This event concludes the series of conferences and workshops of the "Back from the Brink" research project and will comprise several panel discussions over the two days. Papers will discuss the viability of strategies to counter illiberalism in liberal democracies, in particular: the political and institutional responses to parliamentary disruptions; the adoption of legal restrictions against anti-democratic actors; the role of "constitutional hardball" in defending liberal democratic institutions; the conditions for coordinating different oppositions to resist illiberal power bids; the role of ethnonationalism in the current predicament of democracy in the US; the role of anti-democratic rhetorical strategies by incumbent autocrats in delegitimizing liberal institutions; the importance of pro-democracy social norms to stymie the rise of illiberal political forces; the role of civil society mobilization in supporting or opposing illiberal reforms; and the electoral dilemmas of democratic opposition facing elected autocrats.
Participants include:
David Bateman (Cornell); Ivan Ermakoff (Wisconsin); Antonis Elllinas
(Cyprus); Vincente Valentim (Oxford); Robert Lieberman (Johns Hopkins); Susan
Stokes (Chicago); Lautaro Cella (Chicago); Ipek Cinar (Chicago); Andres Uribe
(Stanford); Laura Jakli (Harvard); Jason Wittenberg (Berkeley); Melis Laebens
(CEU Vienna); Marcin Slarzinsky (Polish Academy of Sciences); Michael Biggs
(Oxford), Mihail Chiru (Oxford), Martin Conway (Oxford), Nick Dickinson
(Oxford), David Doyle (Oxford), Stathis Kalyvas (Oxford), Desmond King
(Oxford), Alex Kuo (Oxford), Marek Naczyk (Oxford), Adam Smith (Oxford),
Katerina Tertytchnaya (Oxford).
Most literature on the current
crisis of liberal democracy focuses on the rise of illiberalism and populism as
well as on the erosion of democratic rights and institutions; less systematic
attention has been paid to how pro-democratic actors can prevent, contain, or
resist illiberalism. Furthermore, existing scholarship on responses to
illiberalism is scattered across different subfields, including analyses of
legal and judicial restrictions on extremism, studies of party organization and
competition, works on civil society organizations and social movements, and
analyses of voting behaviour. This conference brings together scholars from these
subfields to analyze what strategies can be adopted, as well as their
limitations and their potential, to protect liberal democracies from
illiberalism.
Our focus will be on liberal
democracies. Even though democracy is in retreat globally, the current
predicament of liberal democracies poses specific challenges for comparative
political analysis. The institutional reforms that instantiate incremental
“democratic backsliding” in liberal democracies —freeing the executive from
checks by institutions such as courts, media, independent agencies,
international and supranational rights regimes; manipulating the access to vote
of specific groups— are different from those observed in “electoral”, less
advanced, democracies. So are the strategies to thwart them.
Unlike most literature on countering
illiberalism in liberal democracies, which focuses on cases where illiberal
governments have started to entrench their power, the contributions to this
conference cover situations in which illiberals are both in power and in
opposition. The success of figures such as Trump, Orban, Kaczyński,
and others, has inspired populist right-wing parties and movements in other
liberal democracies to also advocate removing national and supranational checks
on executive power. Some of these parties are not in power but are rising
rapidly in support and influence. Others (e.g., in the US), are on the brink of
power. Pro-democratic forces are not doomed to fight back only after illiberals
have reached power. They can act preventively too.
Finally, although long-term
strategies such as redistribution, deradicalization programs or education
reforms are often important to counter illiberalism, we complement this
literature by focusing on strategies tailored to have effects in the short
term. These are particularly salient in the current political juncture and include,
but are not limited to: legal prosecution; the violation of informal constitutional
conventions (pro-democratic “constitutional hardball”); actions of civil
society organizations; and voter mobilization. All of them may entail
navigating significant tradeoffs and dilemmas, which become sharper as
illiberal forces become more influential in society. Yet, democrats are rarely
defenseless, even when illiberal forces take over the executive.
This conference brings together
scholars from different subfields of comparative politics and political
sociology to discuss the conditions of viability and effectiveness of
strategies to prevent the rise, contain the influence, and resist the power of political
illiberalism in liberal democracies.
The
Historical Turn in the Study of Democracy
(with N.
Bermeo), speaker
series at the Department of
Politics and
International Relations, University of Oxford, 2010-2011. Calendar
The Challenges and Dilemmas of Democratization (with D. Ziblatt), two-day conference at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University, 3-4 October 2008.
This workshop, funded by the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies and the Stiftung Deutsch-Amerikanische Wisseschaftsbeziehungen, brought together several scholars from Europe, Canada and the US to formulate a new approach to the study of democratization centered on the historical development of democratic institutions. The proceedings were published in August 2010 as a special issue of Comparative Political Studies entitled "The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies". The volume was the focus of a roundtable at the Department of Politics and IR, University of Oxford, on November 11, 2010.