【Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact】Democratic Backsliding and the Role of Populism
Tue, Dec 3, 2024-
Tags
Waseda University released the third episode, “Democratic Backsliding and the Role of Populism”, of its English language podcast series “Rigorous Research, Real Impact” on December 3, 2024. All podcast episodes are available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.
Episode 3: “Democratic Backsliding and the Role of Populism”
Associate Professor Marisa Kellam (Faculty of Political Science and Economics) joins MC Assistant Professor Robert Fahey (Waseda Institute for Advanced Study) to talk about their mutual research interests: populism and democracy. The focus of the episode is Professor Kellam’s recently published article, “Who’s to Blame for Democratic Backsliding: Populists, Presidents, or Dominant Executives?”, which she wrote together with her former Waseda PhD student. The research was based on data spanning 98 countries, 856 elected executives, and a 50-year period. Listen for tips on how they managed such a large dataset and how it produced a clear answer to the question of who is actually to blame for erosions to democracy that occur during their terms in office.
“Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact”
About the Series:
Waseda University’s first ever English-language academic podcast titled “Waseda University Podcasts: Rigorous Research, Real Impact” is an 8-episode series broadly showcasing the diverse work of our renowned social sciences and humanities researchers. In each of the short 15-30 minute episodes we welcome a knowledgeable researcher to casually converse with an MC about their recent, rigorously conducted research, the positive impact it has on society, and their thoughts on working in Japan at Waseda. It’s a perfect choice for listeners with a strong desire to learn, including current university students considering graduate school, researchers looking for their next collaborative project, or even those considering working for a university that stresses the importance of interdisciplinary approaches.
About the Guests:
–Associate Professor Marisa Kellam–
Dr. Marisa Kellam is an associate professor at Waseda University, where she researches the quality of democracy in Latin America. Her research links institutional analysis to various governance outcomes in democracies within three lines of inquiry: political parties and coalitional politics; mass electoral behavior and party system change; and democratic accountability and media freedom.
After earning a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), Dr. Kellam spent several years as an assistant professor at Texas A&M University. Since moving to Tokyo in 2013, she teaches international and Japanese students in the English-based degree program of Waseda University’s School of Political Science & Economics. During her 2021-2023 sabbatical, she was a visiting scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
–MC Assistant Professor Robert Fahey–
Dr. Robert A. Fahey is an assistant professor of political science at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include populism, polarisation, the effects of conspiracy theory belief, and Japanese politics. He is currently working on a series of large-scale surveys aimed at discovering what kinds of conspiracy beliefs are widespread in East Asian countries, and how those beliefs impact the political and social life of those nations.
Transcript:
Introduction
(MC Professor Robert Fahey)
Hello, and welcome to Waseda University’s English podcast series, “Rigorous Research, Real Impact.”
In this series, we dive into interesting conversations and stories from Waseda’s vibrant academic and cultural community. I’m Robert Fahey. I’m an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study. And today I’m joined by Associate Professor Marisa Kellam from the Faculty of Political Science and Economics.
In her research at Waseda, Dr. Kellam explores the quality of democracy, particularly in Latin America. She tackles subjects like political parties, electoral behavior, coalition politics, and media freedom, and has published her research in top journals like the British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Party Politics, and Comparative Political Studies.
In today’s conversation, we will be discussing her article, which was co-authored with her former Ph.D. student Antonio Berlucchi, titled “Who’s to Blame for Democratic Backsliding: Populists, Presidents, or Dominant Executives?” We’ll dive into her argument that populist leaders are, in fact, to blame for the erosion of democracy that occurs during their terms in office.
So, Dr. Kellam, a very warm welcome to you. Thank you very much for joining us today.
————————————————————————————————————–
You have dedicated a career to learning about and researching the quality of democracy. Could we start, though, by hearing a little bit about what brought you to this journey, what brought you to this career?
