In this conversation with Professor Maya Tudor—part of our special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy—we discuss her recent article published in the journal’s October 2025 issue (Vol. 36, No. 4). Tudor explores the factors behind the recent, alleged erosion of democratic ideals worldwide. Drawing on her experiences as an educator, Tudor argues that today’s decline in trust in democracy stems from misconceptions about its achievements—such as expanding education, extending life expectancy, promoting relative peace, and fostering economic progress. Challenging the belief that autocracies deliver more effectively on these outcomes, she contends that such regimes are often short-lived and unstable. Tudor ultimately urges us to view democracy not as a purely normative ideal, but as a pragmatic system best suited to advancing human well-being.

Maya Tudor is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Fellow of St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Varieties of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), as well as numerous articles in academic journals and popular media outlets.

The interview was conducted Anubha Anushree. Lilith Hakobyan edited the audio file.

To what extent does Zohran Mamdani’s recent election represent a turn in American politics? In an interview for the Review of Democracy, Fabian Holt (Associate Professor at Roskilde University) discusses the political platform that made Zohran Mamdani’s victory possible. Throughout our conversation, Holt maps the evolution of the Democratic Socialists of America, as presented in his latest book “Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival”, published last month by NYU Press.

Throughout the podcast, you can hear the reasons why Holt became interested in studying DSA, as his initial focus was on music festivals and their relationship to the neoliberal framework. As he notes, Organize or Burn is the firstethnographic work on DSA. The discussion then focuses on the strengths and limitations of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on such an evolving phenomenon.  Holt argues that first-hand experience is essential in understanding grassroots movements. Another point tackled in the podcast is climate apathy and how the DSA sought to raise awareness about climate change in a sustained way. As Fabian Holt argues, thisis the meaning behind his book’s title, Organize or Burn, which captures a key component of DSA’s campaign to support Mamdani.

For those interested in better understanding how the DSA shaped its discourse and expanded its base, this podcast can provide a good insight. As well, it answers the question to what extent this movement is bound to large cities or canaddress a broader electorate.

In this new episode of the “When the Far Right and the Far Left Converge” series, which shares fresh research from aworkshop organised by the CEU DI Democracy in History Work Group, we discuss with Dr Ashton Kingdon and Dr BalšaLubarda how both the far right and the far left mobilise ecological ideas, often drawing from the same language of resistance. Based on their paper “Co-optationwithout Ownership: The Idea of Resistance in Multimodal Radical Right and Left Ecological Argumentation,” the conversation explores how environmentalismbecomes a battleground of competing ideologies, revealing surprising overlaps in how radical movements frame their struggle against perceived systems of oppression. The episode also examines how the use of similar imagery bydifferent groups can become dangerous in democracies, leading to confusion or disorientation among citizens and making it harder to interpret images and slogans outside their original context.

In this episode of our special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we explore “AI’s Real Dangers for Democracy,” the new article penned by Dean Jackson and Samuel Woolley (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No. 4, October 2025)

Jackson and Woolley discuss the ways in which AI could strain, or even crack, the foundations of democracies; reflect on how the debate surrounding AI is structured and how it has evolved; and recommend practical steps through whichthose potential harms could be limited.

The podcast was recorded on October 9, the same day when Jackson and Wooley published an analysis in TheGuardian on how AI threatens elections.

In the opening episode of Review ofDemocracy’s new podcast series on EU-funded research, Alexandra Kardos speaks with Professor Zsolt Boda, Director of the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, about the MORES Moral Emotions in Politics  project, a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action exploring how emotions shapedemocratic life. The conversation delves into the project’s central ideas of moral emotions and moralised political identities, the dangers of both emotional detachment and over-emotionalization in politics, and how thesedynamics influence trust, polarisation, and civic engagement. Professor Boda also discusses MORES’ innovative tools – including MORES Pulse AI – designed to help policymakers, journalists, and citizens navigate the emotional undercurrents of contemporary democracy by assessing the moral-emotional tone of their own or others’ communication.

In our podcast, Rachel Myrick, the Douglas & Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, discusses with us how extreme partisan polarization threatens not only domestic governance but also global stability. Drawing on her new book, Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability (Princeton University Press, 2025), Myrick argues that polarization in democracies affects foreign policymaking.

The conversation begins with a striking example:each year, the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group publishes a list of the world’s top geopolitical risks. The 2024 report placed as the highest risk not the Russian aggression, Middle Eastern conflict, but ‘the United States versus itself’. This diagnosis, Myrick suggests, encapsulates the central claim of her book: extreme party polarization erodes the institutional foundations that once made democracies stable and credible actors abroad.

Throughout the podcast, the author unfolds how polarization affects the three pillars that democracies used to have in international relations: the ability to keep foreign policystable over time, to credibly signal information to adversaries and the reliability with partners in international politics. Then, the discussion moves to the ways in which polarization affects foreign policies. In a healthy democracy, leaders are incentivized to provide public goods and act in the national interest.Instead, in extremely polarized environments, politicians do not „target messaging at the median voter and instead work to mobilize their political base”. Voters increasingly view politics as a contest between moral enemies rather than legitimate rivals, caring more about their side’s victorythan about performance or accountability.

