This episode explores advances made by the far-right in Austria and in Germany and examines crucial factors raised by Lutz’s recent report on identity, partisanship and polarization. What are the unexpected convergences and similarities across European countries? And what are the implications of the findings on the contested notion of illiberal democracy? Listen to hear about the challenge of mobilizing disaffected voters and what characterizes identity-democracy tradeoffs.
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Glossary
Christian Democratic Union Party (CDU) and Christian Social Union Party (CSU) in Germany
(19:56 or p.6 in the transcript)
The CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the CSU, were established as non-denominational Christian parties directly after the Second World War by members of the civilian resistance to National Socialism. Their core values are rooted in Catholic social doctrine, Conservativism, and commitment to a liberal (social) market economy that is provided with a regulatory framework of rules and laws by the state. The CDU/CSU regards itself as a “catch-all party” that expressly combines many different interests and therefore aims to speak and develop policies on behalf of a very large part of the population. The CDU runs for election in all Germany’s states apart from Bavaria, where its place is taken by the CSU, which only stands in Bavaria. The two parties are often known colloquially as “the Union”. In the Bundestag they form the CDU/CSU parliamentary group. The “Union” is traditionally the strongest party in Germany and has governed the country the longest in various coalitions. source
Shalini Randeria (SR): Welcome to a new episode of Democracy in Question, the podcast series that explores the challenges democracies are facing around the world. I'm Shalini Randeria, Rector and President of the Central European University in Vienna and Senior Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at the Graduate Institute Geneva.
This is the eighth episode of season nine of Democracy in Question. I'm very pleased to welcome Johanna Lutz. She's director of Friedrich Ebert Foundation's Democracy of the Future program in the OSCE region office here in Vienna. She served as deputy head of the foundation's EU office in Brussels and also presided over the network of political foundations in Brussels. With a background in political science and public law, Johanna has lived and worked in Germany, in Egypt and in Brazil. Her most recent publications include the co-authored article “In Europe, Democracy Erodes from the Right”[i] in the Journal of Democracy and the influential report with the title “Identity, Partisanship, Polarization: How Democratically Elected Politicians Get Away with Autocratizing Their Country”[ii]. Both the article and the report are going to be the subject of our conversation today.
This year has been dubbed a super election year, as more than half of the world's populations have or will cast their vote in 2024. We've covered some of these elections on the podcast if you've been listening to us regularly. In a Foreign Affairs article last month, Francis Fukuyama warned against what he called “catastrophe thinking” among liberals who worry excessively about democratic backsliding and the triumph of illiberal populism. He argued, and I quote him, that: “although authoritarian ideologies have made clear gains in several countries, democracy in many parts of the world has shown surprising resilience.”
However, a focus just on election results may give us a false sense of security. After all, the RN (Rassemblement National) has not been able to form a government in France and the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is unlikely to become the ruling party in Germany, even on a regional level. But Johanna Lutz's research on democratic erosion moves us beyond these token promises of resilience and robustness and electoral numbers. It addresses the inherent, if latent, and tacit willingness of many voters to put up with undemocratic and even anti-democratic political agendas of parties and policies that they identify with ideologically. In short, Johanna and her collaborators are focusing on potential vulnerabilities at the heart of many democratic systems in Europe, systems that are considered stable and consolidated, but have vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited in future. She calls, therefore, for an urgent shift in our perspective. Instead of focusing on the present with its illusion of security, stability, resilience, Johanna urges us to consider the possibilities of erosion and backsliding, evident in the questionable voter preferences and biases that her research identifies.
So, I'll begin my discussion with her with a brief analysis of the advances made by the far-right, both in Austria and in Germany. We'll then move on to some crucial questions that her report raises, such as the tradeoff between identity and democracy, for it seems that some voters are willing to overlook anti-democratic behavior of their preferred parties if these are pursuing policies which they strongly favor. I'll ask Johanna to identify and situate these kinds of voters in these parties on the political spectrum. Given the comparative scope of her research, I'll ask her to highlight some unexpected convergences and similarities across several European countries as well. We'll also talk about the implications of her findings for the contested notion of illiberal democracy and whether polarization is the primary driver of autocratization today.
