Misunderstanding democratic backsliding | “Backsliding is less a result of democracies failing to deliver than of democracies failing to constrain the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders”
Posted by ONETRILLIONAMERICANS
2 Comments
I’m alarmed by the deliverism/popularism shift pushed by David Shor and (sadly) Ezra Klein. It’s obviously a very intuitive political framework but my impression is that it isn’t well supported empirically or popular in the political science community. In particular I think Shor’s polling studies are less persuasive than Vavreck’s and Sides’ bundling studies in *The Bitter End*, which contradict his results when voters are forced to make choices (as they must when actually voting).
Obviously I still support abundance as a policy agenda. But I’m skeptical of its efficacy as an electoral strategy.
I would personally say it’s a mixture of many things but a lot of it is the perception of a complete failure of institutions due to the incentives to cause outrage on social media. It’s driving a zeitgeist that western governments are corrupt and incompetent when in the grand scheme of things they are the opposite of that. That’s not to say that they don’t have problems but this sentiment is largely algorithmically driven in my opinion and has created an opportunity for demagogues like Trump or Le Pen to flourish