Amanda Taub in the New York Times: Adam Przeworski, a political scientist, left his native Poland a few months before the 1968 Prague Spring uprising and found he could not return home. To avoid being arrested as a dissident by the Communist government, he accepted a job abroad at a university in Santiago, Chile — only to watch his adopted country collapse into autocracy a few years later. In 1973, a violent coupinstalled a military dictatorship, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, wiping out Chilean democracy in one brutal stroke. “Nobody expected that it would be as bloody as it was,” Przeworski told me. “Or that it would last for 17 years.”
That shocking turn of events, in a country Przeworski thought he knew well, motivated him to find an answer to a seemingly simple question: Why do some democracies survive while others fall into autocracy? “That really was kind of an event that set my intellectual agenda for 50 years,” Przeworski, now an emeritus professor of politics at New York University, said recently.
For a long time, he and other experts believed that after a country had a few democratic handovers of power in a row and reached a certain level of wealth, then its democracy would be “consolidated” — safe from collapse. Once people could trust that free and fair elections would be held regularly, the theory went, other forms of politics would come to seem too costly and violent to consider.
The past decade has thrown that belief into question. The Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol marked the first time that America failed to peacefully transfer power from one president to the next. Last year, similar scenes played out in Brazil, as supporters of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked federal buildings and called for a military coup. In Western Europe, far-right parties with policies and political styles similar to Donald Trump’s have gained in popularity, strengthening the sense that democracy could be vulnerable anywhere — even in places where it has long flourished.
Hungary has stood out as a particularly worrying example. The country was once considered a notable democratic success story. It was one of the first Soviet-bloc countries to transition to democracy, doing so before the Berlin Wall fell, and since then had managed two decades of free elections and peaceful handovers of power. But in 2010, Viktor Orban, the leader of the Fidesz Party, won a parliamentary supermajority and immediately set about using that power to dismantle democratic institutions. He altered the constitution, stacked the judiciary with compliant allies, changed electoral rules to give his party an advantage and cracked down on independent media. In 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution stating that Hungary had ceased to be a democracy and had become an “electoral autocracy.”
Many Americans worry not only that their own country is vulnerable to democratic erosion but that other seemingly stable nations are also sliding into autocracy. This year, as more than half of the world’s population goes to the polls, election watchers have warned that democracy is “on the ballot” in countries as far-flung and diverse as India, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia — and the United States. Przeworski’s questions about which democracies survive, and why, have never felt more salient.
Over decades of research, Przeworski developed a theory that has become part of the bedrock of political science: that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections — because that’s the way to maximize their self-interest over time.
To create those conditions, Przeworski found, it is crucial for the stakes of power to remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods — such as coups — of reversing it. That means winners of elections need to act with restraint: They can’t “grab too much” and make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. “When these conditions are satisfied,” Przeworski told me, “then democracy works.”
But the events of recent years suggest that even “working” democracies can be far more fragile than was once believed. Przeworski, long a voice of optimism, once believed that it would be essentially impossible for a democracy like the United States to collapse. But today, not only does he see real reason for concern about the health of American democracy, he said in a recent interview, he does not see an obvious way to protect it from being weakened further.
The idea of democracy as a game is, of course, a very different model from the one that most people learn in school. Teachers tend to describe democracy as a value in and of itself, a system of government to be supported for moral reasons. But in fact, many experts say, the real value of democracy lies in its ability to resolve disagreements. Every society contains powerful people and groups who are bitterly opposed on important issues, about which they may never agree in substance. But if they can agree that the way to resolve their disagreements is at the ballot box, that’s enough to avoid violence.
Przeworski and others argue that if you understand democracy this way, rather than as a set of institutions or style of politics, it becomes easier to recognize which countries today are stable enough to withstand political turbulence — and which ones are at risk of becoming catastrophically fragile. There is a common pattern linking the countries that are at serious risk of democratic backsliding and those that have already fallen victim to it. And it is a pattern that turns out to have dire implications for the democracy that once seemed to be the most “consolidated” of all: the United States.
More here.
