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By Review of DemocracyNews Politics

RevDem Podcast episodes

August 21, 2024 The Trojan Horse Has Arrived - András Bozóki on Autocratization, External Constraints, and the Role of His Own Generation
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy,
András Bozóki – author of the new collection Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia
kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of Autocracy) – reflects
on what has made the anti-democratic turn in Hungary so effective and discusses
what has surprised him the most about the evolution of the Orbán regime; comments
on the regime’s attempted remaking of Hungarian elite groups and its uses of
ideology to legitimate its rule; evaluates his thesis on the Orbán regime being
an “externally constrained hybrid regime” in light of more recent developments;
and assesses the role of his own generation, the 1989ers, in the longer arc of
history.

András Bozóki is Professor at the Department of Political Science at the Central European University and a research affiliate of the CEU Democracy Institute. His main
fields of research include democratization, de-democratization, political
regimes, ideologies, Central European politics, and the role of intellectuals.

Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról (Breaking Points. Studies on the Formation of
Autocracy) has been published by Gondolat Kiadó.

Ferenc Laczó: You have just released a large and
exciting collection in Hungarian under the title Töréspontok. Tanulmányok az autokrácia kialakulásáról, which might be translated as Breaking Points.
Studies on the Formation of Autocracy. This new volume of some 500 pages collects sixteen important articles that you have authored or co-authored since
2013 and presents them in a largely chronological fashion.
The Orbán regime has clearly been a central concern of
yours. How this regime has emerged, how it operates, how it may be classified, and
what can be said about its international embeddedness—these are all questions
that are repeatedly raised and considered on these pages. You have evidently
been studying a moving target since the early 2010s. I wanted to start our
conversation there: How has your understanding of the Orbán regime evolved over
the years? What was foreseeable to you already back in the early 2010s about
where this regime would be heading, and what came rather as a surprise to you
in more recent years?
András Bozóki:
There was already a de-consolidation of democracy, in the form of increasing
political polarization, between 2006 and 2010. However, according to all
international democracy-measuring institutes, Hungary was still a liberal
democracy up until 2010, despite all the troubles. People were disappointed with
the government of the time; they found it ineffective, and they wanted a more
decisive turn towards what was supposed to be a more democratic system. It was
interesting to see that, while Viktor Orbán started his de-democratization
project quite early on, it was propagated as making the system more democratic.
Forget about the rule of law and all these legal
nuances, or what the Constitutional Court defends, or the ombudsman, all these
legal brakes on the regime. Let the people govern, let the will of the people rule
without any brakes. Autocratization was sold as democratization.
As a political scientist I was surprised by three
phenomena in the process of de-democratization: weak popular identification
with democracy, the effectiveness of political propaganda, and, third, the
radical change in Hungarian foreign policy.
As someone who used to be a member of Fidesz at the
change of the regime, but left it early, I had no illusions about Orbán. My
surprise is not so much about his behavior as a leader, but about the passive
behavior of Hungarian society. I did not expect that the democratic backsliding
process would go so swiftly, and without much social resistance, I would say. That
was a major disappointment: that people didn’t see the existent democracy as something
worth fighting for, worth defending. They said that democracy is just about a
multiparty system and nothing more. It is not about the spirit of the people, it
is only about weak institutions and corrupt party machineries. They didn’t want
to defend that system. It was easy, retrospectively speaking, for Orbán to
change the regime because the social resistance was surprisingly weak.
My second surprise concerns the effectiveness of
propaganda. I did not believe that propaganda after the 1950s can again be used
for direct political purposes in Hungary, that a country which survived Communism
can go back to daily propaganda. But that happened in 2015 with the migration
crisis and the 2016 referendum afterwards. It was just intolerable. In the late
Communist period, the regime was not propagandistic at all. They had neither
ideology, nor propaganda; it was just based on traditional mentalities. It was striking
to see that propaganda can again be effective, together with the manipulation
of social media, and make citizens change their opinion concerning foreign migrants.
Before 2015, there was no Islamophobia in Hungary at all, unlike some traditional
anti-Semitism. However, the Orbán regime propagated Islamophobia and mixed it
up with anti-Roma sentiments.
