Defending Our Constitution Requires More Than Outrage
Blatant dictatorship – in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule – has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means.
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine.
Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box. The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped.
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal”, in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy – making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption or cleaning up the electoral process.
Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy.
Because there is no single moment – no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution – in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2018/jan/21/this-is-how-democracies-die
Assessing the Patterns of Declining Republics
By Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt
Is our democracy in danger? It is a question we never thought we’d be asking. We have been colleagues for fifteen years, thinking, writing, and teaching students about failures of democracy in other places and times—Europe’s dark 1930s, Latin America’s repressive 1970s. We have spent years researching new forms of authoritarianism emerging around the globe. For us, how and why democracies die has been an occupational obsession.
But now we find ourselves turning to our own country. Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States—but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here. After all, even though we know democracies are always fragile, the one in which we live has somehow managed to defy gravity. Our Constitution, our national creed of freedom and equality, our historically robust middle class, our high levels of wealth and education, and our large, diversified private sector—all these should inoculate us from the kind of democratic breakdown that has occurred elsewhere.
Yet, we worry. American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as “laboratories of democracy,” are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in US history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.
American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices.
What does all this mean? Are we living through the decline and fall of one of the world’s oldest and most successful democracies?
At midday on September 11, 1973, after months of mounting tensions in the streets of Santiago, Chile, British-made Hawker Hunter jets swooped overhead, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the neoclassical presidential palace in the center of the city. As the bombs continued to fall, La Moneda burned. President Salvador Allende, elected three years earlier at the head of a leftist coalition, was barricaded inside. During his term, Chile had been wracked by social unrest, economic crisis, and political paralysis. Allende had said he would not leave his post until he had finished his job—but now the moment of truth had arrived. Under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s armed forces were seizing control of the country.
Early in the morning on that fateful day, Allende offered defiant words on a national radio broadcast, hoping that his many supporters would take to the streets in defense of democracy. But the resistance never materialized. The military police who guarded the palace had abandoned him; his broadcast was met with silence. Within hours, President Allende was dead. So, too, was Chilean democracy.
This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion.
But there is another way to break a democracy. It is less dramatic but equally destructive. Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps.
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders—presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power.
In Venezuela, for example, Hugo Chávez was a political outsider who railed against what he cast as a corrupt governing elite, promising to build a more “authentic” democracy that used the country’s vast oil wealth to improve the lives of the poor. Skillfully tapping into the anger of ordinary Venezuelans, many of whom felt ignored or mistreated by the established political parties, Chávez was elected president in 1998. As a woman in Chávez’s home state of Barinas put it on election night, “Democracy is infected. And Chávez is the only antibiotic we have.”
When Chávez launched his promised revolution, he did so democratically. In 1999, he held free elections for a new constituent assembly, in which his allies won an overwhelming majority. This allowed the chavistas to single-handedly write a new constitution. It was a democratic constitution, though, and to reinforce its legitimacy, new presidential and legislative elections were held in 2000. Chávez and his allies won those, too. Chávez’s populism triggered intense opposition, and in April 2002 he was briefly toppled by the military. But the coup failed, allowing a triumphant Chávez to claim for himself even more democratic legitimacy.
It wasn’t until 2003 that Chávez took his first clear steps toward authoritarianism. With public support fading, he stalled an opposition-led referendum that would have recalled him from office—until a year later, when soaring oil prices had boosted his standing enough for him to win. In 2004, the government blacklisted those who had signed the recall petition and packed the Supreme Court, but Chávez’s landslide reelection in 2006 allowed him to maintain a democratic veneer. The chavista regime grew more repressive after 2006, closing a major television station, arresting or exiling opposition politicians, judges, and media figures on dubious charges, and eliminating presidential term limits so that Chávez could remain in power indefinitely. When Chávez, now dying of cancer, was reelected in 2012, the contest was free but not fair: Chavismo controlled much of the media and deployed the vast machinery of the government in its favor. After Chávez’s death, a year later, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, won another questionable reelection, and, in 2014, his government imprisoned a major opposition leader. Still, the opposition’s landslide victory in the 2015 legislative elections seemed to belie critics’ claims that Venezuela was no longer democratic. It was only when a new single-party constituent assembly usurped the power of Congress in 2017, nearly two decades after Chávez first won the presidency, that Venezuela was widely recognized as an autocracy.
This is how democracies now die. Blatant dictatorship—in the form of fascism, communism, or military rule—has disappeared across much of the world. Military coups and other violent seizures of power are rare. Most countries hold regular elections. Democracies still die, but by different means. Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chávez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey, and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.
Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves.
The electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive. With a classic coup d’état, as in Pinochet’s Chile, the death of a democracy is immediate and evident to all. The presidential palace burns. The president is killed, imprisoned, or shipped off into exile. The constitution is suspended or scrapped. On the electoral road, none of these things happen. There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance.
Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process. Newspapers still publish but are bought off or bullied into self-censorship. Citizens continue to criticize the government but often find themselves facing tax or other legal troubles. This sows public confusion. People do not immediately realize what is happening. Many continue to believe they are living under a democracy. In 2011, when a Latinobarómetro survey asked Venezuelans to rate their own country from 1 (“not at all democratic”) to 10 (“completely democratic”), 51 percent of respondents gave their country a score of 8 or higher.
Because there is no single moment—no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution—in which the regime obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship, nothing may set off society’s alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
How vulnerable is American democracy to this form of backsliding? The foundations of our democracy are certainly stronger than those in Venezuela, Turkey, or Hungary. But are they strong enough?
Answering such a question requires stepping back from daily headlines and breaking news alerts to widen our view, drawing lessons from the experiences of other democracies around the world and throughout history. For the sake of clarity, we are defining a democracy as 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. Studying other democracies in crisis allows us to better understand the challenges facing our own. For example, based on the historical experiences of other nations, we have developed a litmus test to help identify would‑be autocrats before they come to power. We can learn from the mistakes that past democratic leaders have made in opening the door to would‑be authoritarians—and, conversely, from the ways that other democracies have kept extremists out of power. A comparative approach also reveals how elected autocrats in different parts of the world employ remarkably similar strategies to subvert democratic institutions. As these patterns become visible, the steps toward breakdown grow less ambiguous—and easier to combat. Knowing how citizens in other democracies have successfully resisted elected autocrats, or why they tragically failed to do so, is essential to those seeking to defend American democracy today.
We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace. An essential test for democracies is not whether such figures emerge but whether political leaders, and especially political parties, work to prevent them from gaining power in the first place—by keeping them off mainstream party tickets, refusing to endorse or align with them, and, when necessary, making common cause with rivals in support of democratic candidates. Isolating popular extremists requires political courage. But when fear, opportunism, or miscalculation leads established parties to bring extremists into the mainstream, democracy is imperiled.
We know that extremist demagogues emerge from time to time in all societies, even in healthy democracies. The United States has had its share of them, including Henry Ford, Huey Long, Joseph McCarthy, and George Wallace.
Once a would‑be authoritarian makes it to power, democracies face a second critical test: Will the autocratic leader subvert democratic institutions or be constrained by them? Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be. Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.
This essay is excerpted from How Democracies Die. Copyright © 2019 by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published by Broadway Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
https://www.americanacademy.de/how-democracies-die/
To better understand how elected autocrats subtly undermine institutions, it’s helpful to [imagine a soccer game]
To consolidate power, would-be authoritarians must;
Capture the referees
Sideline at least some of the other side’s star players
Rewrite the rules of the game to lock in their advantage…
…in effect tilting the playing field against their opponents.
It always helps to have the referees on your side. Modern states possess various agencies with the authority to investigate and punish wrongdoing by both public officials and private citizens. These include the judicial system, law enforcement bodies, and intelligence, tax, and regulatory agencies. In democracies, such institutions are designed to serve as neutral arbiters. For would-be authoritarians, therefore, judicial and law enforcement agencies pose both a challenge and an opportunity. If they remain independent, they might expose and punish government abuse. It is a referee’s job, after all, to prevent cheating. But if these agencies are controlled by loyalists, they could serve a would-be dictator’s aims, shielding the government from investigation and criminal prosecutions that could lead to its removal from power. The president may break the law, threaten citizens’ rights, and even violate the constitution without having to worry that such abuse will be investigated or censured. With the courts packed and law enforcement authorities brought to heel, governments can act with impunity.
Capturing the referees provides the government with more than a shield. It also offers a powerful weapon, allowing the government to selectively enforce the law, punishing opponents while protecting allies. Tax authorities may be used to target rival politicians, businesses, and media outlets. The police can crack down on opposition protest while tolerating acts of violence by pro-government thugs. Intelligence agencies can be used to spy on critics and dig up material for blackmail.
Most often, the capture of the referees is done by quietly firing civil servants and other nonpartisan officials and replacing them with loyalists. In Hungary, for example, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán packed the nominally independent Prosecution Service, State Audit Office, Ombudsman’s office, Central Statistical Office, and Constitutional Court with partisan allies after returning to power in 2010.
