Polarization as a Global Phenomenon with Jennifer McCoy
Ceejay Hayes:
This is CounterPol. Today I'm talking with Jennifer McCoy about how polarization manifests in individual democracies throughout the world. When we talk about and analyze the polarization of democracies, the U.S. can often be the loudest voice in the room. Even in this podcast, the U.S. often becomes the reference point for conversation. But democracies of all types, from long-established Western democracies in Europe to relatively young democracies in Latin America, are polarizing at alarming rates. I talk with Jennifer McCoy about why that is. I hope you enjoy.
Jennifer McCoy:
I'm a political science professor at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States. I'm also currently a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace. And I've been researching this topic of political polarization. particularly in the last eight years or so, when I've created some international teams to look at it across very different countries around the world. And I started out by trying to diagnose the problem. What were the causes and what were the consequences for democracy? And now I'm working on trying to find solutions, which is the hardest part of the entire project. And some of my interest in it actually came from I had a long experience as well with the Carter Center, working with former President Jimmy Carter and his wife, Rosalyn Carter. and working particularly in Latin America and working on democracy, but also mediating conflicts. And in that, I experienced countries that we can talk about really dividing, seeing political polarization. And that spurred my interest in the topic as I saw similar processes happening in countries around the world.
Ceejay Hayes:
Let's start off at a sort of very foundational level. What is polarization?
Jennifer McCoy:
Yeah, that's a big question, and people have very different ideas about it. The way I look at polarization is political polarization, and I look at it in democracies as a process that simplifies politics and leads eventually, as the process deepens, to two mutually distrustful political camps. And this distrust extends not only into political relationships that people have, political identities, but extends into their social relationships. So when it reaches this extreme, I call it pernicious polarization because of its harm to democracy, its pernicious consequences for democracy. It operates like intergroup conflict that social psychologists study. and where we see exaggerated positive views of the in-group, in this case it would be the party or the political camp or the political leader that you identify with, and then biased negative views of the out-group. And because of this, people begin then to view political opponents as existential threats to their way of life or to the nation. And this creates a zero sum view of politics. People feel like if that side is winning, I'm losing. This raises the stakes of elections. and people begin to tolerate candidates who might be sacrificing democratic principles to gain power or to stay in power because they're so afraid of what will happen if the other side comes to power.
Ceejay Hayes:
Right. That's an understanding of polarization that I think is shared and understood by scholars like yourself. And I think amongst the general public, even if they wouldn't articulate it in that way, they feel like it's a deepening divide that inhibits cross-ideological conversation. But you do argue that there are instances in which polarization has been a force for good. It's not a thing that is so terrible to democracy. It's not the virus of democracy that we are experiencing it now, you've argued that it has had benefits in the past. Can you talk about the ways that polarization has been useful for positive change, and whether polarization as a process, state, or strategy, and we'll get to what the strategy of polarization is at the moment. But can you talk about whether polarization is something that is just always going to be present in democracies, or is it a foreign entity that attempts to change it and it always exists as such?
Jennifer McCoy:
Those are great questions. First, I would say that conflict is natural to democracy. It's inherent. Conflicts of ideas, conflicts of interests. And in fact, I think of democracy as a system to manage conflicts peacefully. So polarization comes in, like I said, I view it as a process. And what's inherent, what's needed in a democracy is an articulation of political parties or political visions that represent different visions for society so that people can choose. What vision do they support? Who do they want to vote for? What direction should the democracy go? So there are going to be different ideas about that, different visions for the society. That's natural. The polarization that I'm worried about is this process of simplifying the politics so that we have a single divide between these two camps. And it's often described as left versus right, but that's a very vague kind of thing because it depends on what we mean. And we can be divided on a number of different issues. Right now, cultural issues have come to the fore, even more than economic issues. So if we're trying to simplify politics and say, OK, those people represent this other vision that is really harmful to the country. And when politicians use language that says they are enemies to the country or they're harmful, they're threatening, they're risking, the country or your values or your livelihoods, then this is the pernicious polarization that I'm worried about. So it's an extreme. So we need difference. We need identification of political differences and identities, but we don't want to carry it to the extreme, this process, when it reaches an extreme. is when we are denigrating our opponents and posing them not just as adversaries in a competition of ideas, but as enemies and threats to the nation. And we demonize them, we denigrate, we discredit their loyalty to the country, and even dehumanize them. This is the serious risk that we see. Now, you ask, can polarization be positive? So when people think of polarization as simply representing difference of ideas, that is positive. And it can create the ability for political parties or groups to mobilize people around them. But it's got to be contained. There's one other instance when we have to start to use this polarization where we're identifying threats. And that is what I would call disruptive polarization to address an injustice, like a social injustice, racial discrimination, racial apartheid, other kinds of economic, social injustices, or deficits in democracy, if democracy is threatened. Then we do have to identify, yes, there is a threat out there. It is disruptive in that sense, to identify the threat and to try to mobilize people around it. But it should be focused on the idea, on the value, not on denigrating and demonizing people, not personalizing it. And so that's a difference I would make when we think about it as a strategy.