And, finally, I did not expect Orbán to become a pro-Putin
politician. I mean, I do not have to tell you that back in the 19th century,
the Russian army destroyed the Hungarian Revolution and struggle for freedom; then,
during the Second World War, they came to Hungary, and there are now accounts
about their activity beyond the fronts, like not only killing people, but raping
hundreds of thousands of women; then crushing the Hungarian Revolution in 1956;
and stationing troops in Hungary for decades. Hungary was not as anti-communist
a country as Poland, but there were strong anti-Soviet sentiments. “Russians,
go home” was a leading slogan of the 1956 Revolution. That Orbán could change
this and make Fidesz supporters pro-Russian, anti-EU, pro-war—that was
something truly unexpected. They may now present themselves as the “party of
peace,” but they actually support Russia’s war against Ukraine and have some invisible
but easily detectable relationship with Putin such as economic and political
collaboration. That has been genuinely surprising.
Orbán currently holds the rotating
presidency of the Council of the EU and is working on the deconstruction of the
Union. The Trojan horse has arrived.
FL: Several pieces included in this new collection
address the regime debate that has been raging concerning Orbán’s rule. As part
of that, you discuss its illiberal and antidemocratic features, and critique
the widely used concept of ‘illiberal democracy’ in particular. You write about
‘electoral autocracy’ instead, and some years ago even formulated the thesis of
a ‘liberal autocracy.’ Which key conclusions would you draw today from those
regime debates? What might be key points of consensus among scholars despite
their different emphases and terminological choices?
AB: The first few
years after 2010 were a shock. What should we call this regime? It was the constitutional
lawyers, plus economist János Kornai, who claimed that the regime is moving
fast towards autocracy. It was the constitutional lawyers—Gábor Halmai, Kim
Lane Scheppele, Imre Vörös, and others—who claimed that there was an unconstitutional
putsch when the new constitution started to be used for anti-constitutional
purposes, when it was used to change the legal system and undermine the rule of
law by 2013. In contrast, political scientists were rather quiet in those early
years. They said: Let’s wait for the elections in 2014 to see whether these early
warnings have been well-substantiated or not.
Political scientists started to speak about electoral autocracy,
or hybrid regimes, only after 2014, when the constitutional lawyers were
already sounding the alarm that this was the end of the rule of law. Political
scientists responded basically by saying, “Fine, but the rule of law is just
one side of the story. What about free elections and the will of the people?” But,
as it turned out, we could not consider the 2014 elections honest elections. It
was free, but unfair. And that opened the way to the regime debates, which
dominated the mid-2010s in Hungarian political science.
There were several interesting approaches, such as the
concepts of ‘mafia state’, neo-Bolshevism, re-feudalization, prebendalism,
illiberal democratic capitalism, plebiscitary leader democracy, transmuted
fascism, party-state, post-fascism, populist electoral autocracy and the likes.
Also a distinction has been made between regime and rendszer – ‘regime’ and
‘system’, though the meaning of the Hungarian distinction does not translate
well into English – or concerning the practices of the political formula
vis-à-vis the formalities of institutional order. There were a lot of different
approaches.
At this point Orbán proudly came up with the notion of ‘illiberal democracy.’ In English,
‘illiberal’ sounds pretty derogatory. I do not think Orbán felt that it was
that way. He wanted to state that “We want to keep democracy but make a break
with liberalism.” But illiberal democracy means something else: it is not a democracy
but a sort of hybrid regime. Still, not only Orbán but some political scientists
in Hungary also wanted to argue that ‘illiberal democracy’ is just a form of
democracy: there is a Western liberal democracy and there is a non-Western
democracy which might be illiberal but is equally legitimate. I did not like those
attempts. I did not think they were scholarly.
I realized that being
in the EU, there is a stronger defense of the rule of law from European Union
institutions than from domestic elements. When people were prevented from initiating a referendum in Hungary in
early 2016, I clearly felt that this meant the end of any sort of democracy. But
maybe there is a new form of autocracy which keeps some sort of remnants of
liberalism due to the constraints of the European Union. So, I was venturing
with the concept of ‘liberal autocracy’ around the time. It is not my invention, Fareed Zakaria and Larry Diamond were debating it
back around the turn of the millennium. Hong Kong was called a liberal
autocracy, even the ideal type of a liberal autocracy when human rights were
respected, but there was no democracy because the government was not elected by
the people—though Diamond thought that having a liberal autocracy was
illusionary.
