fear of refugees were characteristic of Fidesz supporters. Bartels states categorically that “the voters who handed Fidesz the keys to Hungarian democracy in 2010 were not motivated by the same impulses driving support for right-wing populist parties in other parts of Europe.”
Not until 2018, after years of Orban’s government inculcating the public with illiberalism, did antipathy for the EU begin to register as a significant factor in Fidesz’s electoral base. Even today, after years of campaigning by the Hungarian and Polish governments against the European Commission (and, in PiS’ case, against the German government), the EU remains strikingly popular in both countries.
Why, then, were Fidesz and PiS both re-elected when they ran on distinctly xenophobic and anti-European platforms? Here, Bartels offers another eye-opening set of data points: surveys show that satisfaction with the economy, with life in general, and even with “the way democracy works in Hungary” improved under Fidesz. Similarly, Polish citizens registered increased satisfaction with the economy, and — unlike in Hungary — gave markedly higher ratings to health services and education.
These differences are not particularly surprising, considering that PiS has pursued broadly welfarist policies, while Orban has effectively written off the bottom third of society (as well as ruining the health system and fully subjecting education to his ideological imperatives). Yet what is remarkable is that trust in politicians and parliaments increased in both countries, under leaders who were clearly in the democracy-destroying business.
To explain both parties’ continued electoral successes, Bartels argued that economic improvements carried a lot of weight. Yet another factor, he contends, is that most citizens simply do not pay all that much attention to politics.
Together with Christopher H. Achen, a distinguished colleague of mine at Princeton University, Bartels has long been critical of what he calls the “folk theory of democracy.” This view, widespread among idealistic political philosophers, holds that citizens form coherent positions on issues that then generate a mandate for winners at the ballot box.
Those in thrall to the folk theory therefore assume that observable political outcomes (such as the rise of “illiberal” ruling parties) must reflect significant changes in public opinion. Bartels has no patience for this idealized image of citizens, however, and he harbors no illusions about governments being responsive to public opinion. Instead, he urges us to adopt a self-consciously elitist view of democracy — not out of any preference for elite rule, but because elite rule is simply the reality in contemporary democracies.
For those who care about the fate of democracy in Europe (and more broadly), there is good news and bad news here. The good news is that citizens are not clamoring for autocracy. Even in supposed “illiberal democracies,” there was no evidence that voters wanted what Orban and Kaczynski have wrought — and in Poland’s case, a majority has now confirmed Bartels’ point.
Those who casually attribute political outcomes in these countries to a supposedly unique central European political culture should take note of Bartels’ analysis. It has become far too easy for western European political elites to argue that those poor, benighted Poles and Hungarians simply did not have enough time to learn the practice of liberal democracy after the fall of communism. Often echoing the propaganda coming out of Warsaw and Budapest, such observers take it for granted that central and eastern Europeans are more nationalistic and incorrigibly xenophobic. Yet as Bartels makes amply clear, insofar as there is a crisis of democracy, it is “first and foremost a crisis of political leadership, not a crisis of public opinion.”
Part of the bad news, then, is that some elites are turning against democracy. The problem does not end there, though, because citizens are so preoccupied with their own lives or so blindly beholden to partisan commitments that they cannot be counted on to “save democracy.”
Still, the main message is to let go of the conventional wisdom that somehow the people themselves are at fault. Bartels makes it crystal clear that it is elites, not the “masses,” who destroy democracies. Ever since the heyday of mass psychology in the 19th century, “ordinary people” have been regarded as irrational and highly susceptible to the blandishments of aspiring demagogues. However, elites are the variable in the equation. If demagogues get an opportunity to capture democratic institutions, they could often do so without resistance from the citizenry. As Bartels said, there is plenty of social-scientific evidence demonstrating that people are reluctant to punish politicians for anti-democratic behavior if doing so runs against their own party or policy preferences.
As such, almost everything depends on elites, and specifically on what political scientist Nancy Bermeo (another distinguished Princeton colleague of mine) calls “distancing capacity,” meaning their willingness to take a broader view and prioritize democracy over immediate political or personal benefits. In this respect, elites in western European seem to have been failing spectacularly.
