Working papers
Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies: Actors, Strategies, Temporalities
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 counter illiberalism. Focusing on advanced liberal democracies, this paper maps the strategies that the government, pro-democratic parties, civil society organizations, and individual voters can adopt to counter illiberal movements in situations where illiberal parties have reached power (resistance); where they are in opposition but are serious contenders to attain executive power in the short term (containment); and where they are not on the brink of power but are rising in political influence (prevention). The discussion focuses on political strategies designed to have effects in the short term and outlines the tradeoff and dilemmas entailed in countering illiberalism in these three scenarios. With the purpose of identifying priorities for future research, the last section of the paper puts forward some tentative reflections on the broad conditions of viability and effectiveness of anti-illiberal strategies.
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Shaping competition: Allies' party licensing and the extreme right in Germany
(with Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University)
Political
elites in new democracies typically confront the problem of how to
mitigate the destabilizing potential of large masses of alienated
voters who might oppose the new regime, either because they are still
ideologically linked to the past authoritarian regime or because they
associate the democratic transition with the loss of material resources
and social prestige. The dilemmas associated with this situation are
well known: preventing the reorganization of radical
“successor parties” might increase
voters’ alienation and sow the seeds of more instability,
while allowing such organizations to compete freely might entail costs
in terms of government stability and effectiveness in the shorter term.
Attracting disaffected individuals under the banners of moderate
parties with the promise of policy concessions on their most pressing
material demands is often considered an effective strategy
in enlarging
the social bases of the new regime. Using a subnational design, the
paper explores the impact of these choices on the development of the
extreme right in West Germany during the first decade of the Federal
Republic.
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Normative Frameworks, Electoral Strategies, and the Boundaries of Pluralism in post-Fascist Democracies: The Case of Italy
Variation in the
political inclusion or marginalization of the extreme right in Western
European democracies is typically explained by focusing on ideational
factors, in particular processes of “political
learning”,
and the “politics of memory” —broadly
speaking,
whether the public debate is dominated by the rejection of the
country’s Fascist past, or whether ambiguity prevails. This
paper
argues that the emergence of public norms legitimizing the political
marginalization of the extreme right is endogenous to whether the
extreme right is illegalized in the aftermath of the democratic
transition. In turn, this outcome is not driven by how key collective
actors and decision-makers view the Fascist past, but by their expected
short-term gains in access to governmental power and policy influence.
The paper elaborates these theoretical propositions and tests them with
newly collected archival and quantitative evidence on post-war Italy.
The argument has implications for the analysis of the marginalization
or inclusion of the extreme right in comparable cases, and for a more
nuanced understanding of the role of public norms in establishing the
boundaries of legitimate dissent in liberal democracies.
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Selecting Units in Political Research
(with Laura Stoker, UC Berkeley)