(Guest Professor Marisa Kellam)
Sure. Thanks so much for having me. Well, let’s see. When I was a college student at the University of California in Santa Barbara, I majored in Latin American studies, and it was an interdisciplinary major and allowed me to take a wide range of classes, literature and history and anthropology and political science.
And I remember that when I was in college, I really looked up to my teaching assistants who were graduate students, and I thought, I would like to go to graduate school. You typically get a PhD in a specific field, not in something like Latin American studies. So, you’d get a Ph.D. in history or sociology or political science.
So, after my second year, I added a second major, which was political science. And I really loved university. I loved school, always. I was the student who was always asking questions, and I graduated with highest honors.
But I actually didn’t end up going to graduate school right after college. At the end of college, I did an internship in Washington, D.C. and I worked at a political consulting firm in San Francisco for some time.
But my tasks were largely administrative, and I decided that I would apply to graduate school. And I knew I wanted to study Latin American politics but before researching Latin American politics, I wanted to spend time in Latin America first.
So, I applied to a program called World Teach. And I was a volunteer English teacher in Ecuador, which is a small country in South America. And I lived there for one year, high up in the Andes Mountains.
And I traveled all over the country, from the Amazon jungle to the beaches, even to the Galapagos Islands. And while I was there, I applied to graduate school.
Anyway, after a year in Ecuador, I began graduate school in political science at the University of California in Los Angeles.
——————————————————————————————————
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, your work now explores the state of democracy in Latin America, and you use Latin America as a case study to then sort of reach out and make a broader theoretical contribution to the study of democracy more broadly. It sounds like the fascination with Latin America started first though, you were interested in that before you were necessarily interested in the political side of it.
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Yes, I think so. You know, I don’t know exactly where the interest in Latin America came, except that I grew up in California, where there’s obviously history and a culture that’s shared with Latin America.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
That brings us to your work in political science now and your current research. What would you say are the major themes or the major areas that you’re focused on at the moment?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
So, one thing for just a little bit of background. Latin American countries are similar to the US in that they directly elect a President rather than a prime minister who governs the country like in Japan. Yet they have many political parties, which is different from the US, which only has two parties.
So, my dissertation examined how presidents form coalitions with multiple political parties and what different kinds of parties obtain in exchange for supporting the President. In Japan, we see this where the LDP and Komeito, for example, form an electoral coalition and a governing coalition. In Latin America, parties also form coalitions like this, but they tend to be less stable.
That is, they don’t last quite so long. And as part of this political instability, political parties themselves might not even survive, and politicians may change parties. So, as I was studying coalition politics, I started noticing that opposition parties had become very weak and many parties had almost completely disappeared.
Instead, I noticed that the media seemed to be taking up their place as opposition to the President. And I remember a conversation I had with a friend from graduate school, Elizabeth Stein, who researches Latin America but focuses on the media. And I was explaining this observation, and she said it made sense to her because the media sort of thrives on conflict or controversy, and they might prefer to report on what the opposition party said or did.
But if parties are weak, perhaps the media would take on this role themselves. Anyway, this led to our research collaboration on a project to study the relationship between the presidents and the press in Latin America and we noticed with concern that presidents were very antagonistic to the media in their rhetoric, but also in the actions that they were taking to really constrain the press, which they saw as biased against their governments.
So, in retrospect, what we were studying was the beginning of the wave of democratic backsliding in Latin America and around the world. And that’s a topic that I have carried through in my research today and extended beyond Latin America to study it globally.
————————————————————————————————-
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, you mentioned democratic backsliding, and this is the key focus of the article that we’re discussing today. Particularly, you study this with regard to more populist leaders in liberal democracies. This is a term that obviously has been in the news very much. I’m sure everybody has heard concerns about democratic backsliding across a variety of different countries in Latin America, in Eastern Europe, in various different places. But these concepts and how we use them in political science and the definitions that we use might not be familiar to everybody. Could you take a moment to explain how you define these concepts and how you measure them in your research?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Sure. Yes, you’re right.
