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Capitalism has come under attack in recent years, notably because of growing economic inequalities not only between the global North and South, but also within Western countries. Some critics even cast doubt on its legitimacy and ability to create and preserve a just and equitable society. In this episode, the economist Branko Milanovic helps us understand how economic inequalities systematically corrode democratic processes.

Since the introduction of neoliberal policies under Thatcher and Reagan many countries worldwide have implemented austerity politics that dismantled social security programs by cutting public funding. Our guest today, the renowned British economist, Lord Robert Skidelsky has argued that liberal democracy rests on a welfare state, so that austerity politics and the rise of populism in the West are interlinked. So this time we ask: can liberal democracy co-exist with a politics austerity? 

Joe Biden was declared the next president of the United States over a month ago now, but Donald Trump has not yet conceded his own defeat. Claiming voter fraud he has launched legal battles to try to undo the results of the election, to no avail. What mechanisms, institutions and narratives has he used? And to what long term effects?  In this episode, we are joined by Professor Timothy Snyder (Yale University and IWM) and Ivan Krastev (Centre for Liberal Strategies and IWM) to understand what will remain of Trumpism going forward and how it will impact democratic legitimacy the world over.

A new kind of elected leader has emerged across the globe: one who rules with a large parliamentary majority and this with a claim to democratic legitimacy, but who uses power to hollow out democracy from the inside. So is such ‘soft authoritarianism’ that uses the law to undermine liberal principles a new face of electoral democracy? Professor John Keane (University of Sydney) helps us dissect this pervasive pattern of new despotisms and their strategies of rule

We have recently seen millions of people taking to the streets to protest social, political and environmental injustices. Even a global pandemic couldn’t stop protesters across the world from showing their support to the Black Lives Matter movement. In this episode, we’re joined by Professor Nancy Fraser (The New School) and ask: can liberal democracy provide the distributive justice citizens seem to crave?

Shalini Randeria s the Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna, Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (IHEID) in Geneva, as well as the Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the IHEID. Furthermore, she holds the Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen, where she leads a research group on Soft Authoritarianism.

Nancy Fraser is the Henry and Louise A. Loeb Professor of Philosophy and Politics at the New School for Social Research. Her work, which aims to enrich the liberal democratic tradition with contributions from feminism, critical theory and post-structuralism, is also concerned with other issues of political and social theory, including globalisation, cosmopolitanism, identity politics, neoliberalism and the welfare state.

As the results of the 2020 US election are trickling in, we are exploring how laws – and notably electoral laws – can be used to dismantle the constitutional systems from within. The undermining of democracy evokes sharp images of authoritarianism and a contempt for libertarianism. Instead, what we are facing today is a deceptive onslaught through political and legal machinations, hollowing out the fundamental processes of freedom that lie at the heart of democracy and institutional legitimacy. In the third episode of Democracy in Question?, IWM Rector and host of this podcast, Shalini Randeria asks Kim Lane Scheppele (Princeton University) how liberal principles and institutions are being subverted while using electoral majorities. They explore democracy’s “democratic undoing” by elected leaders who use democratic mandates to undermine and subvert the constitutional systems of checks and balances that they inherited. Referring to this phenomenon, Kim Lane Scheppele has coined the provocative term of “autocratic legalism” to explain the rise of soft authoritarian regimes. Her conversation with Shalini Randeria focuses on these developments, uncovering the origins and threats to democracy and exploring prescriptions for the resurgence of democracy.