From Maria Alejandra Madi Regarding Western democracies, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard scholars, think that the answer is yes. They base their answer on decades of study and a wide range of historical and modern cases, from 1930s Europe to modern Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, North and South America. Instead of a revolution or a military takeover, the authors believe that there will be a steady and slow breakdown of long-standing democratic rules and institutions. For them, democracy is “a system of government with regular, free, and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association” (p. 8). What is Levitsky and Ziblatt’s goal? “How” is their focus, since the book looks at the
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from Maria Alejandra Madi
Regarding Western democracies, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two Harvard scholars, think that the answer is yes. They base their answer on decades of study and a wide range of historical and modern cases, from 1930s Europe to modern Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, North and South America. Instead of a revolution or a military takeover, the authors believe that there will be a steady and slow breakdown of long-standing democratic rules and institutions. For them, democracy is “a system of government with regular, free, and fair elections, in which all adult citizens have the right to vote and possess basic civil liberties such as freedom of speech and association” (p. 8).
What is Levitsky and Ziblatt’s goal? “How” is their focus, since the book looks at the ways and means by which democracies might become dictatorships. So, they analyse how leaders have destroyed the official and informal institutions of democracy over time and in different places. These institutions include courts, constitutions, the media, law enforcement agencies, and civil society. For example, they refer to the threats to Western democracy, giving examples such as how judges’ retirement ages have been lowered and stubborn judges have been charged with misconduct to weaken the independence of the courts and allow leaders to fill the courts with people who will follow their orders. They also describe methods and charges that have been used to scare the press, and explain how bribes or access to the government have been used to influence economic decisions.
Considering this background, one of their main concern with the conditions for the fall of democracy is related to the fact that people stop believing in and being happy with democracy. Moreover, focusing on the elites or political leaders is not enough since polarization in society is not just caused by them. Long-term changes like increasing economic inequality and growing differences between social and geographical areas, as well as social and cultural divides and the fragmentation of the electorate, have also contributed to the overall conditions for the fall of Western democracy. These trends are also shown in recent books by Yascha Mounk, Theda Skocpol, Sam Rosenfeld, Daniel Schlozman, Julia Azari, and Lilliana Mason.
Ziblatt and Levitsky’s book might help us figure out the connections between current trends in Western democracy and the threat to pluralism in economics.
Nowadays, if democratic institutions are in trouble, the apparent lack of choices is mainly related to the spread of bureaucratic decisions. In this respect, René Passet (1979) said that the bureocratic method of policy decision-making turned into an ideology that is deeply linked to monism, which is the idea that there is only one best way to understand economic problems or find solutions. Indeed, the use and misuse of scientific reason in economics, supported by monism, also help push democracy to the side.
As Jacques Sapir (2002) said so well, pluralism is useless in a society where there is only one answer to every problem. A pluralist way of thinking in economics requires multiple insights and different ways of looking at a problem. It is worth remembering that Albert Hirschman showed in his 1988 important work, Strategies of Development, how democracy’s contribution to economic progress necessitates open debates and criticisms in order to help the government change course and put its resources toward a new goal, if necessary.
To summarize, the adoption of economic pluralism would be of tremendous assistance in laying the foundation for the democracies that would support the future of the West.
REFERENCES
Blanco, M. Economics Against Democracy, paper, Universidade de Évora.
Hirschman, A. O. (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy. The
Cambridge MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Levitsky, S. & Daniel Ziblatt (2018) New York: Broadway Books.
Passet, R. (1979) L’Économique et le Vivant, Paris: Payot.
Polanyi, K. (1983) La Grande Transformation, aux origines politiques et économiques
de notre temps, Paris: Gallimard (original edition in English The Great Transformation,
1944).
Sapir, J. (2002) Les Économistes Contre la Démocratie, Paris: Albin Michel.