Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and the co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of several bestselling books, including How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Ziblatt writes from the position that what defines strong democracies is free and fair competition for power, inclusive participation, and a package of civil liberties that make those first two conditions possible. 2024 saw voters in more than 60 countries go to the polls—and deliver difficult outcomes for incumbents and traditional political parties. This week, Ziblatt joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the fate of democracy after 2024. They explore how big money and corporate power have destabilized democracies worldwide by interfering with the conditions for free and fair competition for power. The consequence has been the movement of voters toward political extremes, which in turn can often threaten economic growth, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Nevertheless, should we judge the strength of democracy by process or outcome? Does democracy still thrive when the people vote for undemocratic politicians and parties? Together, Ziblatt and our co-hosts discuss how to curb global democratic decline by realigning government away from the interests of corporations or big money and back to those of the people.
Daniel Ziblatt is an American political scientist, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, and the co-author (with Steven Levitsky) of several bestselling books, including How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority. Ziblatt writes from the position that what defines strong democracies is free and fair competition for power, inclusive participation, and a package of civil liberties that make those first two conditions possible.
2024 saw voters in more than 60 countries go to the polls—and deliver difficult outcomes for incumbents and traditional political parties. This week, Ziblatt joins Bethany and Luigi to discuss the fate of democracy after 2024. They explore how big money and corporate power have destabilized democracies worldwide by interfering with the conditions for free and fair competition for power. The consequence has been the movement of voters toward political extremes, which in turn can often threaten economic growth, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Nevertheless, should we judge the strength of democracy by process or outcome? Does democracy still thrive when the people vote for undemocratic politicians and parties?
Together, Ziblatt and our co-hosts discuss how to curb global democratic decline by realigning government away from the interests of corporations or big money and back to those of the people.
Episode Notes:
Revisit ProMarket’s series seeking to understand the issues of political economy driving global populist movements during the 2024 “year of elections.”
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Big money is a problem because it distorts our politics, you know, so let's say consider like the minimum wage. You know, there's overwhelming majorities of Americans in favor of a higher national minimum wage. This stuff gets blocked and it creates legitimacy crises for a democracy because more and more citizens feel that government's out of touch. Then you're attracted to outsiders who in some cases may be good, but in other cases may be demagogic.
>> Bethany McLean: I'm Bethany McClan.
>> Unidentified: Did you ever have a moment of doubt about capitalism and whether greeds a good ide?
>> Luigi Zingales: And I'm Luigi Zingales.
>> Unidentified: We have socialism for the very rich, rugged individualism for the poor.
>> Bethany McLean: And this is Capitalisn't, a podcast about what is working in capitalism.
>> Unidentified: First of all, tell me, is there some society you know that doesn't run on greed?
>> Luigi Zingales: And most importantly, what isn't?
>> Unidentified: We ought to do better by the people that get left behind. I don't think we should have kill the capital system in the process.
>> Bethany McLean: We at capitalism are very interested in the interaction between capitalism and democracy. Democracy is essential for setting the rules, rules of the game. And you need the right rules of the game to create a flourishing capitalist system. But then in turn, capitalism can both help and hinder democracy. If it helps create economic freedom and freedom of speech, then it helps democracy. If capitalism is tilting toward corruption both of ideas and of money, then it hurts democracy.
>> Luigi Zingales: If I'm allowed and infomercial this year. The annual Stigler Antitrust Conference, which will take place on the 10th and 11th of April, is dedicated to the effect of economic concentration on the marketplace of idea. If you have any paper related to this topic, please send it our way because it would be a very interesting discussion.
>> Bethany McLean: I'm going to moderate a panel there. Very exciting. Anyway, on this podcast, for obvious reasons we've typically focused on economics, how money affects democracy. We've realized perhaps we're a little bit monomaniacal about this. What if the real challenge to democracy doesn't come so much from economics that gone wrong as it does from political or sociological factors?
>> Luigi Zingales: One of the main exponents of the socio political view of the causes of the democratic backsliding was Juan Linz, a late professor of political science at Yale. Linz provided what is called a litmus test, a list of actions by politicians that can put democracy at risk. The list of actions are a refusal to unambiguiously disavow violence, a readiness to curtail civil liberties, and the denial of the legitimacy of an elected government.
>> Bethany McLean: The most successful Linz student is Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard professor of government and the author of many successful books, including "How Democracies Die" and more recently, “The Tyranny of the Minority."
>> Luigi Zingales: From an academic point of view, his most important book is, "Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy". There he claims that the necessary condition for the birth of democracy in the west was the development of a strong conservative party, one with the electoral machinery needed to offset the appealing messages on the left. Appealing because the left messages is very much centered around with redistributive policies. If you have a very appealing left that preaches redistributive policies, then the people with money, if they cannot resist politically, they resist militarily. And so if you cannot compete in election effectively, then you need to stop the game and not be democratic. And so in order to have a democracy, you need to have an alternance. And the alternance arises from the fact that even if conservats may lose this election, they think that they can win next time. If they know that they are stuck in a position that they will never win again, they'more tempted to go in a, anti democratic direction.
