Democracy Paradox

If you're actually a real person and you're living your life and you're going into stores and you're riding on a bus or your kids are going to school, what matters is that you be treated with respect. That you have a dignity. And that, I think, at every point that matters most to us is what the book has wound up being about. It’s an essay on respect as a condition of a liberal...

You treat votes as equal. My vote is equal to your vote. But the state treats our bodies as unequal. That logically makes no sense and it is farcical to call it a democracy in the first place. Forget what implications this will have for democracy in the long-term, but to be called a democracy and to have your bodies treated differently is a farce in itself. Debasish Roy Chowdhury A full transcript...

The tension in what we want from democratic representation is that we want control over our representatives and we want creativity from them. If we control them, they are delegates. They're not representatives. They do what we want. They act in our place instead of us. They act as we would in our place. If they give us creativity, they will bring things out of us and do things for us that we...

For many Americans, for the first many generations really up through the mid 20th century, the constitutional order seemed to rest on and depend on an economic order in which people had enough economic clout to be independent citizens and voters. Not serfs dependent on some kind of master. Joseph Fishkin A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of The Anti-Oliga...

We have core ideas that form a part of our worldview, but those core ideas are not fixed in the way in which we talk about rationality and interest in that they can evolve. And we have to, when we think about human behavior, political behavior, we have to give serious attention to those ideas and go beyond just fixed material interests. Bilal Baloch A full transcript is available at www.democracyp...

If I could say one thing to every citizen, it's to put country before party. Which is, you know, at this time it almost feels like a hollowed phrase, because we we've kind of heard it so often. But it's like actually true. Sara Wallace Goodman A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of Citizenship in Hard Times: How Ordinary People Respond to Dem...

This is money that flows between individuals and families and largely circumvents governments and that's a hugely important point, because the real take home of the book is that when these financial flows are controlled by citizens, it tips the balance of power in favor of citizens. When the international financial flow goes to governments, it tips the balance of power in terms of governments...

So, the question is how do you respond to that? If you are the party that sees itself as being on the side of democracy and on the side of maintaining democratic norms and procedures and maintaining this kind of democratic accountability, how do you respond? Do you respond in kind? Do you respond with hardball tactics of your own? Robert Lieberman A full transcript is available at www.democracypar...

It's this sort of persistent loss of wages, which causes things like loss of marriage, people not living with their kids anymore, disintegration of communities with all of the things in those communities whether it's churches or union halls or society, just friendship that used to be there. And those are the things that cause people to lose meaning or, if you like, lose hope in their liv...

Science is never offering the whole truth. It may be offering us something accurate. Scientific findings may be reliable for now, but they are always incomplete. Zeynep Pamuk A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of Politics and Expertise: How to Use Science in a Democratic Society   here . Zeynep Pamuk is an assistant professor of political science at the Un...

Charismatic leaders who are intent on governing solely using their charismatic authority and subverting other things to their personal power are inherently bad for democracy and inherently illiberal. They're anti-pluralist. They don't want to share their power with others even within their own movement or their own party. They don't tolerate dissent. Caitlin Andrews-Lee A full trans...

The way we conceive of democracy is being challenged by these regimes and, by that I mean, because the process of backsliding is so incremental, it's difficult to see where these boundaries are. Stephan Haggard A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of Backsliding: Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World   here . Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman ar...

‘What would you prefer? Would you prefer that this boy, Vasya, die because he couldn't get dialysis? Would you prefer that this girl, Katya, die from her shrapnel wounds that she suffered during the war that was obviously not her fault? Right? Like would it be better if I held my nose and refuse to engage in these compromises so these kids died? Would you be sort of happier, so you could writ...

The last time, and luckily this hasn't really happened since 1990, there was minimal resistance from the Kuwaiti and the Saudi forces. So, this obviously is 30 years ago, but there is little reason to believe that in spite of the hundreds of billions of dollars that is spent on armaments, this state of affairs has changed. Let me just put it this way. Nobody in Tehran is losing any sleep over...

Indeed, the moderation of left-wing party’s economic policy proposals in the eighties and in the nineties and the decision to promote an unregulated capitalism with no kind of proper compensation and no tax harmonization leading to greater offshore wealth and rising inequality. All these decisions have played a role in leading the working class to take distance from these parties and, at the same...

We don't think about institutions until they fail and we think of institutions as being really strong when maybe they've never been challenged. They've never really tried to do anything. Daniel Brinks A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America here . Daniel Brinks joins the podcast to discus...

What we are doing in this volume is blurring the boundaries between this older conception of top-down mobilized movements and this newer conception of bottom-up organic, spontaneous civil society propelled movements and discovering that there's an awful lot in the middle there. Elizabeth Perry A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com or a short review of Ruling by Other Mean...

Many of these things that you and I are talking about are simply initiatives put forward by the chief executive or maybe by a cabinet minister. Something they want to do and rather than something that they're required to do. And it seems to me that that's a rather fragile base on which to build a more effective participatory process, which doesn't give up on the role of technocracy...

At the end of the day, I am optimistic despite all the evidence. First of all, I think there are a lot of resources that democracies can use. A lot of areas of law, where as long as we recognize what it is we're fighting for, democracy is worth fighting for and have a common view as to what that means that we can advance it in many places, not just here but abroad. And this might sound a litt...

So, now I've developed a way of talking about revolution as an option that can't be exercised, but that still has present value and I've set up a mechanism for saying what that present value is. Namely the value of the liquidity premium that a democracy that consents to maintaining accumulated wealth can extract for guaranteeing that the wealth continues to accumulate. Robert Meiste...

Where you and I and, I think, many others start from an assumption that somehow there is a thing called democracy and we sort of know what it is. But the diversity within democracy is far larger than that. You know, there's clear big institutional temperamental differences between visions of representatives ruling, people ruling, and so on. All these sorts of things are different models of de...

The most beautiful thing that happened in Indonesia, by the way, which was a polarized society along religious lines more than anything else, was that by the end of the proceedings, everybody knew what everybody else's problems were, what everyone else's constituencies wanted. They knew if X noticed that Y was making a demand, before long X figured out what was behind the demand and why...

Up to today, since the Mexican government deployed the military in 2006 up to the present, Mexico has experienced close to 200,000 battle deaths. That's roughly the number of battle deaths that took place in the civil war in Guatemala. So, the 36 year old civil war in Guatemala that produced approximately 200,000 battle deaths. That's where Mexico is right now. Guillermo Trejo A full tra...

Chinese participation in the human rights regime probably was never really intended to alter human rights so much in China that it would jeopardize the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power. I think China, even if it may have been open to some areas of human rights, I think that we have to keep in mind that the full implementation of human rights including all of the elements of the Universal De...

Putin in the past could claim to have won at least an honest plurality, if not an honest majority of votes given his approval. However, in the upcoming election this fall, in September, it looks like the Kremlin has so restricted political competition that it's going to be a difficult sell to the Russian public to show that these elections are even as legitimate as the elections held in 2016...