Ceejay Hayes:
Early on in your writing, Overcoming Polarization, which I read because I'm working on the Cambridge Overcoming Polarization Initiative. I was like, ah, perfect. This is going to tell me what I need to know. But early on, you're quoted as writing, indeed, disruptive polarizing actors may promote democratic reformist platforms and remain principled Democrats to the end. One example would be Martin Luther King Jr. and the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s. And it's so interesting because I think when we think of mobilizations of polarized attitudes, we imagine the Trump campaign and the rise far right in the United States and in other democratic contexts. We don't think about the liberation movements that could be articulated as polarizing movements. Can you just give an articulation of how polarization is manifested in the civil rights movement so people can understand how polarization could be a force for good?
Jennifer McCoy:
First, King never resorted to violence. He eschewed violence, so that was off limits. And it was peaceful, peaceful protests to bring attention to the social injustice of racial discrimination and inequity. He used respect, respectful language, and he focused on ideas. He also actually employed love. in his message. And he didn't dehumanize or demonize the opponents, but actually considered them with human dignity and with love, even the opponents, even the oppressors. This is phenomenal. You can also think of Nelson Mandela as another example of this. So this is the way of using disruptive polarization, identifying an evil, really, a threat, and injustice, but doing it with a discourse that is lofty, brings hope, and talks about how everyone can benefit by changing it. It's not zero-sum at all. It's very positive-sum, and always respecting the human dignity of everyone in the process.
Ceejay Hayes:
I think that might be of interest to the listener, because when we think about liberation campaigns, I remember very specifically early 2015, 2016, when we were getting to the real thick of that year's U.S. presidential election. There were people in my social circle that were comparing Black Lives Matter protests to the Donald Trump campaign. And it's interesting because I was in very stark opposition to that view. essentially on the ground that one was promoting justice for a marginalized group, while the other was acting on these harmful populist narratives to secure a political win. But it's interesting that a thread line that might connect the two is polarization, and it speaks to what polarization might be. Let me know if you agree with this. Polarization is kind of the trigger point by which people are mobilized. So related to Black Lives Matter protests, they were extrajudicial killings of Black Americans. I'm not too sure what is catalyzed Donald Trump, although it's been highly studied. I would venture to say that it was a sense of lack of social mobility and discontent within white middle America that they felt they weren't being listened to. And so they needed someone who represented their values. And this is Donald Trump. And so those trigger points are what catalyzes the mobilization of polarization. Is that kind of a right understanding or would you disagree with that?
Jennifer McCoy:
Well, yes, I agree to an extent. I'm not sure I think of it as a trigger point, but it is a strategy. It's definitely a strategy. And it is how you carry it out. So that's why I distinguish pernicious polarizing strategies. So I would characterize Donald Trump's strategy as perniciously polarizing because, first, it's exclusionary. It's not inclusionary. It's excluding. It's saying who shouldn't be. a rightful citizen, a member of this political community, who should be kept out. And it's saying there are rightful citizens, but it's identifying only a certain group of people as that. And it is demonizing, it's dehumanizing, it's discrediting opponents. And so that is a perniciously polarizing strategy. The more positive, disruptive for a value, for a positive redress of a deficit, of an injustice, is focusing, as we said, on the values. And that is mobilizing. Yes, you're right. It is mobilizing people. It is pointing out the problem and the threat. And so Black Lives Matter was, for the most part, peaceful. And it was pointing out this deficit of severe racial discrimination and how it is exhibited in the United States, even now in the 21st century. So, yes, it is mobilizing to point out those injustices and to try to get people to support it. But it wasn't the exclusionary. It was inclusionary. It was trying to broaden participation, not to limit participation of citizens in, well, more broadly, I would call it in the social contract.