Finally, I'll ask her why she thinks it's illusory to put our hopes in mobilizing disaffected voters and how these could be won over to the cause of democratic resilience. So warm welcome to you Johanna. Thank you so much for being my guest on the podcast today.
Johanna Lutz (JL): Thank you, Shalini, so much for having me on.
SR: A fortnight ago, I focused on the recent elections in Austria, and since we are both based in Vienna, let's begin there. The extreme far-right Freedom Party is the big winner, having garnered almost 30 percent of the popular vote and attracted almost half a million new voters, while the mainstream parties, especially the conservatives, seem to have lost ground.
The rhetoric of the Freedom Party, its xenophobia, its anti-immigration mobilization, as well as its advocacy of the Hungarian model, with an anti-EU bias, a pro-Russian foreign policy, could well become drivers of mainstream political discourse in Austria as well. So, could you comment on the symbolic significance and also the practical consequences of this electoral result, which follows the wider trend to the right in many European democracies today?
JL: In my view, the rhetoric of the extreme far-right FPÖ is already dominating the mainstream discourse. And this was only made possible because mainstream parties, and above all, the conservative People's Party, copied the rhetoric of the FPÖ and thus contributed significantly to its normalization.
And this is ultimately what makes this election so symbolic. Far-right ideas and rhetoric have already become mainstream, and it shows once again the consequences of repeating the arguments and frame of the radical right. Usually, it's done to win back votes, but we see that it usually helps to push the entire societal discourse to the right, and in the end, people always vote for the original, in this case the FPÖ.
SR: Let's move to Germany. There's been a slow but a continual change in the post-war consensus in Germany with the breaking of the taboo on extremism. Right-wing radicalism has found its way into the German political mainstream and into the societal mainstream as well. True, the Alternative for Germany, AfD, remains marginalized in the German political landscape, unlike the FPÖ here.
And the AfD remains under observation for its anti-constitutionalism. There are discussions, in fact, in Germany about whether the party should be banned. However, in last month's regional elections the AfD won a third of the popular vote in three East German provinces. What do you think this means for democratic politics in Germany? And what is the debate of the pro and cons of banning a far-right extremist party?
JL: So, I think democratic politics is becoming much more difficult now. In Germany, we see that the same path of normalization of the far-right discourse in society has taken place just as in Austria. In Austria, it's just proceeded a little bit further because it started way earlier as well.
And it's becoming more difficult, especially for politicians on the local level to maintain the cordon sanitaire towards the AfD. Because a series of crises, the climate crisis or the Ukraine war, have created an atmosphere in Germany that's not at all open for any change. And it's making it very easy for the far-right AfD to appeal to voters with very easy solutions targeting especially minorities such as migrants and to blame them for many things.
So political parties have to question and really update their strategies for how to counter the far-right politically. And I would say, democratic parties that usually have significant policy differences now have to cooperate in order to form a majority against this big share of AfD seats in eastern German parliaments.
And that's because they agree on basically only one thing: they want to preserve democracy and the system based on the rule of law. And I think that democratic politics needs to strengthen the resilience of political institutions.
They have to prevent far-right parties from hijacking crucial institutions, such as the Supreme Court but also just to safeguard very basic parliamentary procedures. First experiences with AfD in Parliament show that forbearance, like self-restraint in the use of legal powers, in the spirit of the law or democracy, is not a value that democratic politics can continue to rely on, as they used to in the past.
SR: In an article published six months ago, you've argued that the German “democracy malaise” epitomized by the AfD's rise in popularity should not be mistaken for a sudden turn towards authoritarianism. It should rather serve as a wakeup call that German democracy may not be as robust as it was thought to be.
Let me quote from your article. You say, “under certain circumstances, many Germans would abandon democracy. More concretely, many Germans would forgive politicians undemocratic behavior if those politicians came from their favorite party or promised to satisfy their interests with respect to identity related issues, such as immigration, same sex couples rights, or environment, in return. This is particularly true for voters on the right end of the political spectrum.” Now, this argument of yours is based on a very large -scale sample of a comparative survey in seven European countries that you and your co-authors compiled in the Report on Identity, Partisanship, and Polarization. What were the main questions that this report of yours addressed, and how was it received in various European countries?