While the United States provides her primary example, Myrick points to similar patterns across Europe. In younger democracies such as Hungary or Poland, polarisation fuels “executive aggrandizement,” as ruling parties rewrite rules to secure permanent advantage.In established democracies, it simply makes governments less predictable partners internationally. Rachel Myrick ends the conversation with a warning: the greatest threat to international order may no longer come from authoritarian powers, but from democracies unable to govern themselves and to be effective partners.

The end of the last century brought about what scholars have called a “unipolar moment.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, liberalism lost its enemy on the global stage, which led the United States to try to establish an international liberal order by promoting liberalism transnationally. This latter approach has not only been harshly criticized for often being executed hypocritically and sometimes causing disastrous wars, but also ultimately seems to have failed. While Cold War restorationism might be dangerous and mistaken, today’s world again features different authoritarian global powers, with the U.S. seemingly on the path to becoming one itself. Moreover, while democracy promotion by Westernliberal states is deteriorating, scholars have argued that authoritarian powers are increasing their collaboration on theglobal stage to extend authoritarian rule across space and time.

In this conversation, Professors Alexander Dukalskisand Alexander Cooley argue that the project to spread liberalism around the world has caused a snapback, in which authoritarian regimes aim to capture and repurpose the actors, tools, and norms once created by liberal democracies for their own ends. Their book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, was published byOxford University Press in September 2025.

Anna Dobrowolska's new book Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain, published at the Oxford University Press this year, reveals fresh perspectives in the scholarship about the socialist states. In our podcast, she explains how Poland and Eastern Europe developed their own distinct approaches to sexual modernity under state socialism.

While Western observers assumed sexual liberation was incompatible with communist rule, Poland was quietly developing its own sophisticated approach to sexual modernity. In her book, Anna Dobrowolska aimed to map these differences and nuances.

Throughout the conversation, we learn that the conventional narrative of state oppression versus societal resistance proves to be inadequate when examining Poland’s sexual revolution. Dobrowolska’s archival research reveals a complex ecosystem of actors: sexologists, journalists, cultural institutions, who negotiated sexual discourse largely independent of central party directives.

These middle-level negotiations created unexpected spaces for sexual expression within the socialist framework, as the book shows. Perhaps most surprisingly, censorship archives reveal that sexual content often received official approval precisely because it served broader state modernisation goals. Conservative citizens frequently petitioned authorities for stricter moral oversight, only to find officials defending more liberal positions.

Borders are rarely born in conference halls. As thenewly edited book The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I, published this yearby Bergahn Books shows that the borders are created by wars and conflicts and then changed by clerks, soldiers, smugglers and villagers trying to make sense of a new world order. By focusing on one of the seemingly post-1918 quieter frontiers, the line separating Austria from Hungary, the bookchallenges the narrative that the Treaty of Trianon neatly decided everything with a stroke of the pen.

As two of the editors, Hannes Grandits and Katharina Tyran underline throughout our podcast, the creation of Burgenlandwas a complicated process stretching over several years, entangling ideology, class and everyday survival. The volume’s nine chapters, written by Ibolya Murber, Michael Burri, Ferenc Jankó, Sabine Schmitner-Laszakovits, Gábor Egry, Melinda Harlov-Csortán, Katharina Tyran, Hannes Grandits and Ursula K. Mindler-Steiner, explore this border-making through a tangle of sources from international commission reports, localtestimonies to administrative records. Hannes Grandits notes that although the decision to transfer parts of western Hungary to Austria was made in 1919, it remained unimplemented for nearly two years. In the meantime, loyalties shifted, black markets thrived, and even a brief Bolshevik experiment in Hungary complicated the decision-making process.

Throughout this period, identities shifted. Katharina Tyran provides the example of Ivan Dobrović, a Croatian culturalactivist who changed the spelling of his name depending on context. As she emphasizes, this small act captures the fluid identities the new nation-states tried to erase. Other contributors trace the social consequences. The Esterházyfamily saw their estates shrink; local bureaucrats slipped down the social ladder; peasants and artisans, newly politicised, wavered between social democracy and nationalism. Minority communities, Croats, Jews, Roma, foundthemselves suddenly reclassified by powers that barely understood them.

 This book reads the border negotiation as an anatomy of transition. The conclusion of our conversation is that borders are not only documents, but lived experiences, shaped by people who rarely appear in diplomatic archives. The lesson ofBurgenland is that borders are performed, contested and reimagined every day.

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Mohammad Ali Kadivar to explore the urgent and timely question of popular protests amid global democratic backsliding. Drawing from his acclaimed monograph, Popular Politics and thePath to Durable Democracy, Kadivar poses the following questions: What role does dissent play in sustaining democracies? Do protests reinforce or underminedemocratic institutions? The book offers a compelling and often counterintuitive analysis of how mass mobilizations shape democratic trajectories. Through a rich comparative lens—examining cases from Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Poland—Kadivar argues that prolonged prodemocratic mobilizations can in fact fortify democracies. Rather than destabilizing political systems, these extended collective protest movements build the organizational infrastructure and civic capacity necessary for democratic consolidation.

Kadivar emphasizes that sustained mobilization fosters stable leadership, cultivates diverse civic participation, and compels states to engage meaningfully with popular demands. By revisiting pivotal uprisings, such as the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, this conversation reveals underexploreddynamics at the heart of democratic transitions—and challenges conventional assumptions about the disruptive role of protest.