Around 2015, I met Dániel Hegedűs, a younger colleague
of mine. As an expert of EU politics, he pointed out the dubious role of the EU
toward Hungary. We realized that the unparalleled specificity of this regime is
indeed that it is located within the EU, and we have to focus on the interplay
between Hungary and the European Union. Since EU legislation has domestic
impact in Hungary, we cannot fully separate these two entities: following the
principle of subsidiarity, some parts of sovereignty are given up by each Member
State. So let us see what the consequences of EU membership are. Concerning
Hungary, we came up with the proposition of an externally constrained – but
also supported and legitimized – hybrid regime.
There was a huge debate about the latter notion too, whether
‘hybrid regime’ makes sense or not. It is a bit too broad of a category, but it
was suitable for covering those years when Hungary was no longer a democracy,
but not yet an autocracy. We can still use it today: if the Hungarian state is an
electoral autocracy, it is still part of the hybrid regime category on the
authoritarian end of the spectrum. Our article gained remarkable international
attention and it came to be seen as our statement.
In the years since 2018, these regime debates have
slowly lost significance and lost their importance. Everything has been said, I
think. The new consensus may be that nobody calls Hungary a modern democracy
anymore. People realize that there was de-democratization, democratic erosion,
backsliding – whatever you want to call it. More recently, academics have been
talking about autocratization, not democratic backsliding, which can be a
backsliding within democracy whereas autocratization trespasses the line
between democracy and autocracy.
I should add that this volume just collects some of
the articles I wrote at different moments in time between 2013 and 2023. I see
how naïve I was at certain points. I tried to correct myself later and was
correcting myself again after that. Of course, I did not want to change what I wrote
ten years ago, so this collection also shows how my thinking has changed.
The lesson I learned from the debate on the nature of
the regime is that a purely political science approach and the use of purely
political science concepts are not enough to understand the Orbán regime. You
need to have historical and sociological knowledge, and an interdisciplinary
approach is needed. In Embedded Autocracy: Hungary in the European Union, the book I have
just co-authored with Zoltán Fleck, we combine political science concepts with
sociological approaches to conclude that the Orbán regime might be an electoral
autocracy politically speaking, however it can be called an embedded autocracy from
the social point of view.
FL: The collection focuses extensively on how
Hungary’s antidemocratic turn has unfolded in the early twenty-first century.
The decline of democracy in the country has been conspicuous, making Hungary a
rather notorious case even in global comparison. What do you view as critical
junctures during this process of de-democratization? And what might explain the
overall effectiveness of such an anti-democratic turn in Hungary?
AB: On the one
hand, it was a smooth change. On the other, there were some critical junctures,
some breaking points. I think that, as I said, many people did not value
democracy, or better to say, they had different understandings of democracy. I
think that the twenty years between 1990 and 2010 were a shining moment in the
history of Hungary – in a history stretching over a thousand years, we had two
decades of liberal democracy, and I feel fortunate to have been part of this
story.
Having said that, part of the answer is that this
democracy was not without problems. To put it this way, the government lost
credibility right after 2006 and they lost the 2008 referendum. People really
wanted a change of government, or maybe an early election which the government
refused to hold. They just did not feel the danger; they felt that there was
just a normal crisi
49 min
August 19, 2024 How Charm Shapes Politics - Julia Sonnevend on Personal Magnetism and Its Growing Impact in Our Age of Social Media
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Julia Sonnevend – author of the new book Charm. How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics – analyzes the main techniques politicians use to appear charming;
compares the uses of such techniques by liberal and illiberal political leaders; discusses how gendered the perception of charm has remained; and considers whether politicians are likely to become even more like social media influencers in the coming years.
Julia Sonnevend is an associate professor of Sociology and Communications at the New School for Social Research. She is a sociologist of global culture whose research focuses on the events, icons, symbols and charismatic personalities of public life and media. Charm
is her second monograph.
Charm. How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics has been published by Princeton University Press.
38 min
August 14, 2024 Populism in Power - A Conversation with Giorgos Venizelos
Çağlar Öztürk: My first question concerns populism. Populism has become a fashionable term in recent years which has led to quite some confusion even among political scientists and political science students. First of all, what qualifies a politician or party as populist? How do they differ from others, from non-populist ones? What was your motivation in choosing populism as a key concept and what contribution did you intend to make
with the book?
