On September 29, the APARC China Program hosted Thomas Fingar and Stephen Stedman for the program “Rebuilding International Institutions.” The program, which was moderated by China Program Director Jean Oi, examined the future of international institutions such as the United Nations (UN), World Trade Organization (WTO), and World Health Organization (WHO) in our evolving global political landscape. While Fingar and Stedman acknowledged that such institutions facilitated attainment of unprecedented peace and prosperity after WWII, they also asked difficult questions: Are these institutions still adequate? And if not, how will we change them?

Shorenstein APARC Fellow Thomas Fingar kicked off the session by asking whether or not US-China tensions would impede cooperation on major global challenges, or if those challenges were so serious as to render such rivalries immaterial. Perhaps the most obvious example of such a crisis is the current COVID-19 pandemic. The efforts to curb the virus’ spread not only by individual countries, but also by international organizations like the WHO, have proven largely inadequate. According to Fingar, our existing institutions need to be reformed or supplemented to deal with these types of threats. However, such an overhaul of our international systems will be difficult, he says.

How, then, will we go about such a massive project? Stephen Stedman, Deputy Director at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), responded by explaining that the current failure of international cooperation makes such undertakings tough. Globalization has been a double-edged sword: On one hand, more contact, perhaps inherently, leads to increased tension. The resurgence of traditional notions of sovereignty in 2010, kickstarted by the opposition of countries like Russia and China to what was seen as UN overreaching, has led to a reduction of international cooperation overall. On the other hand, Fingar posits that our interconnectedness may force us toward cooperation despite rivalries as we face more and more transnational threats. International institutions create rules to organize and manage our many interconnected relationships so that we can deal with our problems effectively and reduce friction.

Stedman also pointed to the upcoming US elections and the major impact their outcome will have on how these problems are addressed—or not. In the last four year, the United States has pulled back significantly from international institutions and agreements, leaving a gap that China has started to fill. Furthermore, despite the US’s retreat from international responsibility, the country still remains a critical actor in global initiatives. China’s embrace of a global leadership role is not inherently negative, but its future relationship with the US will need to be “managed in a way that you get greater cooperation and not just paralysis.” Stedman says that it is likely that progress will need to be made on a bilateral front in order to have productive conversations about international issues with China.

Concluding on an optimistic note, Fingar voiced his hope that the current tensions and negative perceptions between rivals might ultimately “be mitigated by success in dealing with a common problem,” because “experience does shape perceptions.”

A video recording of this program is available upon request. Please contact Callista Wells, China Program Coordinator at cvwells@stanford.edu with any inquiries.

This article was originally published in Stanford News 

By Melissa DeWitte

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released March 11.

When populist leaders discredit formal institutions and functions, democracy is being undermined and hollowed out, warns Stanford political scientist and paper co-author Anna Grzymala-Busse.

Here, Grzymala-Busse discusses what is at stake for democracies worldwide if populist rhetoric continues to take hold. As Grzymala-Busse points out, populists’ grievances about government failures are not entirely baseless. That’s why Grzymala-Busse and the paper’s co-authors – who include director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and political scientists Francis Fukuyama and Didi Kuo – argue that populism is a political problem that requires political solutions.

Their paper, Global Populisms and Their Challenges, released Mar. 11 through the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), outlines what mainstream political parties must do to protect democracies from populists, including strategies such as reclaiming the rule of law and upholding democratic norms and values.

Why do some politicians find populist arguments so appealing?

Populism argues that elites are corrupt and the people need better representation, but makes very few policy commitments beyond this criticism. There’s been increasing distrust regarding political parties and politicians, especially given various funding and election scandals. And so people readily believe that these actors are corrupt and not to be trusted.

It is a message that is credible these days. It is also a message that doesn’t tie politicians down to any other ideological or policy commitment.

Why is populism on the rise?

The immediate causes are the failures of mainstream political parties – parties of the center-left and center-right – to meet voter concerns and respond with distinct policies. In both Europe and in the United States, many voters who support populists want a change from politics as usual, which they view as unresponsive and unaccountable, and who fear losing cultural and economic status. They perceive that politicians have failed to respond to immigration, free trade, international cooperation, and technological advances and the threats they pose to many voters.

According to your research, what makes populist rhetoric detrimental to democratic governance?

