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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So the research shows that as personalism in the party increases, the number of years of political and governing experience declines among the key elites. So there's a pretty strong connection there. And when these leaders create parties, and again, the Republican Party is somewhat anomalous there in that Trump did not create it, but they usually staff it with friends and family members.
And a really good example of that is El Salvador with Bukele. where he created Nueva Ideas. And first, I believe it was his childhood friend that was the head of the party. Today, it's his cousin. Many family members have key positions of power, and yet none of them had any governing or political experience. And that's pretty common because leaders...
tend to prioritize loyalty over competence where they can. We see that in authoritarian politics all the time. The problem, however, is that, as you might expect, it's not good for decision making to be surrounded by a bunch of sycophants. You want some sort of checks on some of these choices that leaders might float around. You want experience to inform the choices that leaders make.
So when we see these leaders kind of become surrounded by yes-men, we see a lot of really bad policy choices that often have really harmful foreign policy outcomes. In terms of the discussion of Trump...
Some of the ideas of the cabinet nominees that have been floated or published or announced, what have you, are very much consistent with what we would expect with a personalist leader in that we are seeing loyalty prioritized over competence. And it will be very important for the health of democracy in the U.S.,
if the Republican Party stands up to some of these cabinet nominees and pushes back against it. We've seen some of it play out in the media since Trump won the election, where there is some discord. And to me, that is pretty important and something to really look to moving forward.
That, you know, we want our cabinet officials and attorney generals and all these people to have political experience that's relevant to the job. It's a very important not only a check on Trump, but also it's an important constraint in terms of ensuring that we don't have really volatile policies coming out.
That is an excellent example. And I'm going to take note of that because it does illustrate a lot of the dynamics that we point out in the book. It is very important that political elites see a career outside of the leader.
And so when these leaders appoint their friends and loyalists to these key positions of power, those individuals know that they pretty much only have that position so long as they stay in the good favor of the leader. They don't have years of experience to fall back on to ensure that they can get a political post elsewhere.
So, when leaders are able to select these individuals to surround them in their support group, they pretty much know that these individuals are not going to push back against anything that they promote. And in fact, in some instances, they might endorse things that they know are unhealthy for democracy.
So in that way, the lack of experience can be very harmful for democracy because there's little incentive for these individuals to push back against the leader. And on top of it, they tend to not have the same political experience when it comes to collectively organizing to push back against the leader.
So we think about capacity in a couple ways. One is that we know, using anecdotal evidence and so forth, that when individuals don't have much experience working with one another and don't have much experience in politics in general, that they don't have the political sophistication, let's say, to know how to collectively act against the leader.
And then the other thing that we can look at is the party structure in terms of the strength of local party organizations. Ideally, you want a party to be this robust political organization where there are local organizations that are strong and where it is not super top-heavy. And instead, with personalist parties, we see very top-heavy politics.
And we can show in the data that with personalist parties, the leader is more likely to control nominations and where political actors are fearful that if they depart from that individual's messaging, that they are going to be unlikely to win political office. So basically more likely to steer the careers of party officials and party members.
And then on top of it, we know that these leaders are also more likely to personally fund the political party. And so right from the get-go, if the leader is playing a dominant role in funding the political party, they're going to have disproportionate influence. They can control the direction of the party. And a good example of that would be from Georgia with Ivanishvili and the Georgian Dream.
He's this billionaire individual who was able to create the Georgian Dream, personally funds it, and we've seen significant Democratic backsliding in Georgia as well. So both capacity and incentive are important for understanding when we're going to see incumbent parties push back.
In some instances, they have little reason to want to do so because they have no political future outside of the leader's longevity. In other instances, they really don't have the tools to be able to do much to challenge the leader besides defect and leave the party and threaten their own career.
So, yes, it's true that in some instances leaders have used money to gain influence and Trump has certainly used his dominating media presence to gain influence. But I think that that's fairly similar actually to Bukele in El Salvador. who won power with this newly formed party and then was really, really effective at using social media to establish a brand, to get out of his messaging.
He was able to sideline traditional political institutions by just resorting to social media to put out his message. And he's very much an attention seeker, just like Trump. He brands himself as this kind of ordinary cool guy, I guess you could say, with his baseball hats that he wears at his events. And he's really obsessed with media attention in ways that are similar to Trump.
So I think that there are multiple routes that you can get this sort of influence over your political system. But the core thing that is in alignment in all these places is that we don't see political elites envision a future outside of the leader's influence.
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