A road to right wing authoritarian government

This post is inspired by another, by Jan-Werner Müller. I have talked about Müller's ideas on populism before. This particular post is a plea to focus less on the voters who elect populist politicians, and more on the politicians themselves. He writes

“In 2010, Viktor Orbán did not campaign on a promise to draft a new constitution, weaken checks and balances, and radically reduce media pluralism. Instead, he presented himself as a competent mainstream Christian Democrat. In Poland, the Law and Justice (PiS) party went out of its way to stress its character as a reasonable conservative party which simply wanted to provide more benefits to families with children.“

The idea that most voters should see beyond the mask to understand who politicians really are is ridiculous. As the 2016 US general election showed, the information content of the broadcast media can be increasingly small.

Does Trump provide a counterexample of this, because he was an 'outsider' who was elected? I would say no for two reasons. First, the Republican party had played a large part in creating the political environment that allowed his populism to win votes. Second, the Republican party seems quite content to behave in ways which complement Trump's authoritarianism. (By attacking the CBO, for example.)

The message is that if you want to investigate populist regimes (using populist in the Müller sense) you need to look at political elites rather than the electorate. I think he is right. But what makes an elite adopt an authoritarian path? I am sure there are many answers to that question, but what I will try to do below (in no doubt a very 'untutored' way) is to show one route in what had been a pluralistic democracy by which elites from the right can move in a populist, authoritarian direction. I'm an economist, so I use a simple model.

Here is a two dimensional variation on the familiar left-right diagram. The additional dimension is sometimes called 'identity' or 'culture'. Let us assume that voters are evenly distributed inside the circle. (Not necessarily a good assumption: see here.) In a two party system you might expect both parties, if their main concern was to be elected, to adopt positions that put them close to the centre. This is because the party a voter will vote for is governed by the party that is nearest to them.

But suppose that a party wants to take a less centrist position, either because its backers wish this or because its politicians believe is some ideology. To be concrete, suppose the party of the right wants to adopt a very right wing economic policy that involves, for example, distributing income from most people to the very rich. In a one-dimensional left-right space such a party would be doomed. But suppose their opponents, for whatever reason, were fairly liberal. If we assume that the left is fairly moderate on economic issues, then that places the two parties at the position given by P in the diagram above. That leaves them evenly matched. (To see why, see below.).

The party on the right will want to focus on their socially conservative platform, while the party on the left will stress their more 'moderate' economic platform. This looks like a stable situation, which contains no threat to a pluralistic democracy. What could change to upset it? Here is just one possible route.

If the right has more influence on the media than the left, they can campaign on a platform that differs from the platform they intend to implement. If you can pretend that you are a moderate party on economic issues rather than an extreme right party, and this pretense works, then your party wins. So in terms of voter perception, the party on the right moves along the upper arrow from position P to C. The left party might respond in kind by pretending they are less liberal than they are, but because they have less media influence they cannot move so far from their true position. If we look at the campaign positions of the two parties, marked by C, it is intuitively clear that the right wing party wins any election. (The dotted lines show a proof – see [1])

We see this in the US with tax cuts (pushing the idea that lower corporation taxes will mainly raise wages), in the UK with austerity (which was really a policy to shrink the state much further than most wanted, dressed up as some kind of moralistic injunction that governments should be like households) and especially Brexit, where advocates pretended there would be no economic cost to leaving the EU. The counterpart of hiding a right wing position is to emphasise conservative issues. This is most obvious with the culture war in the US, together with the politics of race. In the UK the key social issue was immigration, which the Conservatives started focusing on from the late 1990s. (The great thing about immigration as an issue for the right is that it can be (falsely) given an economic dimension.) Again Brexit is an exemplar, with not just immigration ('protect our borders') but nationalism ('take back control').

While this results in short term gains for the right, as a tactic it is unstable in the longer term because governments once in power implement their real economic policies. We will move back from C to P on the lower arrow. Voters observe tax cuts for the better off at their expense, they observe the impact of austerity and, in the UK, they observe the consequences of Brexit. It may take some time, but right wing leaders know they are vulnerable to reality winning out over spin, so they may wish to take actions to offset the democratic consequences of being found out.