Institutions that cannot be easily purged may be hijacked, subtly, by other means. Few did this better than Alberto Fujimori’s “intelligence advisor,” Vladimiro Montesinos. Under Montesinos’s direction, Peru’s National Intelligence Service videotaped hundreds of opposition politicians, judges, congressmen, businessmen, journalists, and editors paying or receiving bribes, entering brothels, or engaging in other illicit activity—and then used the videotapes to blackmail them. He also maintained three supreme court justices, two members of the Constitutional Tribunal, and a “staggering” number of judges and public prosecutors on his payroll, delivering monthly cash payments to their homes. All this was done in secret; on the surface, Peru’s justice system functioned like any other. But in the shadows, Montesinos was helping Fujimori consolidate power.
Judges who cannot be bought off may be targeted for impeachment. When Perón assumed the presidency in 1946, four of Argentina’s five-member supreme court were conservative opponents, one of whom had called him a fascist. Concerned about the court’s history of striking down pro-labor legislation, Perón’s allies in congress impeached three of the justices on the grounds of malfeasance (a fourth resigned before he could be impeached). Perón then appointed four loyalists, and the court never opposed him again. Likewise, when Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal threatened to block President Fujimori’s bid for a third term in 1997, Fujimori’s allies in congress impeached three of the body’s seven justices—on the grounds that, in declaring Fujimori’s effort to evade constitutional term limits “unconstitutional,” they themselves had breached the constitution.
Governments that cannot remove independent judges may bypass them through court packing. In Hungary, for instance, the Orbán government expanded the size of the Constitutional Court from eight to fifteen, changed the nomination rules so that the ruling Fidesz party could single-handedly appoint the new justices, and then filled the new positions with Fidesz loyalists. In Poland, the governing Law and Justice Party had several of its initiatives blocked by the Constitutional Tribunal—the country’s highest authority on constitutional matters—between 2005 and 2007. When the party returned to power in 2015, it took steps to avoid similar losses in the future. At the time, there were two openings in the fifteen-member Constitutional Tribunal and three justices who were approved by the outgoing parliament but had yet to be sworn in. In a dubiously constitutional move, the new Law and Justice government refused to swear in the three justices and instead imposed five new justices of its own. For good measure, it then passed a law requiring that all binding Constitutional Tribunal decisions have a two-thirds majority. This effectively gave government allies a veto power within the tribunal, limiting the body’s ability to serve as an independent check on governmental power.
The most extreme way to capture the referees is to raze the courts altogether and create new ones. In 1999, the Chávez government called elections for a constituent assembly that, in violation of an earlier supreme court ruling, awarded itself the power to dissolve all other state institutions, including the court. Fearing for its survival, the supreme court acquiesced and ruled the move constitutional. Supreme court president Cecilia Sosa resigned, declaring that the court had “committed suicide to avoid being assassinated. But the result is the same. It is dead.” Two months later, the supreme court was dissolved and replaced by a new Supreme Tribunal of Justice. Even that wasn’t enough to ensure a pliant judiciary, however, so in 2004, the Chávez government expanded the size of the Supreme Tribunal from twenty to thirty-two and filled the new posts with “revolutionary” loyalists. That did the trick. Over the next nine years, not a single Supreme Tribunal ruling went against the government.
In each of these cases, the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful—and “legal”—weapon with which to assault its opponents.
How Democracies Die - Steven Levitsky
https://tinyurl.com/how-democracies-die
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Entire Washington Post Article Above
How flawed constitutions undermine democracy
Many scholars and pundits have recently declared that democracy is in crisis. According to analyses that draw on data from the Varieties of Democracy Project, the average level of democracy across the world has not necessary declined. But over the past five years, the quality of democracy has declined in more countries than the number in which it has increased.
Ukraine, Hungary, Turkey, Poland and Venezuela are flirting with authoritarianism. The current U.S. president regularly violates democratic norms: attacking the media, the Justice Department and the FBI when they push back against him. With Donald Trump in office, leaders with authoritarian tendencies in countries such as Egypt and Russia are crushing their political opponents, aware that the U.S. State Department will do nothing more than issue a mild rhetorical rebuke. And recent polling data suggests that a surprising number of Americans would, under the “right” circumstances, support a military takeover of the U.S. government.
How and why is all of this happening?
One theory: Danger grows as informal norms erode
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s new book, “How Democracies Die,” has rightly received a great deal of attention for outlining steps that lead democracies into authoritarianism. Among the key takeaways: Democracy depends in no small part on citizens’ and the elite’s willingness to tolerate and work with political opponents and to exercise political power with restraint rather than ruthlessness. Informal norms of cooperation and collegiality across differences both complement and ultimately enforce democratic constitutions, they argue; when the political elite begin playing no-holds-barred politics, nations risk slipping toward authoritarianism.
Outgoing authoritarian governments write biased constitutions
But there is still more to consider. In many countries, democratic backsliding comes from far deeper sources. In our new book, “Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy,” we document a little-known fact: Out of the 122 total democratic transitions since 1800, in 80 cases — or 66 percent — new democracies inherited a constitution from authoritarian predecessors. That includes some of the world’s early democracies, such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway. Examples since World War II include Argentina, Chile, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa and South Korea.