Democratic backsliding is a dominant theme in comparative politics, but also in the news media. Democratic backsliding broadly refers to a decline in the quality of democracy and in general, democratic backsliding refers to incremental decline.
It is different from a military coup, for example, that instantaneously extinguishes democracy. In addition to being incremental, it’s deliberate. It occurs at the hands of political leaders. Often, democratically elected leaders use the very institutions of democracy to weaken checks on their power and as political scientists say, they tilt the playing field in their favor. So, Presidents may, for example, use government advertising or tax credits to reward favorable coverage in the news, or they might refuse to renew a media license in order to silence critical coverage. Now, scholars differ over the scope of democratic backsliding. In my research, I focus only on democracy. So, for me, if it’s going to be considered democratic backsliding, the country must start out as democratic.
But along the way, through democratic backsliding, some of them may eventually no longer meet the threshold of democracy. To measure democracy, I use the Varieties of Democracy projects, which comes from this research institute in Sweden, widely known as V-Dem and V-Dem asks country experts to evaluate a large set of criteria about politics and democracy in every country in the world and every year they use these sophisticated statistical techniques to boil them down to indicators or indexes of democracy.
So, the liberal democracy index, for example, assesses the extent to which elections are free and fair, the media are free and plural, people can form associations and protests, and all other democratic criteria. In addition, it takes into account whether the legislature and the judiciary are able to check the power of the executive. So, to measure democratic backsliding, my co-author and I use the liberal democracy index.
And we measure the percentage change in the liberal democracy index by comparing the democracy score when the executive takes office to the lowest democracy score during their term in office. And we use any drop in the score as indicative of democratic backsliding. And this measure allows us to assess the amount of backsliding, that is how much the level of democracy fell during any leader’s term of office.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
I mentioned also about the populist aspect of it. Do you have a similar measure for how you tell whether a leader is a populist or not? How do we define that?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Yes, for populism, we use also established indicators available from other researchers or other research institutes. For studying populism, we had to combine various indicators that given sort of their different scope and availability for different years or different regions of the world.
But all of these measures that we use of populism point to sort of two key characteristics. One is that populism, sort of, defines the elite as evil and corrupt and highlights the role of the good people. And populist leaders claim to represent the general will of the population of the people.
It’s this sort of people centric definition and anti-elitism that these measures assess. And so, we use data sets that identify populist leaders and populist political parties. And pulling from them, we were able to build our data set of populism and democratic backsliding and various other indicators that we use in our statistical analysis.
————————————————————————————————
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, when you started on this project, what was the initial question that you wanted to answer and what was it that you expected to find? I suppose also did those expectations then change over time as you were working with the data and looking at these different cases?
(MC Prof. Kellam)
This project actually began from discussions in my seminar at the Graduate School of Political Science here at Waseda. And although my research is focused on Latin America, my graduate seminar includes students from various regions around the world who are interested in politics all around the world.
So, a master’s student from Mongolia was noticing the rise of populism in his country, as well as the very disproportionate election outcomes where one party was winning most of the seats in Parliament. Another graduate student from Italy was noticing the rise of new challenger parties in Europe. And the question that rose up for all of us was whether it was the nature of political institutions and the party system, or whether it was ideology and particularly populism that was driving the democratic backsliding trends around the world.
And we also noted in Japan that some observers here were pointing to democratic backsliding, and we wondered whether this might be due to the dominance of the LDP. And I ended up writing this paper with Antonio Berlucchi, who was a Ph.D. student at that time. And in part of this graduate seminar, we set up this analysis sort of as a test.
What causes the most backsliding? Is it populism? Is it presidents, as in Latin America and the US rather than prime ministers? Or is it the dominance of large super majorities that don’t have any real checks or constraints on their power? And I guess we kind of already knew that populism was in tension with liberal democracy. Existing research had made these arguments, but scholars had only focused on cases where democratic backsliding was happening.