Ceejay Hayes:
We could really easily talk, have this whole conversation dominated by the experience of the United States. But I'd love for you to talk to us about some of the experiences with polarization that other democracies have had. And I'll start with just you naming a couple of different countries and the context in which polarization manifested.
Jennifer McCoy:
I will tell you the story of Venezuela, because that is the story that really spurred me to work on this topic in depth. So Venezuela was a democracy since 1958, and in the 1970s, by that time, a stable democracy, but it was also a major oil producer. And the oil boom in that decade of the 70s stimulated this large middle class and overall wealth in the country. They had a two-party dominant system, much like the UK, much like the US, alternating political parties. But the parties were very hierarchical and centralized, and they didn't adapt to changes in the society very well. And they also actually kept out third-party challengers. They kind of colluded in that. So when oil prices started to fall, they tanked in the 1990s. That middle class slid into poverty, and voters rejected the entire political establishment. And this has happened in other countries as well. And that opened the door to a former military coup leader and left-wing populist outsider named Hugo Chavez to be elected president. He was elected on the basis of promising to reform the democracy and redistribute the oil well. So correcting injustices is what he was arguing. that he would be transformative, he would be revolutionary. But he took a very confrontational and polarizing strategy and he tried to displace the kind of traditional elites who then engaged in a very severe backlash and actually carried out an attempted coup against him. So the society became torn apart with the characteristics of polarization, with the deep antagonism, the disrespect, even dehumanizing depictions of the other side. And eventually, the democracy and the economy was destroyed in one of the worst cases of pernicious polarization in the world, I would say. Poland and Hungary are often noted. And the interesting thing about those, one, Hungary is very homogeneous. So people often think it's only divided societies, ethnically divided societies or religiously divided societies. Hungary is actually very homogeneous. And it became divided after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. Both countries established a pretty good democracy. But over time, Hungary, they did have an economic crisis, even before the major 2008 financial crisis. But one particular leader, and this is Viktor Orbán, took advantage of that crisis and blamed the former party, who was in part to blame for the economic disaster that was happening in Hungary, but he transformed his own party and moved from the original political ideology that they had to become really a nationalist right-wing kind of populist leader and won a big share of the parliament in 2010 and then began to immediately make changes to entrench his own party and himself in power and then began to change the Constitution in all aspects, not just the electoral system to help his party have an advantage, but the control of the tax system, the media oversight, eventually the universities, civil society groups, everything. It just polarized the society tremendously over no evident dividing line. He kind of created one line, and he actually kind of manufactured immigration crisis in 2015. Syrians were coming, but he helped to actually manufacture it and say it was a threat to Hungary when they were trying to just get through Hungary to go to Germany, actually. And he used that by fear-mongering, making Hungarians afraid that their society, their values were going to change. And he blamed the EU, and he blamed one particular Hungarian expat, George Soros, and he brought in some anti-Semitism. So he really helped to create this polarization. Poland became polarized similarly with a party coming to power in 2015. that also kind of invented a polarization because there even the economy was doing well and people seemed to be fairly happy. But there was some anxieties among the people, a little bit about Catholic values being preserved and a little bit about who was benefiting more from economic growth. than others, and they built on that to create a polarization so that they could also concentrate power. So those are two instances that you wouldn't necessarily predict this kind of polarization and democratic erosion.
Ceejay Hayes:
Is there a commonality to the circumstances in which democracy gets polarized, or is it more out of whim? Like, is it more spontaneous than that?
Jennifer McCoy:
There are usually some kind of grievances, legitimate grievances often within a society and anxiety. Sometimes these can be psychological anxieties that may be perceived more than real. First, there can be very real economic anxieties just from globalization or from automation where we've changed who gets jobs, the nature of jobs. But if people don't understand the cause of their economic anxieties, they may hear messages. that come from political entrepreneurs, ambitious politicians who say, well, I'm going to blame China or I'm going to blame immigrants. Here's the answer to your anxiety. It is this enemy. So there's often some kind of anxiety. There may be anxieties that are more culturally induced, demographic change, bringing in different religions or ethnicities from immigration or simply population growth differentials in a society. the rise of rights for women, gay rights, etc., also can create anxieties among the men who may feel that they're being displaced, then what happens is something like that may exist. So there may be a demand for answers, for wanting to feel like I can be in control by understanding what's happening to me. If an ambitious politician then comes in with the idea, the way I'm going to get elected is to feed these anxieties rather than reassure people, I will give them somebody to blame. And it may not be accurate at all, but I will give them an answer and I will create support for myself as the savior. And so that's what we often see happen. So then the question becomes, your underlying question I think really is, why do some countries succumb to these ambitious politicians? And why do other countries resist? Why do some countries show more democratic resilience even to external crises, economic crises, the pandemic threat, security threats? And others succumb to these because there are always people who would like to be in power using these strategies, but they don't always win. I have a theory about that, which we could get into if you would like to.