Giorgos Venizelos: There's indeed a lot of confusion about populism, even though there's so much literature about it. Without going too deep in this heated debate, I should say that scholars agree that populism is organised
around two notions: people- centrism and anti-elitism. Of course, there are very different approaches to these two operational criteria related to the people and the elite.
For me, populist communication is not just about rhetoric, but also bodily gestures, accents and aesthetics that resemble, represent and enact ‘the people.’ When we talk about populism, we also talk about a certain logic, a certain style or performance. And it can also be said that populism operates with a political cleavage that is distinct from the typical left-right political cleavage – it's a cleavage between ‘the populists’ or ‘the people’ at the bottom and ‘the elite’ or ‘the anti-populists’ at the top. There is non-populist politics as well, of course, politics or discourses that do not have these characteristics or have just one of those two characteristics. For example, they talk to ‘the voter’ or ‘the citizen’ instead of ‘the people,’ or they use ‘the people’ as a term, but there's no antagonistic
dimension. Vice versa, we might identify certain types of challenger parties, especially on the far right, that articulate a strong anti-establishment discourse, so there is an exclusionary element there, however, the notion of ‘the people’ as a collective identity that can supposedly fit the 'whole society' is absent.
Arguably, besides these two categories, populist and non-populist, we can have anti-populist discourses as well: politicians, journalists, and other actors may be showing a very open and clear aversion towards the notions of ‘the people,’ popular sovereignty, populist politicians, and so on. These discourses often reveal degrees of ‘democratic elitism.’
Why did I choose the concept of populism? I wanted to explain how popular identities, or mass identities, are constructed. It was at a time of mass mobilizations against austerity politics that I started thinking about Populism
in Power. Discourse and Performativity in Syriza and Donald Trump. I wanted to study how electorates are mobilized in moments of crisis, how emotions are
involved in such processes of political identification, and how populism is not exactly and always a negative, a mystifying or exceptional phenomenon, but rather
part of everyday political life.
We have been talking mostly about populism until now, but my book is specifically about populism in power. You asked me what the intended contribution of the book is.
I initially wanted to examine what happens when populists get into power – because when I was thinking about the project, prominent cases were emerging, like Syriza in Greece, but also Podemos in Spain and then later Donald Trump in the US.
I started reading into the literature of populism in power and the assumptions about what happens to populism when it moves from the opposition to government did not really convince me. The way populism – and consequently also populism in power -were conceptualized left me puzzled because I thought that scholars focused too much on the consequences of populism for democracy. For example, they would say things like “populists turn authoritarian.” Scholars also focused too much on what happens to populism itself. For example, they would say that “populism fails in power.” However, these are possibilities for other, non-populist actors as well, so why should they be so central in the debate about populism?
When talking about populism, all these assumptions end up defining the concept. I don't think that they're defining it well, but these assumptions seem to be very much discernible in the discourse of scholars. So, the idea behind my project was that in order to rethink populism in power we first have to rethink populism, re-work the way we approach it.
ÇÖ: Which theories and concepts do you draw on and how do you position your book and scholarship in the existing literature?
GV: I draw on theories of discourse and the so-called Essex School of Discourse Analysis in particular, but also theories of political style and socio-cultural approaches to politics. I draw on theories of affect, emotions, and collective identities.
Just to name a few authors here, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe and Yannis Stavrakakis have all had an important influence on me. Benjamin Moffitt and Pierre Ostiguy have also been important to me, but so have more traditional
theories of affect, such as Freud’s or Lacan’s. I also draw on populism studies, of course.
ÇÖ: It's often maintained that there are two main strands of populism: left-wing and right-wing. What separates those two strands from each other, and why is it nonetheless adequate to refer to both as populist? More concretely, why have you chosen to study Trump and Syriza in the same framework? And what does such
a juxtaposition and comparison yield?
GV: It can be argued that there are many more strands of populism besides left and right. There's also a centrist type of populism, but there are also more peculiar or even idiosyncratic formations that are hard to place on the left-right axis. However, there are indeed two main strands, left- and right-wing. I mentioned earlier that populism is about ‘the people’ and ‘the elite,’ but it's never just that. There's always an ideology that comes with populism.
Ideology is defined by certain programmatic features, certain ideas that have to do with equality or distribution, with inclusion and exclusion in social and political
processes. For example, a left populist might be for redistribution of wealth while a right-wing populist might
be pro-business. We have these programmatic ideas of the left and the right that can, however, be communicated in different ways.