And we wanted to look at all populist leaders and compare them to non-populist leaders, governing in similar conditions and see if populist leaders were in fact more likely to engage in democratic backsliding, and if so, by how much more. But I was actually rooting for a different hypothesis. My hunch was that supermajorities were dangerous, particularly dangerous for democracy.
And of course, supermajorities can be produced by the democratic process in free and fair elections. They can also, of course, be manufactured by tweaking the electoral rules. But I thought that democracy would decline more where presidents or prime ministers were backed by supermajorities.
Viktor Orban in Hungary, Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, they were all leaders who commanded supermajorities, but so did Abe in Japan. So, we wanted to see what the effect is.
Can we disentangle populists and supermajorities? In the end, we find some support for this hypothesis. But our strongest, most robust finding is that more democratic backsliding occurs when populists are in power.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So just to clarify, when you say a supermajority in some countries, like Japan, that has a very specific definition, like here, it’s, you have 2/3rd of the seats in the Diet that allows the incumbent government to have control of all of the different committees and all of the different functions of government. They don’t have to hand committee chairs to any other party. Is that similar in Latin American democracies? Does reaching that line of 2/3rd or something like that give you complete control over everything in a way that a simple majority doesn’t?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Of course, the exact thresholds might vary somewhat across countries, but I think it’s quite common that a 2/3 majority allows you to make constitutional changes, which allows you to rewrite the rules in your favor. We used actually a 2/3rd cut off when comparing across countries.
So that was our indicator. If the governing coalition held 2/3rd of the seats, then we counted it as a supermajority.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, you mentioned these populist leaders, people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or Viktor Orban in Hungary. These are people who rose to power initially through democratic means and then undermined that system from within, the very system that had elected them in the first place. Could you maybe give some specific examples of the types of policies or actions that these people take that actually lead to democratic backsliding?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Well, as I’ve already mentioned, one of the ways that populist leaders undermine democracy is through their attacks on the media. Eventually, in both Venezuela and Hungary, almost all of the media came under the control of the government or the leader’s cronies. There is almost no opposition press remaining. But populist leaders, democratic backsliders, also weaken the courts.
They make judicial appointments to put their allies on the courts. Populists also revise constitutions to give more power to the executive branch. And in presidential systems, they abolish or simply ignore term limits in order to stay in power.
——————————————————————————————————–
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, in your article, one of the things that jumps out to me as striking about it is the sheer amount of data that you used to come to your conclusions. You looked at 98 countries, 1,358 terms in office by 856 different elected executives over a 50-year period from 1970 onwards. That’s an enormous amount of information to wade through. Can you talk us through a little bit about the management of that? How do you actually conduct research across such a large volume of information?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Sure, yes. One of the challenges we faced was how to organize our data set with a large number of executives, but also comparing across different political systems. So, we were comparing, for example, presidential and parliamentary systems, and we decided to break up executive terms by periods between elections. So, when we mention terms in our article, this may actually just be the first two years of the US President’s full term in office because there are midterm elections in the United States.
So, we had to organize it this way in order to make presidents kind of comparable to prime ministers, but also in order to record the changes in the size of the majority that was backing the executive. And definitely the most time-consuming part of the project was collecting data on parliamentary support held by each executive in order to know whether they controlled a supermajority or not. During the COVID pandemic, Antonio did a lot of this data collection and since he was not able to return to Japan, we met via Zoom to continue our work.
Once we had collected the data, we used what we call matching methods in this paper. The intuition behind matching is that we want to match each populist with a non-populist that is governing under very similar conditions. Right? We can’t run an experiment and assign countries to be populist or non-populist.