Ceejay Hayes:
We hear a lot about the candidates themselves and the strategies they employ and the circumstances that they exploit, which we will talk through. But at one point, and I think about this a lot in the US, like there are people who support that, who endorse that, who fact. And I think there should be a conversation on the complacency and the endorsement that happens within the public. Like, how culpable are the electorate in elevating these polarizing figures to positions of power?
Jennifer McCoy:
Citizens do have responsibilities in a democracy. And one of the responsibilities is to be informed and to participate. We have responsibilities that we need to share. And right now, with all of the disinformation and the conspiracy theories that are so easily spread, we have an even greater responsibility. and challenge in informing ourselves and distinguishing among all of these different sources of information with possible disinformation thrown in there and conspiracy theories. And this is difficult. This is difficult for the public. It's understandable. If you add onto that these anxieties that I talked about and the grievances, then it's understandable from a psychological point of view why people might succumb to these conspiracies, because it gives them answers when they are anxious, and people need to feel some sense of control. And particularly during the pandemic, this became very clear, and conspiracies rose in many countries around the world because anxieties were higher and people wanted some answers. And when there are groups out there peddling conspiracy theories, that is one way to get a sense of control. So it's people responding to these peddlers and conspiracy theorists and anti-democratic people and polarizing people. It's a challenge. So yes. People do have a responsibility to be an informed citizen and to take action and to look at alternative news sources and to try to become digitally literate and figure out how to distinguish this. But we also have to recognize what a challenge that is, and we need to provide resources for them. So then the news media plays a very important role. in this and i think actually the professional traditional news media could change and play a more positive role rather than succumb to the same kind of thing that social media does in that negative news sells positive news they believe doesn't sell and so coverage is about the problems of government is about problems of the economy rather than reporting on the positive news and reporting on the horse race of an election. This is a real problem in the United States and making equivalence among candidates when some may actually be violating laws or democratic norms. And yet they're reported on in an equivalent sort of way. And it's just the horse race who's ahead or who's not rather than what do these people actually represent and what are they promising to do or threatening to do?
Ceejay Hayes:
You know I'm looking at your figure the past from polarization to democratic erosion, a series of steps that happens from the moment where a candidate decides to become a candidate and operationalize populist narratives in their campaign to the and it feels like it doesn't only apply to the politics of it all. I can see this being a very strong graph on the process of racialization, establishing whiteness as an identity, building in that mutual distrust, that dislike, that bias, building in that perception of threat, and then building up this support of democratic norm violations. And we've seen that in the U.S. Black people didn't have the right to vote until the 1960s. And so that is the clear operationalization of that process outside of the political. I'm thinking about it also in terms of like gender, in terms of immigration. This process looks familiar. Is polarization something that only exists in the politics of it all, or is this more endemic to societies in general, and not even just American society, but heterogeneous societies in general?
Jennifer McCoy:
It's economic. We have to look at the economic system. It's social. And people are very concerned with social status, for example. But when I'm looking at political polarization, it's when these issues become politicized and they become part of politics. And all of these things that you mentioned have become politicized. And that's where they feed into political polarization. But there are economic drivers in the economic system. And when you mention, for example, in the United States, one of the severe weaknesses of the United States is that from its founding, it had an unresolved debate about who is a rightful citizen. And it excluded Native Americans and African slaves and made women second class citizens. Those issues periodically reemerge and polarize the entire society. There's some progress made at one point, and then there's a backlash. And then we have to move forward again. It takes decades again, make another progress. So you go from the Civil War, then progress after that. for a decade. Then you have the whole Jim Crow that you're talking about, the South, basically the authoritarian South, up to the 1960s. And then you have a backlash. Then you have Barack Obama elected, and you have a backlash. It recycles periodically. And the economic roots of that, though, are very strong. And the whole economic roots of slavery And then even after the Civil War and the constitutional amendments to abolish slavery, there were economic routes that turned into convict labor and economic elites dividing the working class, the black and white working class, to create divisions within them to prevent them from uniting that could create either a more kind of positive populist, there was an attempt at a populist party back in the 19th century in the United States, or to demand benefits for workers. And so they divided on the racial ideas and the status ideas and even ideas of white supremacy to keep the working class divided and to keep it weak across the board. So, yes, there's economic drivers of this, and it manifests in economic and social systems as well as the political. But what we're seeing today is how all of this is being politicized and under political identities. which are reinforced with social identities, racial, religious, gender, etc.