[ Is democracy in a worldwide decline? Nope. Here’s our data. ]
Why does that matter? When an outgoing authoritarian regime designs democratic institutions, it often shields the incumbent elite from the rule of law and gives them an unfair advantage in the new democracy’s politics and economy. Those outgoing rulers and incumbents want to protect their own lives and welfare, avoiding accountability for human rights violations and political repression.
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, that some of these biased constitutions contain the seeds of a return to dictatorship. Citizens may be free from censorship and outright repression — but they are not equal and important players in deciding public policy. In these imperfect democracies, opportunistic politicians often try to agitate the masses, urging them to vote out the “corrupt” elite and overturn their “rigged” institutions. Demagogues then use power to ride roughshod over deliberation, consensus building and civil liberties.
How can these biased constitutions be fixed?
Transforming these biased democracies isn’t easy. The constitutions are often hard to change; achieving change requires large supermajorities. The oligarchs and the elite enriching themselves under these constitutions pass policies that entrench their power, such as lax lobbying and campaign spending laws, and rig economic regulations to make it hard for entrepreneurs to compete on a level playing field.
Consider Burma, also known as Myanmar. Yes, the military junta did allow the 2015 elections in which Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy took office — but that happened within the military’s 2008 constitution. Before handing over power, the military-dominated legislature passed laws that included amnesty for military generals accused of human rights abuses, a generous pension plan for departing lawmakers, and lucrative business contracts for outgoing generals and others in the elite. What is more, the constitution awards the military 25 percent of the parliament’s seats — the proportion needed to block constitutional reform.
Some demagogues manage to rewrite these constitutions — to their own benefit
Precisely because holdover authoritarian constitutions are so hard to change, things often get ugly when democratically elected leaders try to get rid of elite biases.
Consider Turkey, where in 1982, the outgoing authoritarian government wrote a constitution that governed the 1983 transition to democracy. Some of that constitution’s trap doors included a constitutional court that could ban “extreme” parties, and immunity for generals from prosecution for past human rights abuses. The military and allied oligarchs maintained control of key industries. Many citizens and clerics resented these privileges and abuses. In the 2000s, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the Justice and Development Party exploited that resentment to ride into office — and then used populist bluster and a state of emergency to gut the checks and balances and military vetoes that had hemmed in civilian politicians.
But Erdogan has not stopped there. He has conducted a campaign to consolidate the executive branch’s power, jail officers, empower Islamists, purge universities, and enervate individual liberties and the judiciary. In 2017, he won a popular referendum that approved 18 amendments to the constitution, transforming Turkey into a presidential system that gives the executive outsize power.
[ Populists have one big thing right: Democracies are becoming less open. ]
Or consider Hungary. Its transition to democracy took place within the 1949 communist constitution, although it was heavily amended on the eve of democratization in 1989. Those amendments gave the president significant legal status, created a new constitutional court, protected human rights and established genuine elections with competition. But political transformation remained within the earlier constitution’s legal boundaries, making it easier for the outgoing authoritarians to protect themselves, including securing immunity for past crimes.
As in Turkey, Hungarian citizens resented the special dealings for former authoritarians. For more than 20 years, elected governments tried to amend or overturn the constitution. With that as background, in 2010, the nation elected the far-right political party Fidesz and its leader, Viktor Orban, who became prime minister. The election gave Fidesz a sweeping two-thirds victory that enabled it to form Hungary’s first post-1989 non-coalition government. Fidesz has had the numbers and power to rewrite the unpopular holdover constitution — but it has done so in an illiberal fashion. Orban’s authoritarian tendencies are now eroding Hungarian democracy.
What does this mean for the United States?
Many have been worrying lately about the decline of U.S. democracy, considering not just President Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric and violations of informal norms, but also Senate Republicans’ refusal to hold hearings on President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, and both parties’ use of budgetary rules to pass major legislation in the Senate while avoiding the filibuster.
But the United States has a much stronger institutional architecture undergirding its democracy. It would be difficult to change the Constitution to give a president the powers of a strongman. And the country’s civil society and media remain strong and vigilant.
How can tilted democracies avoid populism and improve democratic quality?
Our book also demonstrates that democracies biased toward an authoritarian-era elite can become more representative and egalitarian — through measured statesmanship and patient, incremental change. Sweden is a great example. While not always politically popular, such an approach is the best bet for flawed democracies that seek to eliminate their worst distortions while avoiding another bout of dictatorship.
Michael Albertus is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago.
Victor Menaldo is an associate professor of political science at the University of Washington.
Together they are the authors of the newly published “Authoritarianism and the Elite Origins of Democracy” (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