In the case of populism, such classic ideas are communicated in a ‘common-sense’ way, in the name of ‘the people’ and against ‘the elites.’ ‘The people’ are suffering because ‘the elites’ push for certain policies that don't allow redistribution of wealth. Therefore, ‘the people’ should rise and take power, regulate, and
achieve the redistribution they want. That’s an example of communicating a programmatic leftist agenda in a populist manner.
I should add though that there are many different types and subtypes of populism, even among the two main families that we have just been speaking about. Not all
left populists are the same, nor all right-wing populists.
I chose to study Trump and Syriza because, in my view, they were populists in power who had emerged during the same conjuncture. They emerged as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism, understood not just in the economic, but also in the political sense. Technocrats appeared to be very dominant in politics, and certain types of actors or voters rejected this state of affairs. Of course, the case of Trump is not as straightforward
because Trump is a pro-capitalist politician.
You also asked me about the difference between Syriza and Trump and whether the results of the comparison were surprising. One could sensibly argue that the comparison of left- and right-wing populism, such as Syriza and Trump, is not very original. However, I wanted to pursue this comparison precisely because it's quite provocative.
Even if scholars, politicians, and quality journalists
would typically agree that there's a difference between a left-wing and a right-wing populist, there are still many uncritical assumptions in public discourse that fail
to make this basic distinction. They use a notion of populism which is little more than a synonym for bad.
What I therefore wanted to do was to show that there is a fundamental difference, and that ideology plays a key role: the way they construct the people is different, the content of their discourses and the framing of collective
identities are really different in the two cases.
ÇÖ: Donald Trump and Syriza were both backed by social movements that may well have been triggered by the financial and social crisis of the preceding years. How similar or different were the respective social movements that led to their rise? Do you see social movements as essential factors in their rise, or have
they merely contributed to the political momentum that was unfolding?
GV: In both cases, we saw social movements emerge as a response to the crisis of neoliberalism and to the collapse of the markets in the two countries. This may have happened at different times, but the two were part of the same conjuncture: in Greece, this took place a bit later, in 2010 and 2011, while in the US already in 2008 and 2009.
At this early stage, the movements had similar demands. There was an internationalist dimension. They somehow communicated with one another, and they even had similar slogans. There was a desire for change among participants in these ‘movements of the squares,’ ‘occupy movements,’ and so forth.
In the US, the representative of that movement to the mainstream political arena was not Donald Trump, but Bernie Sanders. However, Sanders did not make it to
be the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. At the same time, we saw the rise of the Tea Party in the US, which was closer to Trump and his agenda. The Tea Party indeed played a very significant role in supporting Trump and mainstreaming his discourse.
Despite such differences, we can say that such social movements might be projecting certain social and political attitudes from below. They might also function as some kind of omen for what is about to come.
After all, both movements called out the political establishment, created new opportunities, and revealed a desire for change.
ÇÖ: In chapter four, you discuss how Syriza's retreat from its key economic promises damaged the party, especially when it comes to the emotional or effective bond between the party and its supporters. Did Syriza's populist promise fail with Alexis Tsipras' capitulation to the demands of the Troika?
GV: I could probably offer a simple answer here and say “yes, it did” but I actually think the question is much more complicated. Recall that left-wing populism is constituted by two different elements: a populist one and a leftist one.
Of course, Syriza's discourse was centred around the cancellation of austerity, neoliberalism, and so forth,
which managed to mobilize the electorate in a populist way. That's why Syriza eventually won power in 2015. When it failed to deliver the key promise around which the
affective climate of the time – its whole populist vibe, if you wish – was organized, we could observe a decline of emotions and identifications with the party.
The question is whether that failure had to do with populism or with the leftist component of Syriza's politics? The promise to cancel neoliberal austerity actually had to do with Syriza's anti-neoliberalism. Alexis Tsipras in fact continued to speak as a populist even after the capitulation. Does that mean that he remained a populist? That's difficult to answer.
If we understand populism as some sort of communication strategy, then we can argue that Alexis Tsipras had to maintain it. However, if we understand populism as an affective bond between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites,’ then this was no longer there. I personally think that it was a combination of the two.
To understand populism in power, we need to look at notions such as hegemony. The question would then be: did Syriza manage to establish hegemony after its capitulation? The answer is clearly “no, they did not.”