Ceejay Hayes:
Did Venezuela have a similar journey as well? Their democracy is much younger than the US. So I wonder if that same journey happened in Venezuela as well.
Jennifer McCoy:
No, they did not have that kind of unresolved debate at the beginning, what I call a formative rift. And with my co-author, we call this a formative rift. I should mention my co-author Marat Somer from Turkey. Venezuela, I would say the polarization that emerged there was a little bit more class-based, but it really had to do with some of the weaknesses in their democratic system, that it was a system built on the distribution of oil revenues to make people happy, basically. And when those oil revenues declined, they didn't have that source of revenue to distribute. And the urban poor and the rural poor did feel marginalized. And so when Hugo Chavez came in, he was championing them. It's a little bit racial, but Venezuela is a very mestizo country, very racially mixed. But he did emphasize his skin was a little bit darker than previous political elites. There's a little bit of racial question there, but Venezuela did not have that same kind of unresolved questions from the beginning about who should be a rightful citizen that the United States faces. The United States is very exceptional in many ways, particularly among advanced or Western democracies.
Ceejay Hayes:
We can't really talk about polarization and democracies and the US without acknowledging the fact that the US is globally regarded as this sort of ambassador for democracy. Especially after World War II, a lot of the U.S.' 's foreign policy was on spreading democracy throughout the world. But today, democracies throughout the world and in the U.S. are so incredibly tenuous. What does that say about American democracy? Is this devolution of democracies globally a symptom of bad actors, or is there actually something more fundamental at play?
Jennifer McCoy:
I think there are definitely structural factors at play. I think there are four important points to consider when thinking about how strong a democracy is, the health or the resilience of a democracy, to withstand these kinds of pressures or stressors that might come periodically. And the United States actually has some weakness on all four. And so what I'm doing is taking these four and diagnosing them. When you look at a country and you say, where does its polarization come from? I think you could look at, see, is it one of these four things? The first one is one we've already talked about. That is the agreement on who should be a member of the political community, who is a rightful citizen. So we talked about that in the United States. We had this weakness from the beginning, and we still don't agree today. Now it's framed not only in terms of race, but in immigration. The second one is agreement on the democratic rules of the game. Do we agree on what the nature of the democracy should be, how it should function, how our elections should be done, and do we have trust in elections? So in the U.S., there was agreement on the democratic rules of the game, but it was set up, the founders set it up, first of all, thinking there would be no political parties. That didn't last very long. Political parties emerged very soon after. But the founders set up a lot of protections of democracy. There's a lot of diffusion of power and all of the checks and balances and the federal systems. He had some powers relegated to the state, some to the federal government. But it's also a very rigid constitution, very hard to change, and so we haven't been able to adapt very easily. And it set up some what I consider to be anachronistic institutions, like indirectly electing the president through the Electoral College, and a very disproportionate Senate in terms of representation, and some other things. So this is a problem today. And now we have agreement on the democratic rules of the game. We've lost that. We don't have persistent trust in the election process even. And we're polarized over who is presenting or what is presenting the biggest risk or threat to democracy. Americans agree there's a threat, but they don't agree on what that threat is. And then the third one is, is there agreement on the terms of the social contract? And that means, do we agree on what are our obligations to each other as citizens? And what are our obligations of the state to the citizens to provide for basic welfare, housing, education, et cetera? We don't agree on that anymore. We did at one point, we don't today. And the fourth one is, is there agreement on the levels of acceptable income and wealth inequality? Because in every democracy, there has to be a balance between the inherent inequality that capitalism brings, and the assumed political equality of a democracy. There's a tension there and there has to be a balance. And today, I think that balance has gotten out of whack and it's the deregulation of capital has gone to the extreme and the extreme income inequality that's grown and the social immobility that you mentioned earlier over the last five decades. means that today money is so important in determining political outcomes that we really weaken the political equality in that equation.