So, we use this matching method to sort of identify two executives that are similar in many respects. It just so happens one is a populist and one isn’t. And we do the same matching each president with a prime minister, but otherwise similar, and each dominant executive who’s supported by a super majority of more than 2/3rd of the seat with a non-dominant executive, but who is otherwise similar. And then we compare the amount of democratic backsliding in these matched pairs.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
Through that method, you were really looking at, I suppose, three hypotheses: one that your democratic backsliding is caused by populism, one that it’s caused by dominant executives and supermajorities, and one that it’s a difference between prime ministerial and presidential systems. You say that what you found was that it’s really the populism.
(MC Prof. Kellam)
We find strong evidence of more backsliding under populous leaders.
Depending on which populist measure we use, we find about 2 to 7% more democratic decline under populists as compared to non-populists. Now, we didn’t actually find that presidents differed from prime ministers. And this is somewhat surprising given that there’s a really well-known argument in political science that democracy is less stable under presidential systems. However, we did uncover some interesting combined effects. We found that when populists have presidential power or a super majority behind them, democracy seems to be most at risk. But the other thing that I would like to emphasize from our analysis is that democratic backsliding is very severe in some countries and it does occur in all regions of the world. It’s not just limited to Latin America, but at the same time it’s not really widespread.
Actually, there was no backsliding at all in half of the observations in our data set. And in another quarter of observations, the amount was really quite minimal.
So, when we find that populists lead to sort of a decline of 2 to 7%, that might not sound like a lot, but it does suggest a relatively big impact of electing populists to power, when we compare it to the overall average amount of democratic backsliding in the world, which is really, across all observations of all these executives serving their terms in office is really just something like 1 to 3%. We need to take into consideration that a lot of the research that’s been done on democratic backsliding so far has focused on the extreme cases. And what Antonio and I did in our research is we expanded the data set to include a broad set of cases and looked at these effects on average, across a whole range of scenarios.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
When you start to see this sort of democratic breakdown or backsliding in a country, you mentioned earlier that it’s a gradual process and it’s a deliberate process. But what typically happens next? What’s the end goal here? Do you see a tipping point kind of consequence, this pushing towards something more sudden like a coup or a collapse? Or is this just a gradual decline with long term consequences that doesn’t really have a kind of end state, as it were?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Well, yes, democracies can break down in different ways.
In some countries, you know, the military rolls the tanks in and democracy collapses instantaneously. But in other countries, democratic backsliding is a slow and gradual decline. And it’s really hard to pinpoint exactly when the country stops being democratic.
But I also think it’s interesting to think about potential opportunities, whether democracy can sort of recover and…resilience, right? and how you might push back against democratic backsliding.
You know, to go back to Ecuador. During the 10 years that Rafael Correa was president, the country experienced substantial democratic backsliding. However, when his vice president, Lenin Moreno narrowly won the presidential office after him; he broke ties with Correa and he reversed some of these trends.
And later, Ecuadorians have rejected allies of Correa in subsequent elections. And for sure, there are substantial sectors of the electorate that continue to support Correa and his political party, but the democratic process has allowed for democratic resilience and sort of regrowth.
And so, it’s possible, I think, to see dramatic turnarounds. But, you know, I still think some long-term damage is done through democratic backsliding. For example, the journalists and editors and media owners who go into exile or are forced to sell their outlets, they can’t easily return and pick up where they left off. And also, political polarization of society is likely to persist even after the leader leaves office. So, there is some resilience to democracies and we do see democracy ebb and flow.
But democratic backsliding is dangerous for what it does to the various institutions and society, but also how it affects how citizens see one another and that level of political polarization, I think, is harder to change once it seeps into society.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
Yeah, I mean, if you’re in a situation where one side of the population believes that the other side has just tried to steal their democracy from them, that’s a very hard type of polarization to fix, right?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Indeed, in political science, research shows that democratic backsliding thrives in more polarized settings. So, it is certainly a major concern.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
Are there any specific recent examples of democratic backsliding–things that are happening right now that you find especially concerning?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Well, Bukele in El Salvador comes to mind. He’s a very popular president and he’s reduced violent crime, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he just completely ignored presidential term limits and human rights organizations are very concerned about violations of civil liberties under his watch. I’m also concerned about a potential return of Donald Trump to the White House.
