Abstract:

The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result, Yascha Mounk shows, democracy itself may hang in the balance.

Using his own original research and on-the-ground reporting from countries around the world, Mounk makes clear in THE PEOPLE VS. DEMOCRACY what exactly is at risk if the current trends in America and Western Europe continue. Astounding numbers of people in all age, economic, and social groups are more open to military rule, media controls, and other hallmarks of authoritarianism than ever before.
    
“Under these radically changed circumstances, it would be foolhardy to assume that the stability of democracy is sure to persist,” Mounk writes in his introduction. “The first big assumption of the postwar era—the idea that rich countries in which the government had repeatedly changed hands through free and fair elections would forever remain democratic—has all along stood on shaky ground.”

Mounk shows that the two core components of liberal democracy—individual rights and the popular will—are increasingly at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of “rights without democracy” took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create something just as bad: a system of “democracy without rights.”

The consequence, Mounk writes, is that trust in politics is dwindling. Citizens are falling out of love with their political system. Democracy is wilting away. Drawing on vivid stories and original research, Mounk identifies three key drivers of voters’ discontent: stagnating living standards, fears of multiethnic democracy, and the rise of social media. To reverse the trend, politicians need to enact radical reforms that benefit the many, not the few.

Speaker Bio:

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A columnist at Slate and the host of The Good Fight podcast, he is a leading expert on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy.

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Sponsor:  Bill Lane Center for the American West and

Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Abstract:

John A. Lawrence will present about his book The Class of '74: Congress after Watergate and the Roots of Partisanship (forthcoming April 2018).

In November 1974, following the historic Watergate scandal, Americans went to the polls determined to cleanse American politics. Instead of producing the Republican majority foreshadowed by Richard Nixon’s 1972 landslide, dozens of GOP legislators were swept out of the House, replaced by 76 reforming Democratic freshmen. In The Class of '74, John A. Lawrence examines how these newly elected representatives bucked the status quo in Washington, helping to effectuate unprecedented reforms. Lawrence’s long-standing work in Congress afforded him unique access to former members, staff, House officers, journalists, and others, enabling him to challenge the time-honored reputation of the Class as idealistic, narcissistic, and naïve "Watergate Babies." Their observations help reshape our understanding of the Class and of a changing Congress through frank, humorous, and insightful opinions.

These reformers provided the votes to disseminate power, elevate suppressed issues, and expand participation by junior legislators in congressional deliberations. But even as such innovations empowered progressive Democrats, the greater openness they created, combined with changing undercurrents in American politics in the mid-1970s, facilitated increasingly bitter battles between liberals and conservatives. These disputes foreshadowed contemporary legislative gridlock and a divided Congress.

Today, many observers point to gerrymandering, special-interest money, and a host of other developments to explain the current dysfunction of American politics. In The Class of '74, Lawrence argues that these explanations fail to recognize deep roots of partisanship. To fully understand the highly polarized political environment that now pervades the House and American politics, we must examine the complex politics, including a more open and contentious House, that emerged in the wake of Watergate.

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Abstract:

In Navigation by Judgment (Oxford University Press, 2018) I argue that high-quality implementation of foreign aid programs often requires contextual information that cannot be seen by those in distant headquarters. Tight controls and a focus on reaching pre-set measurable targets often prevent front-line workers from using skill, local knowledge, and creativity to solve problems in ways that maximize the impact of foreign aid. Drawing on a novel database of over 14,000 discrete development projects across nine aid agencies and eight paired case studies of development projects, I argue that aid agencies will often benefit from giving field agents the authority to use their own judgments to guide aid delivery. This “navigation by judgment” is particularly valuable when environments are unpredictable and when accomplishing an aid program’s goals is hard to accurately measure.

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Sponsored by: Stanford University Libraries, Hoover Institution,

Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law

Even before the 2016 election campaign, political polarization and filter bubbles in social media and revelations of foreign meddling, Francis Fukuyama raised his concerns about the decline and decay of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere. Today we live in a new environment where Americans and others get up to two-thirds of their news — real and otherwise — on Facebook, where Twitter bots magnify propaganda, and where foreigners posing as Americans even organize demonstrations and counter-demonstrations on social media. Yet even without these technological developments, from Eastern Europe to the U.S., we observe the re-emergence of demons we thought we left behind after World War II: the rise of blood and soil nationalism, the decline in rule of law and the institutions that uphold democratic governance: parliaments, courts, a free and unfettered press. We believed that through NATO, the WTO, and the EU democracy and peace would be firmly grounded. What happens when these international organizations begin to unravel? Where are we headed? What have we learned so we can avoid the disasters of the 1930s? What are the fundamental institutional reforms we need to make? How do we accommodate the new superpower China, with its alternative model of governance, not only domestically, but increasingly in the international sphere? These questions will be discussed in a conversation by Toomas Hendrik Ilves and Francis Fukuyama.

Speakers:

Toomas Hendrik Ilves is the former President of Estonia (2006–2016). He has previously also served as Estonian foreign minister, member of European Parliament, and the ambassador of Estonia in Washington. In 2017 Ilves joined Stanford University as a Bernard and Susan Liautaud Visiting Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford’s hub for researchers tackling some of the world’s most pressing security and international cooperation problems. He is currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Hoover Institution.

Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Mosbacher Director of FSI's Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). He is also a professor by courtesy in the Department of Political Science. Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues relating to questions concerning democratization and international political economy. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, was published by Free Press in 1992 and has appeared in over twenty foreign editions. His most recent book is Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy.

Abstract:

Fukuyama (1989) was right: a centuries-old argument about government should be over. Liberal democracy is the best regime known to us. It isn’t close: for life’s important aspects, including health, wealth, liberty, and peace, democracy dominates all known alternatives. Empirically, however, the argument is not over. Indeed, there is widespread concern that many citizens (and, sadly, some academics) are less enthusiastic about democracy than the evidence warrants. I argue that when we search for solutions to complex problems (e.g., the design of governments) we often make a serious error in our mental representation of the choice problem: instead of using the criterion of the best feasible option, we ignore important constraints and look for an alternative that satisfies certain value-standards. When these standards are unrealistic, as they often are, we can become disillusioned with the best possible option. Robert Michels was wrong; Voltaire, and Henny Youngman, were right.

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