 Good evening everyone and welcome to this evening's IIEA webinar. My name's Gail McElroy, I'm Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Trinity and also a professor in political science at the same university. We're delighted to be joined today by Professor Larry Bartels, who's very generously giving off his time to speak on his latest book, Democracy erodes from the top, leaders, citizens and the challenge of populism in Europe. Larry's going to speak for about 20 to 25 minutes or so and then we will hand over to you for a Q&A session. You'll be able to join the Q&A via the function on Zoom, which you should see at the bottom of your screen. And feel free to send in your questions throughout the talk as they occur to you and we'll get to them at the end. And it'd be really helpful if you gave your name and affiliation when you're posing those questions. Just a reminder that today's event is on the record, so keep it clean. And also the IIEA like you to tweet, so please join the discussion on X by tweeting using the handle at IIEA. So over to our speaker for today, Larry Bartels is the May Verather Shane Chair of Public Policy and Social Science and University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Law at Vanderbilt. Prior to this, he taught at Princeton University for 20 years and prior to that at the University of Rochester. His scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy and political representation. His career has been built on American politics, but he has now moved into European public opinion. His books include Democracy erodes from the top, the subject of today's webinar, as well as unequal democracy, the political economy of the new gilded age and democracy for realists. He is an elected member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. So Larry, thank you so much for joining us this evening. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. And with that, I'll hand over to you. Thank you. Good morning from Nashville. It's a pleasure to be with you all to talk about this book that I've written. Why would somebody who's spent most of his career studying American politics be writing about Europe? The answer really is that I got invited to a retirement party in Paris. And there was a conference connected with it and I thought it would be interesting as part of this conference to try to understand something about what was going on in the politics of Europe. What I want to do is to give you a little bit of a sense of the understanding that I had of European politics going into this. Here are some examples of the US coverage of European politics around the end of the Euro crisis. A prominent reporter for the Washington Post wrote, it shouldn't be too surprising that the worst economic crisis since the 1930s has led to the worst political crisis within liberal democracies since the 1930s. Even more dramatic, a former journalist from the Washington Post wrote a book in which he said, the Western democracies now seem in danger of collapsing as a backlash against globalization arouses angry opponents of immigration, free trade and cultural tolerance. And even prominent political scientists got in on this act in a book on crises of democracy. Adam Shorsky wrote something is happening. Anti establishment anti system, anti elite populist sentiments are exploding in many mature democracies, confidence in politicians, parties, parliaments and governments is falling, even the support for democracy as a system of government has weakened. So those were my expectations, going into this project. But what I found surprisingly is that virtually none of this is true at least for contemporary Europe. Ordinary Europeans political attitudes really have changed remarkably little over the past 20 years, and the opinions commonly implicated in the so called wave of right wing populism and the crisis of democracy, like attitudes toward immigrants and European integration, trust in politicians and political parties and satisfaction with the economy and the workings of democracy have all remained stable, or even improved. So what's the basis for this claim. I'm going to be talking about data from a project called the European social surveys which is a collaborative project of social scientists all over Europe, about 350 survey respondents in 23 countries, most of which were interviewed nine times over this period from 2002 to 2019. You can see here a list of the countries that are participated in the survey and how many times they were surveyed. Ireland, for example, was surveyed every couple of years over this two decade period. There are a few countries where there are fewer surveys, because they didn't participate in some rounds for some reasons. But what I want to do is just to give you a kind of quick summary of patterns of public opinion over this two decade period across Europe so the light gray lines here are the trend lines for individual countries for the 15 countries that were interviewed all nine rounds of this survey. And the heavier red line is a population weighted average for Europe as a whole. And the first trend line that I'm showing you here is about favorability toward immigrants. This is based on six questions that were asked in all these surveys consistently across time and across countries. People were asked each of these questions to rate on a zero to 10 scale how favorable they were toward immigrants or toward increasing immigration in their countries. And you can see that there's some variation across countries but overall the average opinion