SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Democracies can bounce back after a period of authoritarian rule but not usually for long. That's according to three researchers who argue that once a country loses democracy, durable recoveries are increasingly rare, and most don't hold on for even five consecutive years. They've reached that conclusion based on patterns they've studied over the past three decades. One of the authors of this analysis is Professor Nic Cheeseman. He's a professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Professor Cheeseman, welcome.
NIC CHEESEMAN: It's a pleasure to be here.
MCCAMMON: So tell me more about your research. How did you come to study democracies and how they function?
CHEESEMAN: Well, you know, we've had something like 20, 25 years now of democratic decline around the world in which more countries are moving towards authoritarianism than are moving towards democracy. So there's been a really big shift within the research community to try and understand that. Why is that happening? And why are some countries, you know, moving towards authoritarianism faster or more than others?
And those countries that aren't moving - that are resilient, that are strong, that seem to be able to sustain their democracy - they've led to a kind of new research program around what we call democratic resilience. So one of the questions that we were really interested in is, you know, which countries have democratic resilience and which don't, and to what extent can countries bounce back when they've had a really bad authoritarian episode and get back to the level of democracy that they had before?
MCCAMMON: And how did you go about doing this research? What did you analyze for this study?
CHEESEMAN: So we have analyzed the cases of democratic bounce-back that we can find basically since 1994. And we've looked at all of those cases, and then we've looked at to what extent did those countries manage after they bounced back to a democratic period having been in the authoritarian period to sustain that for a period of five years. And as you said in the intro, the news is really bleak. We cannot be complacent about democratic bounce-backs 'cause unfortunately, most of them turn out to be fragile and short-lived. In fact, 90% of Democratic U-turns - that's 9 out of 10 times when we see it - they don't actually last.
MCCAMMON: You know, advocates for democracy, whether they're in the government or outside the government, are often in an uphill battle, I think it's fair to say, against disinformation. Where does technology and the sort of modern information ecosystem come into this? And how much does it complicate this challenge?
CHEESEMAN: Technology plays a really big role in this, as does disinformation. One of the things we've seen really over the last 20 years is the emergence of social media and disinformation on a kind of global scale because this is being pushed out by a lot of countries globally, as well as domestically by different groups. That has contributed to a massive collapse in people's trust in each other and people's trust in political systems, and that has made it really difficult for governments.
I think it's important to realize that that's made it actually difficult for authoritarian governments as well as democratic governments. So we see a lot of uprisings against dictators around the world, but it has made it really difficult for governments to satisfy their citizens. And that's a particular challenge for democracy because democracy, unlike authoritarianism, actually depends on the consent and the support of the public.
MCCAMMON: You know, going back to 2016, when Trump was first elected, I think a lot of people were worried that that was the end of democracy. Here we are a decade later. Based on your experience, how robust is the U.S. democratic system, and how close are we to slipping into something else?
CHEESEMAN: The U.S. system is fairly robust. We have, of course, a very decentralized electoral system in the U.S., which means that Trump can't simply control what happens at the state level. So the U.S. system is resilient in those kinds of ways, but of course, we've also seen that Trump has been able to actually push and expand the power of the presidency informally in ways that we didn't necessarily think was going to be possible previously.
Even a short period of democratic backsliding, you know, tends to leave authoritarian holdovers where we've talked about. In the U.S. case, that means loyalists in courts and bureaucracies and party structures who can continue to block accountability, who can continue to normalize rule bending. And that creates a misleading sense of bounce-back where you might look like you've got a more democratic system and remove Trump, but in reality, key challenges within the system and vulnerabilities remain in place. So to me, the real question is not can U.S. democracy survive Trump, but whether it will take the tough step of dismantling those legacies and reforming the institutions before the next authoritarian challenge emerges.
MCCAMMON: So you've said that restoring a democracy once it's lost, at least for any length of time, is really, really difficult. But you're also talking about sort of trying to slow or stop the erosion of democracy before it's gone. What do you think are the most important things either individual Americans or elected leaders can do toward that end?
CHEESEMAN: Yeah, it's so important - because we know that 9 out of 10 cases don't actually sustain a democratic bounce-back, it's really important not to get into the authoritarian trap in the first place. So how do we do that? I think one of the things that countries need to do much more is start to be proactive. So if you can see that there's an authoritarian drive within certain political parties from certain parts of society, you need to address that much earlier.
That might be strategies for including some of those people who feel excluded from the political system. It might be trying to make sure that you reduce polarization by building trust between people from different parties. It might be actually doing some institutional changes to make it harder to change the law so that you can actually undermine the rule of law, undermine human rights or undermine key democratic principles.
What's really interesting is that Democrats in the United States, the current Labor government, for example, in the United Kingdom, can see these authoritarian challenges coming down the line - it was clear that Trump had a chance of winning that election - and yet did very little to safeguard democracy to protect it. One of the challenges for the United States is that a significant proportion of Trump supporters don't believe in the system, and so they don't mind him attacking the system. In fact, it's one of the reasons why they support him. Unless you address that, you're not going to address the problem.
MCCAMMON: That's Professor Nic Cheeseman of Birmingham University in the U.K. Thanks so much.
CHEESEMAN: Thanks. It was a pleasure.
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