Ceejay Hayes:
There are articles that the Carnegie Endowment of Peace have written, some of your colleagues have written, that suggest that the difference in ideology is actually much more exacerbated amongst the politicians than it is the electorate themselves. So the public actually has much more consensus on wealth redistribution and labor rights and making things more equitable, but that doesn't really exist in who's representing the politicians. If there is more overlap in the electorate than in the actual politicians themselves, why that exists and why more polarizing figures are elected versus more moderate and centralizing figures?
Jennifer McCoy:
There's two answers to the two parts of your question. The first is, yes, and it's something we haven't talked about, but I'm looking at the system as a whole, how polarizes the system. Within that, we can distinguish between what political scientists call political elites. Those are the politicians and the political parties and the decision makers. and the masses or the voters, the citizens. So yes, I agree that point that there's more issue, division, polarization at the elite level. There's a lot more agreement among citizens on many issues, gun rights, abortion, immigration, all of them, as well as economic issues than you would think, given the level of acrimony at the level of political parties and politicians. So I agree with that. So why is it that that polarized view of the politicians seems to predominate? Part of the answer is what I said before. Money dominate politics. The donors to those politicians are the moneyed class. Yes, citizens are giving more in their $5 checks. Some politicians are relying on those. But overall, money is still dominating politics. Not only who can get elected, but what they do and what kinds of policies they adopt afterwards. Why are the more polarizing candidates being elected? That gets back to part of the structural question, the nature of our democracy. Back in the 70s, there was a reform to move to political primaries that was supposed to be, intended to be a democratizing reform, to take it away from the smoke-filled rooms, the opaque decision-making, you know, within the smoke-filled rooms of who would be candidates, and to bring it to the citizens. So that sounds very positive. but it's had unintended consequences of actually weakening the political parties. They find it much harder now to vet candidates, and almost anybody can run. And if you can have, also because of our Supreme Court decisions, allowing for opaque funding, and you don't have to disclose all the funding, so you can have these different outside groups backing candidates, then the very extremist candidates can get attention, they can get money, they can get into the media and get their message out. And then the voters who come to vote in selecting the nominees for the political parties in our primary system are the ones who are the most active and often the more extreme partisans of that political party. So we have candidates nominated with like 10% of the electorate. It's a very small participation in these primaries, which are actually very critical. By the time you get to the general election, then you only have the choice that has arrived between the two final nominees.
Ceejay Hayes:
We're going back to this issue of class and the power of money influencing these elections. Is that something that's universal to this sort of pernicious polarization globally? Is that something that we see in other countries as well?
Jennifer McCoy:
Again, the U.S. is an exception in many ways. And this is another one, the role of money in politics. Most other, let's say, advanced democracies or established democracies don't even have to be Western, but many in Latin America, and in other countries, provide for public financing of campaigns trying to equalize it out. And they limit expenditures, how much you can spend, for example, in the media. And they try and limit it, and they require equal time in the media. The US has been moving away, used to have some of these things, but has been moving away from this in recent years. So we're an exception on that. And money in politics, yeah, that can be countries that are eroding. If we go back to, say, Hungary, part of the erosion there is actually protecting a system of kind of legalized corruption, we might say. And the allies of the Prime Minister, of Prime Minister Orbán, win a lot of economic contracts and subsidies that actually come from the European Union. and are benefiting economically in this system that he has built up to even last, even if he's voted out of power, it will last. So it's become a corrupted system in this sense that is controlling the politics.
Ceejay Hayes:
There's this report you've done for Carnegie, where it talks about a host of democracies, their experience of polarization and depolarization. The countries that were polarized for at least two years, they've experienced now a period of depolarization. and then also their ability to maintain a mostly stable democratic infrastructure, and those who have seen degradation of their democratic infrastructure. What enables some countries to exist as polarized but still democratic, non-polarized, non-democratic, polarized, non-democratic? What happens? What allows some countries to be polarized but still democratic and others can't?