There are lots of directions this authoritarian turn can take. Taking greater control of the media, either directly by shutting down critical media or buying off media owners in exchange for support, is one direction we see taken in Hungary. Gerrymandering is favoured by Republicans in the US. Portraying opposition leaders as traitors is favoured in the UK. Ramping up nationalism and the 'threat' from immigration almost everywhere.

Politics that is exclusively along the social conservative/liberal axis can degenerate into a kind of identity politics where you just vote for your tribe. As Müller writes

“The problem starts when citizens view every issue purely as a matter of partisan identity, so that the credibility of climate science, for example, depends on whether one is a Republican or a Democrat. It gets worse when partisan identity becomes so strong that no arguments from or about the legitimacy of the other side ever get through.”

The path to authoritarianism I set out here is not meant to be the whole story, and is not meant to correspond with any particular country. What I hope it does illustrate is how an authoritarian government can emerge when a party adopts a very right wing economic policy, and pretends it has not. It happens without voters changing their views or preferences in any way. It is authoritarian populism that comes from the behaviour of right wing elites.

[1] To see which party wins (assuming my geometry is correct), draw a line between the two positions, and then draw a line at right angles that bisects it. Every voter on that line is indifferent (equidistant) between the two parties, and therefore every voter either side of the line votes for each party.

The two types of populism within Brexit

When I read this by Hungarian academic Tamas Dezso Ziegler, I could not help thinking he had a point. The point, as I understand it, is that by calling people like Trump or Farage populist, when at the same time we call Syriza or Podemos populist, we are in danger of diminishing or normalising the danger the former pose. He suggests this wide definition of populism

“could be useful because there is not necessarily a moral evaluation behind it: if they would use far right demagoguery, or fascist politics, it would show something dangerous, extreme. It would ring the bell to us all. Populism does not do so.”

We could add that talking about “right populists” and “left populists” allows the academic to show a kind of balance.

There seem to me to be two definitions of populism. Dani Rodrik defines populism here as parties/politicians/movements with

“an anti-establishment orientation, a claim to speak for the people against the elites, opposition to liberal economics and globalisation, and often (but not always) a penchant for authoritarian governance.”

The problem I have with definitions like this is that they seem to be encompassing rather than natural. By this I mean that it includes things that do not obviously go together, but instead are chosen so that they encompass some list of political parties. Virtually every candidate for Congress in the US declares that they will ‘sort out Washington’, so appears anti-establishment and for the people rather than elites. In contrast, authoritarian governance is optional. What seems to be doing the work here is opposition to liberal economics and globalisation.

It seems to me that a quite different conceptualisation of populism is expressed by Jan-Werner Müller. You can tell a populist by whether they claim to represent ‘the people’, which is certainly not all the people, but instead just the ‘real people’. The others, be they immigrants or the 48%, just do not count, or worse still are ‘saboteurs’ trying to thwart the ‘will of the people’. And, critically in my view, populists are prepared to overturn the institutions of democracy if they believe they are frustrating what they perceive as the will of the people. The populist, if you accept Müller’s account, denies pluralism. They are naturally authoritarian, and so are happy to tear down the elements of a pluralist democracy. [1]

Thinking in terms of left or right tends to get in the way here. The more appropriate axis to thinking about this definition of populism is social liberalism and conservatism. A social liberal, almost by definition, is not going to attack democratic pluralism. Once we recognise that, we can see why parties of the right that use socially conservative policies to attract votes are particularly vulnerable to morphing into (or being taken over by) populists in the Müller sense. Indeed this is a point he himself makes, as I quote here.

It seems to me that Brexit can illustrate both types of populism. The definition of populism based on anti-globalisation might describe quite well the average Leave voter. The Leave voter tends to be against immigration, and as a result be prepared to roll back globalisation, and this often goes with a belief that the elite or establishment no longer listens to them. In contrast some of the prominent Brexiters, and certainly the newspapers that swung the referendum vote, are populists in Müller’s sense. They are quite happy to talk about the will of the people, and take away power from judges and parliament to ensure the will of the people as they see it prevails.

