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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Yeah, that's an excellent observation about the intricate ways in which the business community has aligned with Trump. So I study authoritarian politics primarily, and corruption is very common in authoritarian politics. It's kind of the norm. Democracies are not immune from corruption either. But what we see is that particularly in personalist dictatorships where power is really concentrated—
that corruption plays an important role in enabling the leader to distribute perks to their base of supporters. So in these really personalist places, leaders rely on a fairly narrow group of supporters to maintain power. So they don't need the support of everybody. They just need the loyalty of a select group of individuals.
So what they do is ensure that these individuals have access to the perks of power. And this often happens in a corrupt fashion. One of the things that's interesting to observe is that corruption can also help the leader gain greater control over these individuals.
So there's a quote from Mexico during its authoritarian regime in the 20th century that a politician who stays poor is poor at politics. And that gets at the fact that, you know, many politicians are going to be corrupt in an authoritarian system. So it's not unusual that they take the bait and engage in these corrupt activities, but
But once the leader, you know, has established this relationship, ensuring that these individuals are getting the spoils of office in a corrupt fashion, the leader kind of owns them. Because at any moment that the leader suddenly questions their loyalty or grows suspicious of their intentions—
they can charge those individuals with corruption and purge them by saying that, oh, this person was engaged in corruption. We saw Xi Jinping do this with his big anti-corruption effort a while back, where he went after his big opponents. But we see it in a lot of other personalist environments where corruption is used strategically.
The leader is relying on corruption to secure the support of key elites and also owns these elites by virtue of this because he has access to information about their illicit activities that they can use at any moment to purge these people from positions of power, imprison them and so forth.
Sure. So I don't know all of the details of, you know, Biden's relationship with the super rich or of Russia's relationship with the oligarchs. But in general, we think about corruption as an abuse of public office for private gain.
So usually robust institutionalized democracies like the United States have a lot of rules in place to ensure that public officials can't use those posts for private gain. It doesn't mean that these things aren't always breached. You know, I'm sure that there is corruption in the United States, not nearly the degree to which there is in Russia.
But in general, there are some sort of processes for ensuring that this doesn't happen. And those processes are, for the most part, respected. In a place like Russia, under Putin, there are all sorts of breaches of these rules and all sorts of funneling of money overseas into overseas accounts.
Researchers have done studies on Russian legislators and tried to measure corruption among those individuals, and they have been able to identify a disconnect between what the salaries are of those legislators and the types of cars that they're driving. So we have more solid evidence that there is private gain happening among these individuals in these public posts.
These corrupt legislators that are driving the fancy cars in Russia are less likely to show up to vote for individual policies and more likely to support regime legislation. But, you know, there isn't a ton of research that has looked at some of the synergies that you're talking about with political the ways in which backsliding elites have aligned with the business community.
We do know that in existing authoritarian contexts like Hungary and Russia, that leaders are able to build these really close linkages with elites in the business community, often through corruption, that can be helpful for these regimes. But there's not a lot, to my knowledge, that gets at the way in which it can facilitate the process of backsliding.
You know, I actually had not thought about tariffs from that perspective, but that's pretty spot on, actually, in that in general, where we see greater state intervention in the economy, it creates opportunities for corruption. It creates opportunities to establish deals and give access to networks where officials can store their money overseas and all sorts of things lie on the books.
The list is fairly long of the ways in which governments can take advantage of those state interventions. So from that perspective, yeah, it certainly does generate more opportunities for corruption if there is greater state intervention in the economy and tariffs would fall under that category.
It does seem like there has been a shift, at least observationally, for all the reasons that you just mentioned, in that it looks like we're entering an era of court politics where everyone is flying to go get the ear of the new leader.
And it's not something that we're familiar with in the past, where all sectors of the business community are descending in Mar-a-Lago to try to get Trump's attention. And I think that this is really a reflection of an understanding that what Trump wants is what's going to happen. And that if you don't get into his good favor, that you're not going to get what you want.
And you could even potentially be punished. So it's unclear what sorts of attacks Trump is going to implement against his opponents. But the overall energy is one in which most people have the impression that if you're against Trump, you might be persecuted in some way, that he might try to go after you, that your business could be at risk. So there's that component of it.
And also, I think there's an extra layer where, in some ways, many key sectors of society in the U.S. have kind of given up, I guess, for lack of a better word, in terms of, you know, trying to push back against what Trump's vision is for society here and have instead decided that it's in their interest to get on board with
All of this kind of falls outside of my area of expertise in terms of analyzing some of the intricacies of what's happening with Trump and the business community. But the major thing that would come to the fore is this kind of sense of court politics where everybody's trying to get around the leader, flatter the leader to ensure that their business futures and political futures are intact.
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