We saw democratic decline in the United States of America during his first term of office, and he’s given no indication that he will respect the democratic rules of the game a second time around and as a political scientist, you know, I fully respect differences of opinion on the issues or on policy priorities, but I cannot remain neutral when it comes to democracy and the rule of law.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
You talked about the positive side of this, which is that there is a resilience to democracy and that there are instances of democracies bouncing back from this type of backsliding. Are there some solutions that have been put forward to prevent or to help with reversing democratic backsliding? And are there strategies that can be used, particularly in countries with populist leaders, to try to prevent this from happening and becoming a problem?
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
You know, two Harvard professors of political science wrote a book called “How Democracies Die.”
One, Steve Levitsky is a scholar of Latin America. The other, Daniel Ziblatt, is a scholar of Europe. And they use their comparative perspective to raise concerns about the first Trump presidency. So, these scholars argue that politicians must practice forbearance, by which they mean sort of non- abusing power, even if they can, and mutual toleration or sort of mutual respect for the other, even your opponents. Other political science research suggests that political polarization thrives under populists. People are more willing to tolerate backsliding, perhaps in these polarized environments.
So, whatever we can do to reduce political polarization, which admittedly is much easier said than done, would also help protect democracy. Citizens need to be attentive. We cannot take democracy for granted. And I admire citizens and people all around the world who advocate for democracy, who take the risk to challenge entrenched incumbents and dictators. And I also admire the work of journalists who take enormous risks to report on the truth.
(MC Prof. Fahey)
So, hand in hand with this really inspirational research work, you are also, of course, very deeply involved in teaching here at Waseda, both international and Japanese students in the English-based degree program at the School of Political Science and Economics. So, I wanted to ask a little bit about that and about your experiences here at Waseda, about the environment here and how you’ve found it.
(Guest Prof. Kellam)
Well, as we’ve discussed today, you know, my own research has benefited from this really engaging intellectual environment here at Waseda University. And I think the international push at Waseda is one of the main reasons for this.
Bringing students and professors from all around the globe together in the classroom. I think it creates this sort of intangible, irreplaceable benefits, you know. Research thrives with the exchange of diverse ideas and perspectives.
I’ve learned from my students, you know. Although my students may not be specifically focused on Latin America, I can use the theories and evidence from Latin America to help them explore politics in regions all over the world that interest them. And I learn about other regions beyond Latin America.
And I find it so exciting to have college students from mainland China and Taiwan, and Korea, and Japan together discussing ideas about democracy in the classroom. This is at the undergraduate level. You know, I love the perspective that returnee Japanese students bring from living and going to school overseas.
And, you know, I also hope that Japanese students at Waseda University seize the chance to take classes in English and study alongside their peers with different life experiences. I think that this will be so beneficial for their own futures and for the future of Japan. You know, when I moved to Japan with my Japanese husband and two children, I wasn’t sure what to expect professionally, given that I don’t speak or read Japanese.
And I really feel so fortunate to have landed at Waseda, where I’m able to carry out this very rewarding career as a professor, as a teacher, and as a researcher. And in addition to my students, I appreciate so much my colleagues and the staff at Waseda who translate documents, hold discussions in English, and host this podcast so that I can fully participate in the life of this great international university.
Conclusion
(MC Prof. Fahey)
Dr. Kellam, thank you very much again for being here today and for highlighting for us the dangers of populism and these very pressing, very contemporary issues that are facing democratic systems. And to our listeners, thank you for taking the time to listen to this episode.
We hope it’s been enlightening and has contributed to your understanding of this detrimental effect that populism can have on liberal democracy.
For more such stories and insights from the corridors of Waseda University, don’t forget to subscribe and tune in to the next episode on “Rigorous Research, Real Impact.”
Until then, take care and stay curious.
