Identity, Partisanship, Polarization – How democratically elected politicians get away with autocratizing their country?
Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Office in Belgrade and the Institute of Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade have the pleasure of inviting you to the presentation of the study and expert debate on how increasing polarization threatens democracy.
Recently, this statement has become a widespread opinion that you hear and read in the media all the time, and to some degree, it seems to be backed up by scientific research. But how exactly does “polarization” threaten democracy? What are the mechanisms behind it that endanger the functioning of democracies? And does this assumption really hold true universally? Does polarization in the US work in similar ways as in Brazil, India or Poland? We do indeed observe more and more that democracies are creepingly undermined by ruling politicians. While the population has the opportunity to sanction this behavior at the next election at the latest, it does not always do so.
Milan Svolik (Yale University) has used an election experiment for the United States to show that a strong polarization of society leads to a situation in which citizens no longer act as a corrective, but instead rather focus on their own camp’s victory – even if they have to vote for a politician who explicitly announces that they want to lower certain democratic or constitutional standards. Our team from the FES Office ‘Democracy of the Future’ cooperated with Svolik to analyze for seven selected European countries under which circumstances the electorate acts as a corrective against the erosion of democracy. The results of our large-scale experiment in Germany, Estonia, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden and Ukraine allow us to draw conclusions about which factors may be decisive for autocratization in Europe, but we can also designate which democratic standards people are most willing to give up and for which concrete interests they are most willing to accept a curtailment of democratic standards.
Please confirm your attendance by sending an email to the address ivana.racic@fes.de.