is quite moderate to around five on this zero to 10 scale. And there's been some increase over time, overall from the beginning to the end of the series, the increase is almost half a point on this zero to 10 scale that increases mostly due to generational replacement as older people with less favorable views toward immigration have been replaced in the electorates of all these countries by younger people who even in the less favorable countries are a good deal more favorable toward immigration than their elders had been. Here's another example based on a question about support for further European integration. And the overall opinion is quite moderate on the zero to 10 scale. And there's really no change over this period in terms of the overall level of favorability despite all the talk about a public backlash against the European Union, even in the depths of the COVID pandemic, although people were in some cases wary about the European Union's response, they were generally more favorable about the European Union's response than they were about their own country's response. And that was true in the Euro crisis as well you can see a little bit of dip in support for European integration in the wake of the Euro crisis but on almost immediate rebound thereafter. There's a measure of ideological polarization just based on the variability of responses within each country on a left right zero to 10 scale. Again, you can see really no increase at all over this period, a little bit of increase during the Euro crisis, and then a flattening out trust in parliament and politicians again virtually unchanged, some ups and downs in particular countries particularly the ones where politicians are held in the lowest esteem but overall really not much change across Europe, and there's no satisfaction with democracy likewise in spite of all the hand wringing about people's unhappiness with democracy as a system of government there seems to be really no change in overall public opinion about democracy over this two decade period. So, if all of these opinions are essentially stable over this period. What sense are we to make of the so called wave of electoral support for right wing populist parties. Well, what I want to argue is that what we have is not a populist wave as it's often put but rather a reservoir of potential support for right wing populists in virtually every country in Europe. One part of the explanation for why we have this mismatch between public opinion and perception is that the idea of a wave is itself exaggerated. Extrematically across Europe support for these right wing populist parties has really only increased pretty modestly. Here's a complicated looking picture of the vote shares for right wing populist parties in all the different countries that we've been focusing on. The dotted red line is the average across all the countries you can see that there's an increase there over time but it's not a dramatic increase it's from 12 or 13% on average at the turn of the century to something like 15% more recently. There are some countries where support for right wing populist parties has skyrocketed but you can see that there are also somewhere it's really declined substantially. I think we misperceived that mild overall trend in part because the media pays so much more attention to the instances of right wing populist parties rising than to the instances of them collapsing. This is an example from last summer so after my book is published but based on New York Times coverage of the election in Spain last summer. A few weeks before the election there was a very long story on the front page of the paper. Far right parties are rising to power around Europe is Spain next. And then on the morning of the election another very long front page story far right may rise as kingmaker in Spanish election. Well then the election happened and the far right party Vox saw their support crater. The New York Times reported that in a brief story on page six inconclusive election thrust Spain into political model. So somebody who is following this coverage might very well get the impression that right wing populism was soaring dramatically but in fact what happened in this instance was that support for a right wing party was actually falling pretty significantly. The second part of the explanation for the mismatch I think between public opinion and what we perceive about the role of populist parties in elections is simply that variation in support for populist parties at the polls reflects variation in what political populists have called supply much more than it does in demand by demand I mean the underlying public opinion that would lead people to support these right wing populist parties by supply I mean the willingness of populist entrepreneurs to try to mobilize support and get attention and offer people what looks like a viable right wing populist alternative. Here's a summary of the relationship between these various factors of public opinion that I've talked about and the likelihood of people across Europe voting for right wing populist parties you can see that overall the most important factors are simply having right biological positions placing oneself on toward the right on a left right scale and anti immigrant sentiments. Then there's less importance attached to anti EU sentiment and distrust of politicians and parliaments but they turn out to be pretty important in most places where right wing populist parties have some role for democratic disaffection and maybe most surprisingly virtually none at all