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In this episode of Democracy in Question? Shalini Randeria asks if the ideals of liberal democracy – free and fair elections, separation of powers, rule of law and respect for human rights – may be exported easily from the West to other parts of the world? This is a question especially salient when some of these very ideals are being undermined in several countries including the United States (more about this question in the first episode? Further, Prof. Randeria asks her guests, Laurence Whitehead and Yanina Welp, if Western models of democracy ought to be transplanted to other regions of the world at all?

The conversation considers the failings of modernization theory, and to what extent it was simply mistaken in assuming that there can be a unilinear, unidirectional path to ever greater freedom with the successful transplantation of western style, liberal democratic institutions everywhere. This episode features questions concerning democracy’s relationship with populism and capitalism, as well as a discussion of democratic innovations from Latin America that may be of interest to the Western world.

The podcast series Democracy in Question? is hosted by Shalini Randeria, Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, and Director of the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna. Episode 2 features Laurence Whitehead, an Official Fellow in politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Yanina Welp, research fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy. Yanina and Laurence recently edited a book together titled, The Politics of Recall Elections, that analyses the variety of processes and purposes of recall, by comparing the practices and outcomes of removing elected officials before the end of their term.

This podcast series is co-produced by the Graduate Institute’s Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) Vienna, and the Excellence Chair, University of Bremen (Research Group: Soft Authoritarianism) in collaboration with Richard Miron and Anouk Millet (Earshot strategies).

This series comes at a time when the liberal democratic order established after the Second World War is under unprecedented strain. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a view that authoritarian rule was confined to the dustbin of history and Western-style liberal democracy would reign supreme the world over. But today, even in the cradle of modern democracies, in the U.S. and in Europe, that assumption looks flimsy. The ascendancy of Donald Trump to the presidency has shaken the fundamentals of Jeffersonian democracy and raised serious concerns about its survival. Does Trump represent a blip in America’s long experience of representative government? Or does the current crisis of democracy in America highlight an underlying malaise?

In this episode, Shalini Randeria explores in a conversation with Timothy Snyder the reasons behind Trump’s access to power, the propensities that Trumpian politics shares with fascism, the unaddressed original sins of American democracy, as well as the future predicaments for democracy opening up in the wake of Trump.

Prof. Randeria is Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva, Rector of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna and Excellence Chair, University of Bremen (Research Group: Soft Authoritarianism). Timothy Snyder is Richard C. Levin professor of history at Yale University and author of The Road to Unfreedom (Tim Duggan Books, 2018), where the intriguing term of ‘sadopopulism’ is developed.