ÇÖ: What do you think about the actual policies of populists in power? Do they govern differently? And would you agree that we seem obsessed with what
populist leaders or parties represent rather than focusing on what they actually do? Last but not least, how did the policies Syriza and Trump adopt influence
their image?
GV: That's another difficult question to answer because it doesn't apply to all populists; different populists implement different policies. Some are more successful than others and this often has little to do with populism. It rather has to do with the context and the relative autonomy that they have.
For example, Greece is part of the European Union. When Syriza was governing, Greece was subjected to various austerity packages and memoranda, so the room for manoeuvre was limited. Certain populists simply have greater difficulties developing their own policies.
But there is also a very interesting contradiction here. Although Syriza did not manage to implement its key promise and reject austerity in Greece, it did implement
policies that benefitted lower social strata. However, former supporters of Syriza on the left were not satisfied with these achievements because the party’s “big betrayal” was still on their minds and in their hearts. Syriza’s efforts to introduce a bit of social policy within a rather restricted economic and political framework did not translate into electoral support. We have seen the
popularity of the party decline.
As opposed to that, Trump was much more autonomous in power. Many scholars have shown that he did not manage to pass many new policies. I remember that even The Atlantic called Donald Trump the worst president in US history. And if we consider how he handled COVID-19 and other important areas, his policy record was very poor indeed. Despite his poor policy record, his base continued to identify passionately with him.
Politics is not necessarily about rationality, it is not necessarily about policy choices, and how well politicians do in terms of implementing them. It's more about the ways in which people identify with a political actor. In 2020, Trump in fact received twelve million more votes than in 2016 – which is not to overlook that there was much more polarization, and many more people went to vote in 2020
26 min
August 05, 2024 The vehicle of change is always politics - Sanjay Kumar on the 2024 Elections in India
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, eminent psephologist and political analyst Sanjay Kumar discusses the recently concluded elections in
India. Kumar weighs in on some of the unique features of the Indian elections in 2024, the emerging patterns of change, and what the election verdicts mean for democracy and politics in the Global South.

Sanjay Kumar is currently a Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. He served as the Director of CSDS from January 2014 till January 2020. His main area of research has been elections in India and voting behaviour. Kumar has also conducted research on other themes such as youth in India and the state of democracy in South Asia. His latest books are Elections in India: An Overview (2022) and Women Voters in Indian Elections: Changing Trends and Emerging Patterns
(2022). His earlier publications include Post-Mandal Politics in Bihar: Changing Electoral Patterns (2018), Changing Electoral Politics in Delhi: From Caste to Class (2013) and Measuring Voting Behaviour in
India (2013). He has been an Election Observer in numerous countries. He is also a prominent face in Indian media.
27 min
July 29, 2024 Ukraine Will Not Slide into Authoritarianism - A Conversation with Pat Cox
In this conversation, Pat Cox reflects on the new term
of the European Parliament and the importance of the rise of the Right in the Union and its member states. He also discusses his work in Ukraine after 2012 – when he led a mission to free political prisoners imprisoned by President Viktor Yanukovych – as well as in more recent years when he has co-directed the Jean Monnet Dialogues which aim to build consensus between the main political parties represented in the Ukrainian Parliament.

Pat Cox was President of the European Liberal Democrat Group between 1998 and 2002 and served as President of the European Parliament from 2002 until 2004. In what turned out to be the final phase of the Santer Commission
in early 1999, he played a decisive role in establishing parliamentary accountability of the executive. Since 2015, he has been President of the Jean Monnet Foundation for Europe.
40 min
July 10, 2024 Why Do We See the Rise of Anti-Democrats in Democracies? - Zack Beauchamp on the Reactionary Spirit Across the Globe
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Zack Beauchamp – author of the new book The Reactionary Spirit. How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World – discusses the specific kind of
antidemocratic politics that emerges in countries with democratic institutions; shows how the United States might to said to have invented competitive authoritarianism; explains the conclusions he drew from
comparing countries from different continents and how those conclusions may help us correct Western misperceptions; and reflects on the major intellectual
inspirations behind his book.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox where he covers challenges to democracy in the US and elsewhere, right-wing populism, and the world of ideas. He also acted as the host of Worldly, Vox’s weekly podcast on foreign policy and international affairs.
