America's Path To 'Competitive Authoritarianism'
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Who is Stephen Levitsky and what is his expertise on democracy?
Oh, yeah. Freedom House has annual reports for every country. The rise in political violence, political threats, threats against politicians, refusal to accept the results of a democratic election in 2020, an effort to use violence to block a peaceful transfer of power are all listed among the reasons for why the United States has fallen. I should say that even in the first four months of the Trump administration, it's quite certain that what's happening on the ground in the United States is likely to bring the U.S. core down quite a bit.
Peter Robinson I think the most likely outcome is a slide into what Luke and Wei and I call competitive authoritarianism. These are regimes that constitutionally continue to be democracies. There is a constitution, there are regular elections, a legislature, and importantly, the opposition is legal, above ground, and competes for power. So from a distance, if you squint, It looks like a democracy, but the problem is that systematic incumbent abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. This is the kind of regime that we saw in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez, subsequently become a full-on dictatorship. It's what we see in Turkey under Erdogan. It's what we see in El Salvador. It's what we see in Hungary today.
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