>> Bethany McLean: So in his latest book, "The Tyranny of the Minority," which he wrote with Stepven Levitsky, Ziblatt blames the democratic what he thinks is the democratic backsliding of the United States to what both authors argue is an outdated constitution. They argue that there are deliberate features of the US Constitution that are, I'm m going to see if I can say it counter majoritarian features. And they're appropriately designed to forestall the unfettered domination of the majority and to give political minorities institutional mechanisms for defending their basic interests and rights. Think of the Electoral College and presidential elections. The Senate with its disproportionate representation of small states in its filibuster, and the Supreme Court with its judicial review and its lifetime judges. In Levitsky and Zlatt's view, the efforts to prevent a tyranny of the majority through this globally unique institutional setup has gone too far. It's allowed what they argued was a nationally ever less competitive Republican party to establish instead of a tyranny of the minority. And the authors also argue that this is essentially enabled by the Republican Party's focus on racially resentful whites who refused to adjust to a multiracial diversity.
>> Luigi Zingales: But the book was written last year before the election. In some ways, of course, the election makes their warning look prophetic, but in other ways it doesn't because reducing Trump voters to racially resentful whites is obviously far too narrow of framing. So there's a lot to discuss. Let's start with an easy question to set the stage.
How do you define democracy and what aspect of democracy you think are most concerned that will die?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Well, democracy at its most basic level means rule by the people. It's a moving target. Over time, throughout history, over the last 2,000 years, it's a concept that's changed in meaning. And so in the modern version, I really subscribe to, definition that emphasizes that democracy consists of three big pillars. One is free and fair competition for power. Second is inclusive participation, that is citizens should be able to run for office and to vote. And then the third big pillar is a package of civil liberties, freedom of speech, freedom of association that make those first two pillars meaningful. you also asked the second part to your question though, which was what are threats to democracy? That's a good question. I mean, there's many ways for democracies to die. One of the major ones, it seems, is unlike during the Cold War, where the biggest threat to democracy came in the form of military coups, where men with guns killed democracy, today the biggest threat to democracy comes from presidents and prime ministers, who are elected to power, who then democratically, often who, once in power, begin to undermine those three big principles that I just talked about, begin to undermine competition, making it harder and harder to vote them out of office, or they make it more difficult for the opposition to participate in politics, or they may even restrict civil liberties. And what makes this more modern version, I would say ah, of democratic death so pernicious is that it's often done legally. There's no violations, sometimes even of the constitution of the law. And leaders do this under the COVID often using democratic language. And so it's much harder for citizens to recognize the threats.
>> Luigi Zingales: But in your definition of democracy, you emphasize by the people, not for the people. So let me take an example. Russia under Yeltsin was fairly competition for position, fairly include participation. Civil liberty was not perfect, but was clearly improving. However, the oligarchs were buying off members of parliament so that they were ruled in the interest of the oligarchs, not the people for the people. So would you consider that democracy and what is missing then from the previous definition?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Well, one of the kind of indicators that people often use for a democracy is whether they's sometimes called the two turnover test. If you really wanna know if there is competition, the kind of best test of that in a sense, is when the incumbent goes to sleep at night, on the night before an election, is the incumbent nervous that he or she may not win? And that has to happen over a couple of, sequences, over a couple of elections. And in the case of Yeltsin's Russia, there really was no turnover in power. Yeltsin came into power, was in power through the 1990s, and then he essentially handpicked Putin. And so you really. So Russia, although at the time people were sort of talking about it as a democracy, there was no, never really any genuine competition for political power. Now, to your point about the role of oligarchs, I mean, one thing that can undermine political competition is excessive concentrations of economic power. I mean, one of the reasons there probably wasn't genuine competition is because the oligarchs sa a lot of power. So sort of behind your question, I guess, is the idea that the Russian government wasn't delivering for the people, and so in that sense, was not a democracy. The reason we kind of, I don't emphasize for the people component of, in the definition of democracy is that democracy is really a set of procedures to create a kind of fair political game, and we don't judge it based on what government does. You know, some democracies deliver more for their citizens, other democracies deliver less for their citizens. But what the outcome of a kind of political policy process is, we can't use that as a criteria, because that's sort of getting into the substance of politics. Because if you go around sort of deciding, you know, whether or not you like a policy or not qualifies a country, if it's a democracy or not, then there's going to be disagreements over policy. You know, there's legitimate disagreements over tax policy, over environmental policy, over healthare policy. And really what matters most is, do you have a set of procedures in place that you have a fair political game?
