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
And perhaps Bukele has been even more effective in that we haven't seen the same sort of general societal concern for his relationship with the media. that we do here. But regardless, there is this obsession that we see in lots of these incumbents that degrade democracy with the way in which they're portrayed. And in some ways, it is somewhat comical.
But in other ways, it's something we should take fairly seriously because it degrades the ability of the media in many instances to speak truthfully. So on the one hand, we've seen that leaders who are at the helm of personalist parties Once they get elected, the chance of democratic erosion and backsliding goes up considerably.
And the playbook that they use to undermine democracy follows a similar format.
Yeah, so probably one of the first regimes where we saw this play out that got some media attention would be Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. And since then, we've seen a number of other places experience similar dynamics like Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The list is actually really long of these democratically elected leaders taking over power.
And in places like Chavez's Venezuela, we often forget that Venezuela had been one of the strongest democracies in Latin America when Chavez got elected in 1998. So we have this very robust democracy, and this leader comes to power via free and fair elections. He had created his own movement to back him, this Chavista movement, the name of which has shifted over time.
And slowly he started to implement policies that gave him greater control and that undermined the power of his opponents. And this included things like messing with the judiciary. And by that, I mean changing the rules so that Chavez could ensure that he had more loyalists in key judicial positions. Leaders in other countries have done a variety of things to take control over the judiciary.
They have changed things like the age that a judge must be to retire to ensure that there's some forced retirement so they can staff the courts with their loyalists. They also go after the media. And either they... take over existing media outlets and staff them with their supporters, or they sideline the traditional media and basically see it as some sort of evil operated against them.
They also implement policies that make it more difficult for their opponents to win office. And then what we see is that over time, the ability of these traditional institutional checks on the executive to constrain the leader degrade, and eventually leaders start messing with the electoral process, which is the kind of fundamental core of a democracy, and we see democracy erode.
So, I'm really glad you asked that, actually, because... When Trump got elected in 2016, you know, I study authoritarian politics and democratic backsliding. And at the time, there wasn't too much interest in my research, right? So at least not from, you know, journalists covering American politics. And...
At the time, it seemed like everyone was really quick to say that democracy is falling apart in the U.S. So we have democratic backsliding happening in Hungary and Turkey and Poland, and certainly it's going to happen here. And I kind of pushed back against that because there were a couple of factors that the U.S. had going for it.
We know that countries that have really long experiences with democracy are less likely to backslide and that countries that are wealthier are less likely to backslide. So democracy in the U.S. should be fairly protected. And I did think at the time that the chance of backsliding in the U.S. was somewhat higher than it had been in years past, let's say.
But overall, we were at a far lower risk than, say, a place like Venezuela or But then the big shift that happened was really circling back to personalism again, but the control that Trump got over the Republican Party since he even that he left power in 2020. And so that was a critical shift.
On the one hand, it was a big positive that Trump's efforts to stay in office after losing the election in 2020, they failed, right, because of the Republican Party, and in particular, Vice President Pence. So that was a big testing point for American democracy. And, you know, we got through that one.
But the critical red flag to me is that the Republican Party has a majority in the legislature this time and that Trump has really established full control over the party. So the key things to be paying attention to in the years to come are mainly in the months to come, to be quite frank. We want to see how is the Republican Party going to settle following this election?
We've already witnessed a number of divisions within the Republican Party. Well, how is that all going to play out? Are we going to see key elites throw up their hands and say, you know what, there's nothing we can do. We have to get fully behind Trump. Are we going to see all of these nominations of some of these bizarre and inexperienced nominees go through in the Senate?
Or are we going to see intense divide play out? And from the perspective of the democracy expert over here, we want the Republican Party to be more divided. We want to see some sort of thorough discussion of some of these things. So that's like probably the first thing on the horizon.
And then moving forward, the additional things to look at are the way in which the Trump administration engages with the judiciary. So are we going to see any efforts to mess with the judiciary in ways that ensure more loyalists are within key courts? And then are we also going to see further attacks on the media and efforts to silence and sideline the media?
I guess I should mention a third thing as well. Trump has made some statements that he intends to go after some of his political opponents once he gets power. Are we going to see that play out? Those are the key things in the authoritarian playbook that we're used to seeing. And are we going to see him go after Liz Cheney, let's say? Those would be some red flags to look for in the years to come.
You know, yeah, that's a great question. And there is not a lot of research on successful opposition movements to Democratic backsliding. This is kind of a new field. So we don't have a strong sense of what the core features are of opposition groups that are successful in pushing back against backsliding. But there are a couple of things that we know that one of which might be fairly obvious.
So where opposition parties are divided, they're going to be less likely to be successful in pushing back. And it's important to note that oftentimes the very attacks on democracy that the leader is pursuing can split the opposition because it can create all this uncertainty in terms of how to respond, kind of what you're mentioning here with the Democratic Party.
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