for economic disaffection. Despite all the talk about the way in which the euro crisis was supposed to have stimulated support for right wing populist there's really almost no relationship at the individual level between feelings of economic disaffection and support for right wing populist parties. What I want to do is to talk about populist sentiment as a combination of these various attitudes that predict electoral support and identification, typically for these right wing populist parties, and to show you what populist sentiment actually looks like across Europe. Here's the relationship between the average level of right wing populist sentiment in recent years along the horizontal axis. You can see that the average values all range between four and six on this zero to 10 scale so the averages are relatively moderate. Even in the countries that have relatively more or relatively less potential support for right wing populist parties. And then on the vertical axis I'm showing you the average vote share for right wing populist parties in each of these countries. And you can see that overall there's really no relationship at all between the right wing populist sentiment in the population and the vote shares in Switzerland, which has one of the lowest levels of right wing populist sentiment. They've also had the most successful consistently successful right wing populist party anywhere in Europe. There are other places where there's much less sentiment, and still a fair amount of success for these parties at the polls. And then at the other extreme cases where there's a good deal of right wing populist sentiment but for one reason or another they haven't really established much of a foothold in the election. So there's a lot of variation here it mostly has not to do with variation in public opinion. And if you think about specific places where right wing populist parties have flourished. You can see that in more detail, because often they flourish in situations where right wing populist sentiment is stable or even declining in Spain, for example, when Vox first took off. Not because right wing populist sentiment was increasing, but because the incumbent more traditional right wing party had had some scandals and mismanagement that made Vox an attractive alternative to people on the right. In the early in Britain, UKIP reached a height of electoral support at a point where the level of right wing populist sentiment in Britain was at a relatively low ebb. Here's another way to think about the relationship between sentiment or attitudes on one hand and voting behavior on the other. And here is the distribution of right wing populist sentiment across Europe on this zero to 10 scale you can see it's kind of a bell shaped curve. The biggest tan curve is for the entire eligible electorate all over Europe. The somewhat smaller kind of gold colored distribution is the set of people who actually cast votes in their national elections. And then the much smaller distribution kind of dark gray or black at the very bottom is the distribution of right wing populist sentiment among people who voted for right wing populist parties. You can see that they're mostly toward the right end of the scale, but even people at the very far right and the people with the most extreme right wing populist sentiment are mostly not voting for these right wing populist parties. They're voting mostly for more mainstream conservative parties, sometimes because there is no viable right wing populist alternative but more often because they don't find it compelling compared to the more established conservative parties in their political systems. So the good news is that politicians haven't yet been very successful in mobilizing right wing populist sentiment. And so there's a good deal more opportunity or potential here for right wing populist parties to grow in many places in Europe. But much of the concern I think about right wing populist parties in Europe has not to do with their achieving power itself, but rather with the connection that sometimes made between populism and Democratic backsliding. Here's an example of the connections that are sometimes made between support for right wing populist parties in Western Europe and what's happened elsewhere. Far right populist parties have risen from obscurity to transform the party system of virtually every Western European country. In the parts of Central and Eastern Europe, bear witness to the institutional and ideological transformations that might be afoot. In Poland and Hungary, populist strongmen have begun to put pressure on critical media to violate minority rights and to undermine key institutions, such as independent courts. The last part is certainly right. If you look at what's happened in Poland and Hungary they have observed significant Democratic backsliding in recent years. But what I want to note here is that the connection between those events and support for right wing populist parties in Western Europe is simply the word meanwhile, the fact that these things are occurring at more or less the same time. If you look in detail at what's happened in Hungary and Poland, the story turns out to be quite different. There have been substantial Democratic backsliding as noted by expert observers of these countries, beginning in 2010 when they first took over in Hungary and in 2015 when the Law and Justice Party took over in Poland. But those takeovers really had very little to do with right wing populism. If you look at the characteristics of people who supported those parties