JL: As you said, we wanted to find out how come people vote for politicians or political candidates who already propose or are running with the notion of wanting to autocratize the system. What motivates people to vote for autocratic leaders? Because when we ask people directly in surveys about their attitude towards democracy, they usually express very positive sentiments. But at the ballot box, we then see that they do vote for authoritarian-minded politicians. And so, we wanted to explore this discrepancy and conducted an online experiment.
And in this, we asked our survey respondents to choose between two candidates, one of them holding an anti-democratic position. And we repeated this many times. So, in the end, our experimental design allowed us to explore how voters would behave when they are faced with a choice between democracy and other issues like their party loyalty, policy priorities, or ideological dogma.
So ,we put these European democracies under a stress test and we saw that most voters in these eight countries express the desire to live in a democratic system. They also show a solid understanding of what democracy is. And also, the majority of the respondents are indeed inclined to punish candidates who violate democratic norms.
But we also saw that there are differences. For example, not all elements of liberal democracies are valued equally. Our candidates had proposed different measures. For example, sometimes they would suggest that their supporters should violently disrupt the others’ rallies. And that was actually one of the measures proposed that was punished the most throughout all countries. So free and fair elections as one element of democracy are valued the most. Others, such as civil liberties or separation of powers, a little bit less.
For example, if a candidate says that the government should discipline judges who publicly criticize the government, that is less punished by voters. Or if a candidate proposes the government should prosecute journalists who accuse the prime minister of corruption.
And we also see it that politicians who strive for autocracy in their country, will always try to hold elections, no matter what, just to evoke a democratic image. And then we also saw that not everyone punishes undemocratic behavior equally. We saw differences in characteristics of voters. Some are really different depending on the country, but in general, for eight European countries that we tested, we saw, for example, people who have a better political knowledge or people who trust the other citizens or people with a better education in general punish undemocratic behavior more. But voters are in general very strongly party loyal. So that means whenever a candidate who was according to our test or experiment ballot, belonging to their favorite or preferred party, then they were ready to forgive undemocratic behavior by far.
And this was the element that resulted in most forgiveness throughout all countries. And we actually interpret this result as an evidence of the ongoing strength of political parties. But also, a reminder of how crucial it is for party organizations to keep undemocratic politicians in check and prevent their rise within the party.
That's something that, for example, also now Republicans say of Trump and some are now taking a stance against him. And this finding also serves as a call to all voters, both partisan and nonpartisan, to advocate for democracy, I would say. And we also found this quite surprising, because trust in political parties has been sinking in the last years.
Yet we see that people somehow trust this overall frame that a party gives a candidate because he just assumed that the party will somehow reign that person in. And you trust the whole package more than just this one candidate.
SR: These are very interesting findings. They show a consistency, Johanna, of the correlation between education and democratic adherence to democratic values and institutions, they show there's a gender gap with women much more inclined to hold up democratic values and principles than men.
But what is really interesting is the consistency across Europe. So, could you say something about the countries you looked at and did you find any differences which were interesting?
JL: Yes, we tried to pick different countries that were modeled for a certain kind of liberal democracy. So, we had Sweden in our sample and Spain and Germany as the older liberal democracies. We had Poland and Estonia and Serbia in our sample. We added Hungary last year, and we also had Ukraine, prewar, included. And the results were quite surprising sometimes. For example, in Poland our voters punished undemocratic behavior more than in Germany, and the lowest punishing rate we actually saw in Spain. And in Poland, we had the impression that some of the measures that we tested the, the Polish society was just really sensitized towards them.
There had been lots of debate about these issues and rule of law issues were also much more in the consciousness of people. We did see quite a few differences between Hungary and Poland that were interesting and that also showed that civil society and there is a strong democratic part in Poland, which we cannot see in Hungary at all.
In general, throughout all different party supporters in Hungary, the punishing rate was really low. Whereas in Poland, we had a big variance over the different types of people. And in Poland, we could say people are polarized over the issue of democracy and the rule of law much more than in other countries.