Jennifer McCoy:
There are several things about those studies that we did that I think are important to look at. And one is that when we looked at overall polarizing episodes around the world going back 100 years, and when countries could depolarize, we found that, for the most part, it happened after major systemic interruptions. And by that, I mean it was after a war, either an international or a civil war, or it was after a transition from an authoritarian government to democracy, then they could depolarize, or it was with independence from colonialism. So now what we're interested in is we don't want any of those things today. We don't want to have to go to war and then depolarize. We're looking at countries that are already democracies who are polarizing. How can they depolarize, not just transitions from authoritarian governance? And of course, we already have independent countries. So the harder part is looking at the democracies. Many democracies who have polarized have been very recent. And so we don't have a lot of examples of good examples of how to depolarize and maintain that. What we have seen is that countries Particularly if you look at Europe and after World War II, many of them did depolarize. Some of them, they go in cycles. So we see a lot of cycles, and this is around the world as well, in Africa, Asia, Latin America. We see cycles. So this is a common phenomena of cycles of polarization. We also see countries that seem to be able to manage a certain level of polarization. So it's not quite this pernicious level, this really risky level that I've been talking about. But they've kind of managed, France is one example, they kind of manage polarization. And France, there's kind of a norm, a democratic norm of protest, they have protest all the time. But it doesn't mean that their democracy is faltering. And in other countries, protest would mean something different that aren't used to it. So I think that the key thing is, which countries are able to maintain this depolarization once they get it, and democratic strength has to do with those four points that I mentioned earlier. And that is, if they start to weaken on one of those points, if they lose trust in elections, for example, if they begin to question who is a member of the political community, like Orban did in Hungary, raising that question, if they lose an agreement that they had for a while or a consensus, they're more susceptible to the polarizing politicians and the polarizing strategy when there are some kind of stressors that come. That's what we found in the democracies that were able to resist succumbing to the pernicious polarization and could kind of maintain some manageable level of polarization. and those who didn't and then eroded their democracies.
Ceejay Hayes:
I've seen some people argue that Germany doesn't have enough polarization in their democracy. Do you think that's the case? Do you think that's true? And what's the harm of too little polarization?
Jennifer McCoy:
Yes, definitely people have. What happens there is if you don't have enough difference in political party offerings to the people, It's kind of a different meaning of polarization, which is getting back to what difference is identified. Because you want that difference. You want some options, you know, political choice. when people perceive that all the political parties are the same, there's no real choice. That started to be the case in the United States in the 50s and the 60s. It seemed like they were all pretty much the same. In Venezuela, when I said that, the people rejected the entire political establishment, the major political parties, because they viewed them at all as colluding in corruption and mismanaging the economy. And so they rejected the whole thing. So in that sense, too little polarization in the sense of clear difference in political options. What it often does is open the door to these outsider candidates, which may be the populist or the nationalist or the more authoritarian kinds of candidates that come in as saviors, as newcomers, but that risk then the democracy.
Ceejay Hayes:
Now for my final question, listeners will probably be feeling a sense of deep concern that there's no We'll save that for another conversation. But, you know, what are some examples? It could be any sort of circumstance. But what are some scenarios of a country that depolarized or democratized in a stable and sustained way that could perhaps give the listeners some hope that there is a path forward to a more peaceful society?
Jennifer McCoy:
Well, I'm going to give you two examples of democracies. One goes way back to the beginning of the 20th century, a small country in Latin America, Uruguay. But at the beginning of the 20th century, they suffered from political violence between the winning and the losing political parties. So they had elections, but the losing party would often fight to resist the election outcome. In one election in 1903, the winning party had a majority. And they first put down that challenge, that violent challenge, but then they had an enlightened leader and he had the support of a large enough majority in the legislature that he brought about two major changes that have really lasted decades for Uruguay. One of those was political and they reformed the with more equal political representation so that the losers wouldn't have to feel like it was a winner-take-all, zero-sum game, that they would lose everything. And they even formed, for a while, a collegial presidency, like Switzerland has had, with a combined presidency, multiple people in the presidency. They did that for a while. The second thing they did was they really created a new social contract that established a very strong social welfare state that made Uruguay very progressive, education for all, and very progressive kind of country, more equal country, more equality, et cetera. And so those two changes addressed two of those arenas that I was talking about, the political representation, democratic rules of the game arena, and the social contract arena. A more recent example I'll give you is North Macedonia, going