Johannes Völz

This research project investigates transnational authoritarian populism with a focus on the US, Brazil, and Poland. It contributes to the IWM’s pathbreaking research on challenges to democracy in the recent past. Johannes Völz shows that authoritarian populism is not democracy’s “Other,” but that it thrives on a logic of informalization that also lies at the core of aesthetic and social forms of democracy. The book explores the track on which a democratic dynamic of informalization tips into a dynamic that is authoritarian and anti-democratic.