One other interesting finding was that the non-voters in Serbia, for example, were much more democratically minded than non-voters in most Western European countries. One feature that we could see in all countries was that people who preferred far-right parties are more likely to forgive undemocratic behavior than all other than all other voters.
SR: So that's exactly the point I wanted to pick up here because what I found really interesting in the report was that there is very significant variation within each country and those who sympathize with radical far-right parties are much more forgiving of violations of liberal principles in case the policies that they favor are being strongly adhered to by the parties.
As you pointed out in the report, the supporters of some of the mainstream conservative parties, such as the CDU in Germany or the People's Party in Spain, are rather uncomfortably close to this position as well. You put it in your report in a really succinct formulation, you say: “In Europe, democracy erodes from the right.”
These identity defining preferences include social issues that seem to constitute core elements of illiberal, ethno-nationalist, nativist ideologies. So, immigration obviously is a very big issue. But the opposition to same-sex marriage, to LGBTQ rights seems to be an equally important issue. So, it's gender politics and immigration.
Could you elaborate on this and talk a little bit about the variations among the far-right sympathizers? Because there seems to be, as you just pointed out, a gender divide.
JL: So, when we say in Europe democracy erodes from the right that's because in all the countries which we tested, the voters of the populist right, they really punish the least undemocratic behavior.
But as you said, conservative party voters would also tolerate undemocratic behavior. That is something that I find quite disturbing, especially when you look at prospects of potential coalitions. For example, in Germany between AfD and CDU/CSU.
The CDU/CSU party leadership adheres to strong democratic and rule of law principles, certainly. But it's just that we have to really keep an eye on the fact that their voters, however, would not mind if certain democratic or rule of law standards would be just abandoned.
And among far-right voters, we have looked at a couple of them also to see whether there are any strategies to still address sympathizers or voters of far-right parties, for example. And in Germany, we can see that women who vote for the AfD, they care more about democracy than a male CDU/CSU voter.
We tried to analyze this so deeply so that we could actually perhaps also find some strategies on how to address people. We had we tested a couple of policy positions and among them was the attitude of a politician that was on the ballot or a fake politician that was on the ballot and their stance on immigration or their stance on same sex couples. We didn't ask for other gender issues but it was just clear that the issue for same sex couples is something that mobilizes people a lot, even if it doesn't really affect them directly. And other issues, socioeconomic issues, didn't mobilize them just as much.
SR: Do you have an explanation for that? We are in the midst of inflation of the kind that Europe has not seen in a long time. We're in the midst of a cost of living crisis, affordable housing has become such a problem, and why is it that in such an economic situation, in which also over the last year statistics show so clearly that the gap between the rich and the poor, the wealth and income disparities are growing, why is it that in such a situation identity politics and same sex marriage seems influence and mobilize political support so much. This is bad news for social democratic politics, right?
JL: It certainly is. And in the end, I think it's actually bad news for everyone. And it was also a great surprise and a puzzle to me. We had these different policies on the ballot to see whether people who usually punish undemocratic behavior, if they would forgive this undemocratic behavior for something else.
And we had different policies that we tested against this. So, for example, also one that included income tax. Or energy taxes, you know, we particularly picked taxes that would affect almost everyone and yet we would see that other issues like giving rights to same sex couples or whether someone is allowed to converse in minority language, such as Catalan (in) Spain, that was something that even though it doesn't affect everyone, that's what mobilized people, and that's what got them to ignore undemocratic measures that were proposed by that same candidate. The effect of the extent of forgiveness was much bigger when it was such an identity issue rather than socioeconomic issues.
I think what these turbulences of war and multiple crises do is they give people the feeling that they are losing something, and this makes you very susceptible to very easy rhetoric, to blaming minorities.
If there is the housing crisis, they manage to somehow blame it on the migrants, rather than blaming it on really bad housing policies that have been going on for years. And so, they always very successfully divert from any socioeconomic issue to making it an identity issue somehow.
SR: You are careful to point out in the report that temporary or partial suspension of democratic preferences, we shouldn't frame this as a battle between liberal and illiberal conceptions. That is, as a conflict of values within a democratic framework. But equally importantly, supporters of illiberal, radical, right-wing parties are willing not only to sacrifice liberal ideas like civil liberties, rule of law, but they are, in general, more open to authoritarianism.