The Reactionary Spirit. How America’s Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World is published by Public Affairs.
35 min
July 08, 2024 Why Was Central-South-East Europe Labeled as "Corrupt"? - Silvia Marton on Transnational Histories of ‘Corruption’
In this podcast, Silvia
Márton, principal investigator within the ERC Project “Transnational Histories of ‘Corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe,” discusses the multiple understandings of the concept “corruption” in the context of Central-South-East
Europe; the relevance of this debate in understanding the process of modernization between 1750 and 1850; factors that led politicians, scholars, travelers and writers to label Central-South-East Europe as “corrupt;” and how
this team aims to challenge the main historiographical debates through the use of multiple sets of sources.
40 min
July 04, 2024 The intellectual sources of the EU Rule of Law crisis: In Conversation with Maciej Krogel
This latest RevDem Rule of Law podcast discusses the doctoral research of Dr. Maciej Krogel following the defence of his thesis “The intellectual sources of
the European Union’s response to the rule of law crisis in the Member States”.
Maciej is a lecturer at the University of Amsterdam and he completed a re:constitution fellowship in 2022/23.
Oliver Garner: Your Ph.D. traces the intellectual sources of the EU's response to the Rule of Law crisis in certain Member States. This is a topic that we have covered since the inception of RevDem. Could you
summarise your key findings for our listeners and readers?
Maciej Krogel: Thanks a lot for asking me about it. It is
still brand new to me to be graduated from the EUI and I think you are the first person to ask me about my research in an interview. So, indeed, I have written my thesis about the background conditions for the response of the European Union institutions to the Rule of Law crisis in the Member States. A lot has been written about the Rule of Law crisis, about institutions, about judiciaries, and about the problems in the Member States in the recent years. However, I think what was lacking, and what is lacking still, is the critical theory of the origins of what the European Union institutions are doing. We have some very specific critical accounts of, for example, the overly legalistic response or the democratic credentials of the response. But I have decided to trace the origins of the
Rule of Law response of the European Union to its earlier constitutional heritage, as I call it.
What has been lacking most of all, I think, has been situating the Rule of Law reactions, and also scholarship, within the broader constitutional heritage, concepts, ideas, and discussions of the European Union from the past decades. For instance, on topics such as constitutional pluralism, constitutional change, and membership in the European Union. These were the three main strands that I selected for tracing the origins in my thesis.
14 min
June 24, 2024 Gergő Medve-Bálint on the First Two Decades of Hungary’s EU Membership
In this conversation, Gergő Medve-Bálint – co-editor,
with András Bíró-Nagy of the new volume Húsz év az Európai Unióban. Magyarország uniós tagságának közpolitikai mérlege (Twenty Years in the
European Union. A Balance Sheet of Hungary’s Membership and Public Policies) – discusses the achievements and shortcomings of Hungary’s EU
membership; what continuities and ruptures there have been across these two decades; in what
ways Hungary has been a reliable member of the club and where it has deviated from common agendas and policies; and what the case of Hungary may reveal about
how the semi-peripheries have fared within the EU since 2004.
Gergő Medve-Bálint is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department for Government and Public Policy,
HUN-REN Center for Social Sciences. He also acts as an associate professor in political science at Corvinus University.
Húsz év az Európai Unióban. Magyarország uniós
tagságának közpolitikai mérlege (Twenty Years in the European Union. A Balance Sheet of Hungary’s
Membership and Public Policies) has been published by Osiris Kiadó.
47 min
June 17, 2024 Michael S. Roth on Being a Student and Student Activism Today - Finding the Pragmatist Middle Ground-
In this conversation at the Review of Democracy, Michael S. Roth sketches the main ways of being a student since ancient times; reflects on the process of learning “to be free”; explores the reasons behind
the politicization of universities in the United States; considers what might be new about the adversarial relationship between students and university
administrators these days; and sketches what “safe enough spaces” might look like in our turbulent
times.
Michael S. Roth is a historian, curator, author, and public advocate for liberal education. He has acted as President of Wesleyan University since 2007. He is the founding
director of the Scripps College Humanities Institute. He formerly acted as the associate director of the Getty
Research Institute in Los Angeles and as president of the
California College of the Arts. He is the author of eight books. The Student: A Short History is his newest book.
The Student: A Short History is published by Yale
University Press.
30 min

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