back to Europe, to Eastern Europe. So that's a recent story of a country that, again, after the fall of the Berlin Wall and everything, was divided by ethnicity, Albanian and Macedonian ethnicity, and had a leader for a while who was corrupt and who was concentrating power, eroding the democracy. And in 2016, opposition political parties from different ideologies and the different ethnicities joined together in an electoral coalition, also supported by major civil society protests, so people going out in the streets to protest, and they ousted that leader in 2016 and then maintained the alliance for some time and depolarized even after taking power when it often falls apart. Now we have to see, you know, it's fairly recent, it's not perfect, but that's an example and that we see often that it does take broad social societal efforts to oppose a kind of polarizing leader who is also eroding democracy and power. And it might be a broad electoral coalition of ideologies who don't usually get together. And it's also social, civil society support that is really critical. I think Brazil is a very interesting country to look at because it, like India and like the United States, is a big multiracial democracy that had become polarized in recent years and the fear of its democracy eroding. In the last election, this is a new phenomenon. We have to see how it evolves. But in the last election in 2022, they defeated the kind of right-wing nationalist polarizing figure of President Bolsonaro, who is running for re-election. they defeated him by a couple of things. A broad coalition where the primary candidate was a return candidate, President Lula da Silva, who had been in office earlier. He had actually been convicted in a controversial court ruling for corruption, but then permitted by the courts to run for election. So absolved and permitted to run. So he was coming back. So he had experience behind him, but he reached out to one of his former rivals, political rivals, and a different, more conservative ideology. Lula himself is kind of on the progressive center-left side. And he reached out to a more conservative politician to be his vice president, to run on a ticket, so a fusion ticket. And then there was a broad effort among social leaders and business leaders who may not have agreed with all of Lula's policies, but who wanted to support democracy, who were worried that a second Bolsonaro term would be a threat to democracy. And so they supported and they wrote public letters and this kind of thing supporting Lula. The third thing that Brazil had going for it in terms of resisting democratic erosion was a very activist Supreme Court. We can really contrast this with the United States because Bolsonaro was considered like the Trump of Latin America. But whereas Donald Trump, who's under multiple indictments for trying to overturn an election and becoming an insurrectionist, threatening U.S. democracy, is now the front runner for one of the two major political parties. In Brazil, the Supreme Court has prevented Bolsonaro, accusing him also of insurrection because they had a similar protest after the election. and prevented him from running for eight years. And they've done some other things to try to bolster democracy and put down insurrectionist threats. So a very activist Supreme Court kind of in support of democracy. So Brazil is another example. Again, very recent. We have to see how it develops. But to give hope to people, it is possible. It is possible. It's going to take broad coalitions and people willing to stand up. And it takes leadership leadership from political parties, but also from media, from religious leaders, from cultural leaders, sports figures, all across the board, business leaders. And it takes grassroots citizens to stand up, do the things we talked about, inform themselves, resist conspiracy theories, and don't support candidates who are using those perniciously polarizing strategies. Resist that. Don't reward that kind of strategy. It's an across-the-board effort that's required. It's hard work, but it is possible.
Ceejay Hayes:
Dr. McCoy, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Jennifer McCoy:
Thank you. I enjoyed it as well, Ceejay.
Ceejay Hayes:
One of the things that stands out to me from this conversation is the fact that relatively homogenous democracies are also susceptible to polarization. To me, it proves that the pain point upon which a society is divided does not have to be prominent or immediately visible, but can be manufactured and exacerbated by political elites. Jen names immigration in Hungary as an example. Trans rights is another issue I've seen mobilized by political elites to divide a public who otherwise did not have strong attitudes towards the subject. Jennifer names four metrics for assessing the health of a democracy, and I want to make sure that you, the listener, have a clear understanding of what those are so you can make your own observations. Those four metrics are agreement on who has the right to be a citizen, agreement on the democratic rules of the game, agreement on our obligations to each other as citizens, a social contract if you will, and agreement on acceptable levels of income and wealth inequality. I really appreciate these clear metrics for assessing a democracy's well-being, and it's clear to see how polarization impacts all four of them. It is reassuring to see that there are countries in the present day that have experienced polarization and depolarization. The examples of Uruguay, North Macedonia, and Brazil prove that collective action at the elite and institutional level against polarization can win the support of the voting public. In a world where we see polarizing figures take governments and societies to the brink of breakdown, it is imperative that we amplify these examples of depolarization. Thanks again to Jennifer McCoy for sharing her knowledge with us. Shout out to Jac Boothe of Neon Siren Studios for editing. And thanks to you, the listener, for joining us. If you liked this episode of Cartopole, please share with your loved ones and leave us a review. Until next time.