So, they don't oppose their own parties violating, for example, the principle of electoral fairness. This would mean that the term Illiberal democracy is an oxymoron. As you point out, the illiberal right’s disagreement with democracy is not confined to its liberal components. It is all encompassing. Could you say something about the all-encompassing nature of the willingness to embrace authoritarianism by right-wing voters, especially because illiberal politicians all claim that they want more and better democracy or rather direct populist majoritarian kind of democracy.
JL: Yes, that's what they often claim. But we saw in our experiment that across the board, those on the liberal right punish undemocratic candidates at a rate that are at best 50 to 70 percent of those of the mainstream. And, apart from a few outliers, the liberal right (is) just as unmoved by violations of electoral fairness as it is by those concerning checks and balances or civil liberties.
So, its argument is not with liberalism alone. And we have seen how want-to-be autocrats try to in the end also dismantle free and fair elections. They start with other issues, but in the end, they change the system so that free and fair elections [aren’t] really possible anymore.
They, when far-right politicians claim that they would be the better democrats, for example, by proposing to hold referenda I think they're just trying to lure all those who are less satisfied with how democracy works. And there are lots of those in our survey and in lots of surveys you see that people in general support democracy, but they are very dissatisfied with how democracy works. So, I also think that we should really improve democracy and update the way it works.
SR: What is it specifically that your survey is finding that people are disappointed or dissatisfied with? And what has democracy failed to deliver?
JL: We didn't go into specifics. We just asked the very standard questions: are you satisfied with how democracy works in your country? And then we, of course, also analyzed by different groups of respondents who's more satisfied with it and less. And for example, when you looked at the Germany data in more detail, we saw that democracy as a system is very dear to AfD voters.
They would like to keep democracy as a system, but when you ask them how satisfied they are with it, they are very dissatisfied, much more than the supporters of other parties. That's where the gap is. And also, the non-voters, but non-voters also do not really support democracy as a system as much as AfD voters do. I think most people are very satisfied with the output of democracy.
SR: I'll come to the question of non-voters. But the other question that I want to discuss with you is the question of polarization on which the report has some very interesting things to say. Polarization deepens the identity-democracy trade off, as you point out. Identity related issues are polarizing societies significantly more than socio-economic disagreements, as we've just heard from you. But you emphasize something interesting here, which is the difference between the United States and Europe. Unlike in the United States, where much has been made of polarization as the main driver of autocratization, in Europe, your report points out, and I quote, “the salience of an issue can also make people tolerate undemocratic behavior, even if a society is not polarized over it.” Your comparative research shows that some polarizing issues don't provoke undemocratic behavior, while others do. Some voters trade off democratic standards for policy issues which are not particularly polarizing in their country. So, could you give some examples and try and explain a little bit about how this transnational divide on polarization seems to be evident in your data?
JL: When we set out with this experiment, it was basically a remodeling of the experiment that our co-author Milan Svolik from Yale University had set out to do. He had this influential article in the Journal of Democracy called “Polarization vs. Democracy”, and in it you could see that polarization plays a big role in the deteriorating of democracy in the U.S. So, we assumed we would find the same role for polarization in Europe. And we were really surprised that we didn't.
It does play some role in our selected European countries, but not as clearly as was in the U.S. experiment. And that's probably also because the U.S. has a two-party system which collapses a wide range of social and political debates into a singular two pole battle. And a stance on a particular issue, such as on abortion, for example, can always be directly assigned to one of the two camps. And in European multi-party systems, polarization alone cannot have such a strong effect as it does in the U.S. So that was one main difference. And then we tested the polarization among our respondents on these different issues that I had mentioned earlier and in general, we saw that the respondents were not that polarized. For example, in Germany, people are not so polarized in general. And there's a higher polarization, for example, in Serbia. And then we found that on some issues the polarization was high and yet people did not tolerate undemocratic behavior for it.