As the Dutch academic Cas Mudde has been arguing for years, conservative and center-right politicians are increasingly likely to “mainstream the far right.” They have proved willing to enter coalitions with populist, far-right parties or — less obviously — to ape such parties’ rhetoric, thereby legitimating far-right policy positions and perspectives on political challenges like migration.
For example, in the last French presidential election, the Gaullist candidate — which is as mainstream as it gets in the Fifth Republic — effectively endorsed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that Muslims are being sent to Europe to take the place of the natives. Similarly, in early 2021, French President Emmanuel Macron’s interior minister charged the far-right leader Marine Le Pen (of all people) with being “too soft” on Islam.
After the wall that previously held back the far right has been breached, it cannot easily be rebuilt. Voters who regard themselves as respectably bourgeois and once would have shied away from the positions of Le Pen and racist firebrand Eric Zemmour have now been given tacit permission by center-right elites to go down that path and see where it leads. Should we be surprised that they have accepted the invitation? As far-right populist leaders themselves often ask: Why vote for the copy when you could get the more “authentic” original?
The major exception to this Europe-wide trend in recent years has been Germany. The Christian Democratic Union, so far, has held firm to the view that it would not cooperate with the far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). True, the party’s leader, Friedrich Merz, tested the waters this summer when he hinted that exceptions could be made at the local level; but the pushback, including from within the party, was immediate.
Still, maintaining this brandmauer (firewall) might become increasingly difficult. In regional elections earlier this month, the AfD, previously considered primarily an East German protest party, finished second in the western state of Hesse, and third in Bavaria. Moreover, polls show that AfD voters are increasingly driven by “conviction,” rather than an impulse to protest, implying that they are unashamedly opting for a party that does little to hide its outright racism and revisionist approach to German history.
While Christian Democrats came out on top in both of these state elections, they lost tens of thousands of voters to the far right — as did other parties, including, surprisingly, the Greens — and contrary to the assumption that the far right’s main constituency is the elderly (in which case the problem would supposedly solve itself), the AfD did well among the young in both Hesse and Bavaria.
Of course, “protest” might still explain some of this voting behavior (notwithstanding Bartels’ skepticism about citizens forming rational political views). After all, there is widespread fear of economic decline among Germans, with many worrying that their country would return to being the “sick man of Europe,” a status it held just 20 years ago — recently enough for most citizens to remember. Equally telling, the governing coalition — comprising Social Democrats, pro-business Free Democrats and Greens — has nosedived in the polls.
The Greens are generally considered the opposite of the AfD. They are now also widely associated with government infighting, and they are regularly attacked for supposedly taking away people’s freedom by forcing them to install heat pumps, among other environmental measures. Such hysterical hostility points to a less obvious mechanism for mainstreaming the far right. As Mudde points out, so-called “culture war” issues like transgender rights serve as a gateway drug for conservatives more broadly.
In center-right discourse — which is not exactly brimming with policy ideas — a moralistic, intolerant left-wing minority is charged with restricting free speech, fostering denialism about migration and generally dictating values to a majority comprising “ordinary people” who just happen to think and feel differently. According to the typical rationalization, these put-upon voters simply have no choice but to vote for the far right in order to make themselves heard.
Once the political landscape is understood this way, there is no obvious place for a firewall to be maintained. Conservatives and far-right populists agree on what society’s main challenges are — sanctimonious left-wing preaching and migration — and that they are defending respectable middle-class values like free speech and a commonsense understanding of the national interest. The bridge from the center to the far right is paved with culture-war memes and moral panic about the supposed dangers posed by immigrants.
The alternative to adapting the mainstream to the far right is to adapt the far right to democracy. There is nothing inherently undemocratic about calling for less immigration. Yet it is of course never acceptable in a democracy to incite hatred against foreigners and minorities at home — not least because there would always be some people who would act on such rhetoric in violent ways.
Bartels has identified a reservoir of voters from which both far-right and opportunistic center-right politicians could draw. Yet these voters are a loud minority, not the silent majority. They are hardly capable of becoming an unstoppable wave that will sweep over the world’s democracies. To create that impression, they need the complicity of elites who ought to know better.
Jan-Werner Mueller is professor of politics at Princeton University, and is the author, most recently, of Democracy Rules.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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