Erica Frantz
speaker
113 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Erica Frantz’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Thanks for having me.
Personalist politics is where we see leaders have disproportionate political influence vis-a-vis other key institutional actors. And we can see it manifest in both democracies and dictatorships. It looks slightly different in the latter.
But essentially, rather than seeing politics being part of this bargaining process through elites and the leader, we see that the leader is basically determining most outcomes.
Right. So it's all relative. In general, most political leaders are disproportionately influential over other political actors. But what matters here is the degree to which they have that sort of influence. So certainly we could say that Barack Obama was very influential in American politics, but not nearly to the degree of, say, Vladimir Putin in Russia.
where all political choices are at the whims of Putin and no other actors can challenge him. And even in authoritarian systems, some regimes are significantly more personal and leadership-centric than others. So we might think of Singapore under the People's Action Party as an authoritarian regime,
But most ordinary people wouldn't even know the name of the leader of Singapore because the party is so central to that regime. And that's in stark contrast to places like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey and so forth. So it's really a matter of degree. And I can get into, if you'd like, the ways in which we can measure these sorts of things.
But in general, we're looking at the type of bargaining that's happening between leaders and elites and the degree to which elites can serve as a constraint on the leader's choices.
Yeah.
Yeah, sure. So ideally, you want a political party to be based on a clear policy program. And in a traditional programmatic party, we would see elites really caring about the long-term reputation of the party. And in personalist parties, instead, we see elites really fearful of appearing to fall out of favor with the leader.
So it's a very different institutional dynamic where parties are personalists than where they aren't. And you mentioned the Republican Party, which is a traditional American political party and has had for many years a very clear conservative policy platform. It's shifted somewhat, but... Today, we now see a Republican Party that's really centered on whatever Trump feels like promoting.
And this evolution of the Republican Party is consistent with trends that we're seeing globally. And I'm really glad that you mentioned that, you know, the focus should be less on the individual and more on the institutions. Because to me, it's been somewhat frustrating, the degree to which observers have focused on Trump as a person.
And from my perspective, I have, I guess, more of a pessimistic outlook that most political leaders try to become more influential. But what matters is the degree to which institutions can check them. And, you know, observers have noted for a number of years now that incumbent takeovers or autocratizations or whatever term you want to use are on the rise.
So rather than seeing coups being the way that democracy is dismantled, we are instead seeing elected leaders slowly chip away at democratic institutions to consolidate power.
And the common theme in many of these incumbent takeovers is that the leader is supported by a personalist party where the party is basically geared around their career prospects rather than these kind of clear policy programs.
Yeah, so I think it is very important to zoom out and see what's happening globally, to have some sense of whether this is normal or not. So usually these are parties that the leader created or was a founding member of. So what was slightly unusual with Trump is that he basically leveraged these fissures in the Republican Party to kind of co-opt it.
So on the one hand, it's unusual that Trump was able to personalize this kind of longstanding traditional party. Usually leaders create these parties. And then the other thing that was somewhat unusual was that oftentimes when we have elections that are somewhat troubling or where you're worried about backsliding, it's
It's because you think that the leadership group is going to somehow fiddle with the elections in ways that benefit them. And with Trump, he was alleging fraud against him, which is kind of the opposite direction that we usually would see. We did see in Brazil under Bolsonaro that he started to follow that kind of new model.
But apart from that, everything that has happened with Trump in the direction of democracy in the U.S. and with his policy choices and cabinet appointments is really, really consistent with trends globally. You know, you mentioned that the party doesn't even look nearly as programmatic as it did during his first term. So we've seen a shift in that regard where it's no longer quite so predictable.
And that's not to say that parties don't shift their policies. But that it is somewhat more of a predictable program where other elites have some sense of what the party is going to promote. Under Trump's Republican Party, I think frequently Republican politicians don't really know what Trump's stance is going to be and therefore what the party's stance is going to be on political issues.
So that is a big shift.
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