Democracy Paradox
Is it possible for a democracy to govern undemocratically? Can the people elect an undemocratic leader? Is it possible for democracy to bring about authoritarianism? And if so, what does this say about democracy? My name is Justin Kempf. Every week I talk to the brightest minds on subjects like international relations, political theory, and history to explore democracy from every conceivable angle. Topics like civil resistance, authoritarian successor parties, and the autocratic middle class challenge our ideas about democracy. Join me as we unravel new topics every week.
Episodes
I think one of the greatest barriers to reform is thinking that reform is impossible.
Daniel Ziblatt
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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.
Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Transformations of Democracy group at Berlin's Social Scienc...
North Korea is stable up until the day it's not... The day that it collapses, there'll be a lot of people out there who will say this was inevitable.
Victor Cha
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Victor Cha is a professor of government at Georgetown University and holds the Korea Chai...
People still think of Chinese history as this two-line struggle because that's the story the Chinese tell. But everything from Mao Zedong's relationship to Liu Shaoqi to anything that happened during the 1980s, it was not a problem of competing policy platforms. It was a problem of getting the politics of your relationship with the top leader right when it was hard to guess what they were thinking and they were changing t...
Great developments by nature are not linear. Things just don't always continue as they have been. That's why this idea that the Arab Spring came, it went, it happened, it didn't work, therefore the Middle East will always remain an autocracy - that's linear thinking. Great events are great precisely because they're not linear.
Robert Kaplan
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India should be understood as a test case of democracy outside the Western world.
Rahul Verma
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Rahul Verma is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is also Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Ashoka Univers...
It would be a miracle if the original understanding of the Constitution just landed time and time again with the views in 2023 of the right-wing of the Republican Party. That would be too amazing a coincidence. That's more than troublesome.
Cass Sunstein
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...
I think we have a more complex notion of what democracy is.
- Marc Plattner
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Marc Plattner is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and the founding codirector of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic S...
It's too simplistic to call it an evil company. There are certainly a lot of very good people that work there. It's just the system itself and the corporation itself and the system that it's embedded in is what causes the problems.
Michael Forsythe
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Spin dictators have fewer political prisoners, fewer political killings. This is good. This is really good. On the other hand, we want to tell everybody that they are still dictators.
Sergei Guriev
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Sergei Guriev is a professor of Economics at Sciences Po in Pa...
Elections are not free or fair, but they matter greatly because this is how Erdoğan comes to power and stays in power and in this case he was almost about to lose that power.
Sebnem Gumuscu
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Berk Esen...
The most dangerous states in the international system aren't necessarily revisionist powers that think that their trajectory points continually upward. It's those countries that have been growing, rising for a long time, and then fear that they are peaking and are about to decline. Those are the countries that are inclined to take the biggest risks to try to improve their position in the the here and now before things get...
My book is in some ways trying to help us see not only the kind of deep intermingling of pre-modern and modern ideas of sovereignty, but how we repeat some of those more fantastical attributes of sovereignty that we might otherwise presume to be long gone remnants of a more superstitious or religious age.
Natasha Wheatley
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A ful...
I think that the most important reform is openness. Once the country is open, really open to the rest of the world, the rest follows.
Sebastian Edwards
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Sebastian Edwards is the Henry Ford II Professor of International Economics at the University of California,...
Democracy is Eastern as well as Western.
Dan Slater
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Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science, the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies, and director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University...
If you have grown up in a household which had decent quality of life and now you are struggling, you cannot even match the degree of wellbeing that your parents achieved, this is very obvious and makes people feel completely dissatisfied with the system that we have now.
Peter Turchin
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It's very hard to understand what's happening today without looking at the roots of all these divisions and at the interests of the different communities and their long-held resentments against the establishment of the country.
Isabel Kershner
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Isabel Kers...
The Jihadis today root themselves theologically and ideologically in a particular movement that is exclusivist, that is militant, that is activist, and that is the movement known as Wahhābism.
Cole Bunzel
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Cole Bunzel is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at S...
If you have this model of AI, which is geniuses design machines and those machines or algorithms are going to scoop up all the data and they're going to make better decisions for you. That's fundamentally anti-democratic.
Daron Acemoglu
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Daron Acemogl...
The fact that Ukraine can be a democracy.... presents a threat to the authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Minsk of the sort that NATO would never actually present.
Serhii Plokhy
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Serhii Plokhy is a Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the Di...
We are at a moment of very, very high risk and I'm not sure that people really know that or understand it, or if they do, if they care.
Anne Applebaum
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Anne Applebaum is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. Some of her boo...
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