when they first came to power, they were virtually unconnected with attitudes about immigration or about politicians and trust in government. All the traditional right wing populist sentiments that we've seen motivating support for right wing populist parties in Western Europe. These were basically just alternative parties that gained support because the incumbents had been discredited in one way or another. In Hungary, the incumbent party had suffered a huge scandal and was fatally discredited. Fidesz was really the only viable alternative party, won 53% of the vote, which was hardly a huge popular triumph given the circumstances. But given the majoritarian electoral system in Hungary, that 53% of the vote translated into exactly two thirds of the seats in the assembly, which was exactly enough to push through these constitutional changes, cracking down on independent media and judges and attempting to entrench Fidesz in power, which they did pretty successfully. And the story is kind of similar in Poland where they actually said, you know, to Orban, we've observed your example and we're following it. They took advantage of an opportunity to try and entrench themselves in power in the way that many political leaders in democratic systems have done at one time or another. There are also important parallels here, I think, to what's happened in more dramatic breakdowns of democracy in the 20th century in Europe and Latin America. Nancy Brameo in her book, Ordinary People and Extraordinary Times wrote, the culpability for democracy's demise lay overwhelmingly with political elites. In the vast majority of cases, voters did not choose dictatorship at the ballot box. I think the same could be said about democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. Ordinary people generally were guilty of remaining passive, while they generally did not polarize and mobilize in support of dictatorship, they did not immediately mobilize in defensive democracy either. I think that's by and large been true in Hungary and Poland as well. In most recent election in Poland last fall, the opposition parties did manage to put together a coalition that ousted the law and justice party from power. That was viewed as a sea change in public opinion, but again, the change had less to do with public opinion than it did with the actions of political elites. The vote share for the law and justice party in the election that they lost was just a few percentage points less than it had been when they first came to power. The real difference was that the opposition parties managed to hold their coalition together, which they hadn't been able to do previously. Another piece of what's going on here is that these parties, at least for a time, were quite successful in convincing ordinary citizens that their lives were better off than they had been. If you look at Hungary, for example, and compare people's ratings of the economy and government, health services, and so on. In 2009, just before Orban came to power, and a decade later you can see huge dramatic improvements in most of these indicators over time. First, in the immediate aftermath of his coming to power, but increasingly the longer he was in power, even satisfaction with democracy, ironically, increased substantially as at the same time that outside observers were charting this notable democratic backsliding in Hungary. And the same thing was true to a somewhat lesser extent in Poland after law and justice came to power. So much of what was happening here, I think, was that ordinary citizens were prioritizing their substantive values and their perceived quality of life over the democratic norms that democratic theorists often focus on as the indicators of how well a democratic system is functioning. So I think what part of what's going on here is that democratic theory itself is an obstacle to our understanding of what's happening politically. If we see immigration tearing Europe apart, we imagine it must be because anti-immigrant attitudes are on the rise, but they're not. If we see elites squabbling over European integration, there must be a public backlash against the EU, but there hasn't been. And if populist parties are winning more seats in parliaments, it must be because populist sentiments are exploding, but they're not. And if democracy erodes, it must be because there's something wrong with support for democracy in the public. Our understanding of democratic politics, I think, is essentially simplistic based on a tremendously exaggerated notion of the immediacy and urgency of the connection of public opinion and events as the political scientist E. Schachtschneider put it in more than half a century ago. But we can go back even further, an entire century, to Walter Lippmann, who wrote in 1925, there are, I believe, immense confusions in the current theory of democracy, which frustrate and pervert its action. I have attached confusions with no conviction, except that a false philosophy tends to stereotype thought against the lessons of experience. I do not know what the lessons will be when we've learned to think of public opinion as it is, and not as the fictitious power we have assumed it to be. Well, here we are a century later, and I too do not know what the lessons will be once we've learned to think of public opinion as it is. And to think of democracy as a political system in which political leaders rather than ordinary citizens are usually the ones who are calling the shots and who are responsible for the health of democratic political systems. Thank you.