For example, the issue of energy tax in Poland (is a) very controversial, polarizing issue. But the Polish people would not sacrifice democracy for it. On the other hand, we saw the issue of same-sex couples rights in Spain. It's not at all polarizing, and most of our respondents, more than 90 percent are in favor of all rights for same-sex couples. Yet people would sacrifice democratic standards for it. That was really surprising, and we also tested for each of these issues, the salience. So, we could see that sometimes, even if an issue is not polarizing a society, it can be still very salient, and then politicians can also use this issue in their favor.
SR: Let me turn to the other point which you just made, which is a slightly unexpected finding for me, that it's not only illiberal far-right voters who represent a potential threat to European democracies, but also disengaged, passive citizens who are disaffected, disinterested in politics for a variety of reasons. Because what the survey finds is that if, and when these disaffected citizens re-engage in politics, they are often quite likely to gravitate towards the illiberal right. So, they would constitute a hidden but still a potent reservoir of tolerance for authoritarianism.
And if this disengaged section of nonvoters exhibits greater tolerance for anti-democratic politics and are, therefore, dormant supporters of the illiberal right, then, of course, the argument, let's get the vote out, we can get people to engage more actively and we can mobilize the politically apathetic and inactive, that's not going to work in order to preserve or protect liberal democratic values, right?
JL: Yes, that's true. And that was also a surprise to us because we often hear that politicians would just mobilize the non-voters and then democracy would thrive again and that democratic parties would get more support. The non-voters in our sample, however, paint a different picture. They are in general also very dissatisfied with democracy. But they also think that democracy is just not important to them. They are drifting towards indifference to democracy. And I think that, of course, makes it quite difficult for parties to mobilize non-voters, especially if they try to appeal to them by claims like, go vote to save democracy, because it's actually not really important to them.
SR: There is a demographic aspect to this, which is worrying for me, and that is the age group, if you take the German data, the age group of 18- to 29-year-old voters who seem to value democracy the least. How do you explain this rather worrying finding, and as a political foundation, the Ebert Foundation, which is a foundation of the Social Democratic Party, this must be an alarming development for you as well.
What kinds of strategies are you thinking about when it comes to addressing this problem and attracting especially a young group of voters not only back into being active engaged citizens, but also to be proponents of liberal values and social democratic principles.
JL: That is certainly a big challenge, and we were also surprised to see that among the age group of the 18- to 29-year-olds in Germany, they are very forgiving of undemocratic behavior than on average in other countries. It was just Serbian and German youth who punish less than older people in their country. And that is quite surprising. And we also ran a democratic competence test with our respondents to see whether they knew what democracy was, what the democratic standards were. And there we could also see that the younger age group is less democratic. They cannot really differentiate between democratic and undemocratic behavior as well as the older cohorts do. I think this means that political foundations, but also other actors, governments should also support programs to educate people more about democracy and to educate them in a way that they really can experience it. You have to bring more innovative programs to schools, different venues where young people are. And it's also really important to stick to the values and to hold up the values in all kinds of surroundings where young people are.
SR: I think this is a really important finding for us as universities and has implications for our curricula in higher education. But also of course with the 18- and 29-year-olds, I think there seems to be a real gap in civic education in schools as well. This has practical implications for the work of all political foundations, but also for the work of all educational institutions as well.
Why do you think mainstream centrist parties like the Social Democratic Party have increasingly become out of touch with young people? And what kinds of cultural forms and registers, especially new media registers, alternative, innovative approaches and venues could be used to regain support for democracy among this age group? What we've seen, for example, in the last German regional elections is that the AfD was extremely successful in mobilizing, especially this group of young voters through trendy social media channels like TikTok, for example. And the question for me is: is that the way all parties should go or must go? Or are there other venues, strategies, innovative approaches for lived democracy to be experienced by these young people, which could be more appealing, which could also be more attractive?
JL: More appealing than TikTok? I don't know. And this is certainly something that the far-right parties across Europe have recognized early on. The TikTok and social media in general, but especially TikTok is and its algorithm is functioning in a way that's really supporting them. Other parties have tried to catch up but much less successfully so. They should still try, but they shouldn't only focus on becoming the new champions on TikTok. I think there's lots of space for young people that we have really lost and given up. And in Eastern Germany the structures, such as sports clubs or youth centers also, these spaces have gone empty. They used to be organized by the party, you know, in GDR times. And nobody has really stepped in afterwards. And now far-right groups have mobilized. They're offering karate and all kinds of sports and leisure time. And that's where also democratic parties should step in.