Populist politicians and governments view the formal institutions of liberal democracy as corrupt creations spawned by crooked establishment elites – and so they systematically hollow out and undermine these institutions, such as the courts, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the press, and so on. They justify these attacks as replacing discredited and corrupt institutions with ones that serves “the people” – or, in other words, populist parties and politicians. Moreover, precisely because populists claim to represent “the people,” they have to define the people first and that often means excluding vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as religious or ethnic minorities and immigrants.

For example, in Hungary, the governing populist party brought the courts under political control, abolished regulatory agencies, and funneled funding to allied newspapers and media. In Poland, the chair of the governing populist party refers to his opponents as a “worse sort of Poles.”

In the short term, what can be done to counter the effects of populism?

Vote! Vote for politicians and parties who make credible promises, who do not simply want to shut down criticism or who view their opponents as their enemies, and who are committed to the democratic rules of the game. At the same time, we need to understand, not just condemn, why so many voters find populist politicians appealing.

And in the long term?

Mainstream political parties need to credibly differentiate themselves, become far more responsive to their voters and consistently articulate and uphold the democratic rules of the game. Our research finds that where mainstream political parties are strong, populists stand far less of a chance of making inroads. Such parties would also be far more responsive to voter concerns about economic and cultural status, which also motivate populist support.

Some of the paper’s findings are from Global Populisms, a project sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CCDRL).

Once associated with Latin American and post-communist democracies, populist parties and politicians have now gained support and power in established democracies. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) experts Anna Grzymala-Busse, Didi Kuo, and Francis Fukuyama — co-authors of a new white paper, “Global Populisms and Their Challenges” — joined FSI Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss how to spot a populist, how populism threatens democracy, and whether the movement can be stopped. 

Populists and populist parties are a threat to liberal democracy, and they generally make two claims: first, that the elites are corrupt and self-serving, and that the will of the people has to be better represented; and second, that those who disagree with the populist representation of “the people” are not the “real” nation, Grzymala-Busse said.

[Read the full report “Global Populisms and Their Challenges”]

“It’s very much a criticism of democracy,” she told McFaul, who is also a co-author of the report. “It doesn’t call for specific sets of solutions for institutions — it can be anti- or pro-democractic, but fundamentally it’s a criticism of how liberal democracy functions.” 

A common practice among right-wing populists is to define the “people” as a dominant ethnic group, and to exclude groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants, or marginalized economic groups, Fukuyama pointed out, and added that populists on the left tend to not make that kind of distinction. 

Populist leaders have typically used democratic institutions as a means to come to power, Kuo said.

“It’s a two-step process,” Kuo explained. “Once [populist leaders] are in power, they go after the liberal foundations of democracy and potentially the democratic institutions themselves.”

For example, a leader like Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who does not criticize the elite and who is not functioning in a democracy — would not be considered a populist, said Grzymala-Busse. However, people like U.S. President Donald Trump, French politician Marine Le Pen, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini would be.

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Immigration and globalization have contributed to the rise of populism, said Fukuyama, who pointed to the 2014 Syrian migrant crisis as a trigger in Europe.

“All of a sudden a million non-white, non-European people show up in a part of the world that’s not used to this sort of thing,” Fukuyama said. “It produced what the right calls ‘cultural replacement.’ This is language that you hear in the U.S. from Donald Trump and his supporters — I think it’s something that binds a lot of these groups together.”

While all three experts were not optimistic that the populist wave will be stopped in America in the near future, voters in European countries such as Slovakia and Croatia have been pushing for anti-corruption, anti-populist candidates, they said.

“Parties of the left have to figure out how to capture the symbolism around the nation — people want to belong to a community, and over the last 30 years, the left has fractured into a lot of different, partial identities,” said Fukuyama. “The idea that you have a broader democratic civic identity that all Americans share is important culturally to give people the idea that they’re actually living in the same community.” 

Related: Learn more about FSI’s Global Populisms Project

"Freedom is inseparable from human dignity," says LarryDiamond for Bertelsmann Foundation talks on "How to Fix Democracy." The crisis is “bad, deepening, accelerating,” but he suggests several steps we can take to reverse the trend, such as ranked-choice voting to tackle the two-party system, and spreading “motor voter” laws to increase the number of registered voters. Watch the video here.