This is why I have considerable sympathy with the Hungarian academic who I quoted at the start of this post. Populists in the anti-globalisation sense may be a problem, depending on your view of globalisation and liberal economics, but they are not really dangerous for democracy. Populists of the kind Müller describes are, as our history tells us.

In the US, we are not just talking about Trump, but most of the Republican party: a party that appears to go to any length to preserve its gerrymandering of voting districts. In Hungary and Poland we have seen many attacks on pluralistic democracy justified by nationalism and racism. Both, like Russia or the far right in the US, are happy to scapegoat someone who happens to be a wealthy Jew as an enemy of the people for the crime of standing up for liberalism. That certain UK newspapers find common cause with these authoritarian regimes and the far right in the US by scapegoating the same wealthy Jew on their front pages should be a wake-up call that these newspapers are no longer part of a pluralist democracy but have become instead its enemy.

[1] Tear down rather than reform. Of course when reform becomes destroy has to be judged, but in most cases that is not very difficult.

Brexit and Democracy

A constant refrain from politicians and others is that we have to leave the EU because we have to respect democracy, where by democracy they mean that 52% voted to do so. Arguments that the vote was based on lies by the Leave side are met with dismissive remarks like both sides were the same, or what do you expect from politicians and so forth. The important thing, we are told, is to ‘respect democracy’.

In Poland the government recently passed a law which will dismiss all existing judges and allow the state to directly appoint their successors. This government was democratically elected, and the plan was in their manifesto. So why did the Polish President veto the plan, and why was the EU deeply concerned about it? Surely there was a clear mandate for this policy? Shouldn’t the President and the EU respect democracy?

The reason why the President and the EU were right is that democracy is much more than having elections or referendums every so often. Checks and balances, and the rule of law, are crucial ingredients of a well functioning democracy. But having an independent judiciary is not the only essential characteristic of democracy besides voting.

I personally think an important part of democracy is that politicians do not base campaigns on complete lies, and that knowledge, evidence, facts and expertise are respected and are easily accessible to all voters. Otherwise elections can be won by those who tell the biggest lies. If this happens and is not remedied democracy is a sham. As I noted here, lies were central to the Leave campaign (more money for the NHS, Turkey about to join the EU) and have already been shown to be untrue, while the central plank of the Remain campaign (dubbed Project Fear by Leave) has already come to pass. Polls suggest the Leave lies gained them votes. Only one side in the campaign spent a large amount of time dismissing or denigrating academic expertise (be it economists or lawyers).

In the US the Republicans control Congress and the White House, all won by democratic elections where a key part of the Republican platform was repealing Obamacare. The Republicans therefore appear to have an overwhelming democratic mandate for this repeal. So why are so many people protesting against this repeal? Isn’t it important for democracy that repeal goes ahead?

You may say that the Republicans did not say how they would repeal Obamacare, but neither did the Leave campaign say how they were going to leave the EU (or rather they said whatever people wanted to hear). You may say that Leave voters will lose their faith in the democratic system if Brexit doesn’t happen, but the same is surely true for Republican voters if Obamacare is not repealed. That is hardly a reason to do it.

But referendums are not like elections, we are told. Mandates from elections can be challenged but referendum results must be respected. But where is it written that referendum results (particularly those that are so close) can never be challenged? Where is it written that we must be bound by the words of politicians during the referendum.[1] If it turns out that the claims of one side in the referendum have been shown to be false, where is it written that the referendum result should nevertheless be cast in stone for a generation. The answer is nowhere, and for the good reasons that David Allen Green explains. All that is written is that parliament is sovereign.

People overseas, in the EU or outside, are mystified at what the UK is currently doing. The main supporter of Brexit overseas is an authoritarian regime, which should give you a clue about what is going on. There are two overwhelming reasons for challenging the referendum result: it was arrived at after a deeply flawed campaign, and we now have information that clearly shows the extent of the Leave campaign's lies. The Leave campaign abused democracy before the vote with lies, and then abused the word subsequently to stifle any dissent. When a vote is won narrowly in an election based on lies that have now been exposed, it seems to me a hallmark of a functioning democracy is that the original vote is challenged and voters have a chance to vote again.

[1] We could add whether we should be bound by an electorate chosen to keep Brexiteers happy.