I think there should also be more democracy practiced in the workplace through works councils and trade unions and so on. You should just try to experience democracy and also the way of finding compromise in different venues, schools, at work, and so on. And I think if we are speaking of democratic innovations certainly casting the vote every four or five years is not enough. That's also not how you can address young people and engage them. And one option that you can at least try is also using citizens assemblies more, where people are really chosen by lottery. So, it's just by chance that you're picked and this also gets people who are otherwise really disengaged and disinterested in politics. For this, they usually come and are curious. And evaluations of citizen assemblies have shown that the experience alone of being in a group of really different people and finding compromises, finding solutions to a certain well-defined problem, that's an experience that can actually motivate people to engage more afterwards.
People have reported that now they're going to vote again, and some people who hadn't voted in 20 years or so, they have even started to become engaged in local politics. I think these democratic experiences, they are really what can also help representative democracy in the end.
SR: Thank you so much Johanna, for this wide-ranging conversation with some surprises, some very interesting insights from comparative research across Europe, and also some suggestions as to how to protect and preserve liberal democracy.
JL: Thank you so much for having me.
SR: Johanna Lutz’s analysis of the recent elections in Austria and Germany echoes the alarm about the normalization and mainstreaming of far-right discourse that we heard from Julia Ebner on the podcast a few weeks ago. This raises a challenge for all political forces committed to the preservation and protection of liberal democratic institutions. This challenge is all the more formidable as voters, particularly on the right of the political spectrum, are sometimes willing to sacrifice democratic norms and values for the sake of policies and ideologies they consider salient. Johanna’s research has highlighted hidden potential vulnerabilities. Many voters in several European countries considered to be robust, consolidated democracies, do not value fundamental democratic principles. They are all too ready to forgive their violation by political actors with whom they identify. This is most typical of far-right voters, but also occurs among supporters of mainstream, especially conservative parties, which should raise alarm about coalitions between the center right and the extreme right in many countries.
Johanna’s findings about the identity-democracy tradeoff as she calls it also throw into sharp relief one of the central puzzles of contemporary politics, namely, the secular decline of European social democratic forces, who so far have not been able to mobilize around worsening economic conditions. Surprisingly, voters subordinate socioeconomic issues to ideologically framed questions about gender or about migration. Moreover, these identity-based issues could lead to democratic erosion even if they were not polarizing issues to begin with in a country. The other key finding she has shared with us today is the recognition that disengaged, passive members of the electorate are often potentially far-right supporters and supporters of the anti-democratic parties. We should therefore not naively assume that disaffected citizens, including many young voters, could simply be rallied to the cause of liberal democracy, if only they could be persuaded to cast their ballots. Instead, progressive politicians and their civil society counterparts ought to engage much more actively in the laborious process of reaching out to these disengaged groups, also to youth by providing institutional spaces and opportunities for empowerment, for dialog, for meaningful participation in everyday democratic politics. Along with civic education in schools and colleges, it is one’s own experience of democratic practices and the making of pragmatic compromises around concrete challenges that are most likely to instill liberal values.
This was the eighth episode of season nine. Thank you very much for listening. Please join me again next time not in our usual two-week rhythm, but exceptionally in three weeks’ time, when I will be discussing the outcome of the U.S. presidential election and its worldwide significance with Professor Stephen Walt from the Harvard Kennedy School.
Please go back and listen to any episode you might have missed and do let your friends know about the podcast if you're enjoying it. You can stay in touch with the work of the CEU at www.ceu.edu and the Albert Hirschman Center on Democracy at www.graduateinstitute.ch\democracy.
[i] Svolik, M.W., Avramovska, E., Lutz, J., & Milačić, F. (2023). In Europe, Democracy Erodes from the Right. Journal of Democracy34(1), 5-20. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2023.0000.
[ii] 19536-20220926.pdf