ORIGINS OF ELECTED STRONGMEN CLOTH

by Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joe Wright

Since the end of World War II, democracies typically fell apart by coup d'?tat or through force. Today, however, they are increasingly eroding at the hands of democratically elected incumbents, who seize control by slowly chipping away at democratic institutions. To better understand these developments, this book examines the role of personalist political parties, or parties that exist primarily to further their leader's career as opposed to promote a specific policy platform. Using original data capturing levels of personalism in the parties of democratically elected leaders from 1991 to 2020, The Origins of Elected Strongmen shows that the rise of personalist parties around the globe is facilitating the decline of democracy. Personalist parties lack both the incentive and capacity to push back against a leader's efforts to expand executive power. As such, leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely to succeed in their efforts to dismantle institutional constraints on their rule. Such attacks on state institutions, in turn, reverberate throughout society, deepening political polarization and weakening supporters' commitment to democratic norms of behaviour. In these ways, ruling party personalism erodes horizontal and vertical constraints on a leader, ultimately degrading democracy and raising the risk of democratic failure.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Current Affairs

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[ND · Rating 4 out of 5]

Academic presentation of research data but very approachable for non-experts, useful and fairly thorough in presenting its conclusions and differentiating its thesis from similar projects. I find the authors do a good job of foregrounding the aspects of the work they believe will be practically useful, namely for defenders of democratic institutions to critically assess the likely potential for danger from incoming potential authoritarian leaders. A heavy emphasis is placed on this predictive utility, and I think it's justified.

[Cyrus Lloyd · Rating 3 out of 5]

A model for how to make a compelling social science argument with ample data to validate your claims. The subject is salient and important for anyone who cares about the preservation of democracy to know about. However, reading pages and pages of data explanations is not the most enjoyable thing to do. (Though this was exacerbated by the bad version of the PDF which made it onto my Kindle with no charts.)

[Kerry Gibbons · Rating 3 out of 5]

While very interesting, this book was not written with the general public in mind so it was dry AF. I also do not recommend it as an audiobook as it would be much easier to skip the statistical explanations in a physical or ebook. Besides, there were no charts so the comparisons of things were hard to visualize from the descriptions.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I never thought I'd be reading comparing political research for fun after I left grad school. Yet :: gestures wildly around::: here we are. This was interesting and thorough, the arguments convincing and generally supported by the results. I did the audiobook so I couldn't see any of the tables (I don't recommend listening to quant research).

[Allen McCarty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was able to complete the book in a single sitting. (Less than 300 pages).
Good material in addition to other books such as Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, Strongmen by Ben-Ghiat, and Autocracy Inc by Applebaum.
Though my preferred material on this subject matter still lies with The Politics of Authoritarian Rule by Svolik.

[karim Jebari · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent analysis and discussion on one of the most important discussions of our time.

[Damion Reinhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The models showing how party personalism can promote democratic backsliding are the closest we'll get to Hari Seldon in our lifetime.