>> Bethany McLean: How do you think more broadly about whether the Democratic Party enforces Democratic ideals better or worse than the Republican Party does, given that the last three presidential candidates don't really seem to have represented the will of Democratic voters? The party stacked the deck against Sanders in 2016, forced everybody else to step away after Biden in 2020, and then Harris was kind of parachuted into the race. So if you had to pick between the Republican and the Democratic Party as to which one upholds democratic ideals, is there a clear winner?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yes. I mean, I would say that to be a political party committed to democracy, to be committed to the rules of the game, you have to do three very basic things. I mean, this is a really minimal requirement. Number one, you have to accept election results win or lose. Number two, you have to be unwilling or not interested in using violence or threats of violence to gain on power or to hold on to power. And then third, you have to distance yourself from groups, let's say militia groups, to engage in those first two behaviors. So, on, that criteria, I think it's pretty clear the Democratic Party is more Democratic small d Democratic than the Republican Party today. I mean, hasn't always been the case, but just calling balls and strikes as I see them using those objective criteria, I think it's pretty clear. I mean, the Republican Party had a tough time accepting the 2020 loss. There was acts of violence. The party leadership sort of spoke out of both sides of its mouth. I mean, you've had similar kinds of much more small scale things with the Democratic Party in terms of not accepting election results, but party leaders by and large have accepted election results throughout the 21st century. Now, in terms of your specific question about the Democratic primary process, I guess I would challenge the point. Mean two regards. One, you had a primary process in 2020. Free and fair competition. As far as the primary process itself is flawed for both parties at some level, but there was a process, and voters in the end voted for Joe Biden. And so you may say, well, the Democratic leadership put their thumb on the scale and so on. Yeah, possibly, and I'll come to that in a moment. But there was a genuine process. Similarly, 2016. Again, the party leadership may have played a role, but at the end of the day, African American voters in South Carolina chose, and this was a key moment in the primary process in 2020. Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. There was nothing fraudulent about that. You have to think about this. Bernie Sanders wasn't even a member of the Democratic Party and the party was willing to consider this guy to be the head of the party. Could you imagine the Green Party ever selecting a candidate for the head of the chancellorship in Germany without even being a member of the party? 2024 was a slightly different story. I mean, I think it would have been much better had Joe Biden stepped in, with the benefit of hindsight, stepped out earlier. But again, there was a process where Biden endorsed Kamala Harris and people could have challenged her. They didn't. So it's not as if anybody limited the ability of, all the various ambitious governors to run against her. That just didn't happen. There wasn't much time that wasn't an ideal process. But I think I would also make the broader point that there's a big, big difference between a primary process and a general election. Throughout the history of democracy, political parties have generally, in smoked filled rooms, pick their candidates. So you know, actually we have a pretty open process in the US and party leaders, I mean the goal of parties is to win elections. And so I think parties, the kind of same democratic criteria that I just used, and this is my maybe controversial view, ought not necessarily be applied to internal party decisions. Party's main goal is to win elections. These basic criteria of democracy should apply to general elections, but not to internal party decisions.
>> Luigi Zingales: That's a little bit controversial because you define democracy as competition for power. But this competition in the United States is basically limited to parties and they do everything in their power to block any alternative. Very different from in Germany. There are a number of parties and there is much more intense competition on the margin. In the United States, this competition doesn't exist. So the only competition takes place in repacing people within the party. And we have seen that with all the defects, the Republicans have been very open, you might argue, even too open because they were taken over by Trump. And this is the establishment of the Republican Party in 2016 wasn't happy that Trump won, which is an ultimate evidence of democracy in the Democratic Party. And you conveniently skipped 2016 in your analysis because basically the system is rigged to have the establishment win. there is no way in which somebody not blessed by the establishment can win.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: But you're mixing up two different issues. One is the electoral system we have. Do we have a proportional representation system with multiple parties or do we have a kind of majoritarian first pass the post system with two parties?
>> Luigi Zingales: I think that, I think that they must be analyzed together because when you have a first pass the post, then the democracy inside the party is an essential element of competition. Otherwise you don't have real competition.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: You have competition between two parties.
>> Luigi Zingales: Yeah, but if one of these two parties does not allow, both does not allow free primaries, then there is no competition.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: You know, look, I think that our primary system process is broken. We have to put this in historical context. Until 1972 there was no primary that ever mattered in American history. You had closed conventions where leaders got together and smokef filled rooms and chose the candidates. Beginning in 1972, we opened up the process. And what political scientists discovered is that even though this process was opened up and more made more democratic, and to be clear, I mean I don't think we should go back to the smoke filled rooms. I think having primaries makes a lot of Sense. But from 1972 until 2016, the establishment candidate usually won. Not always, but usually. For instance, in 2008, Barack Obama won. He was the outsider, Hillary Clinton was the insider. So you know, there are instances where the outsider wins. The primary process does allow to some degree the outsider to win. Now is that an unmitigated good? I would say that there'it's a double edged sword in 2016, the outsider one, and in this case was somebody who I regard, and many people regard as being really problematic for democracy. So, there's no kind of silver bullet. I do think, I do agree with both of you though that this primary system that we have is a broken process. I mean it's an arbitrary process, but it's broken not just because party elites and bigwigs call the shots. Because again as we saw in 2016, they didn't call the shots, they lost out. The reason it's a broken process is that it'not it's not as you say, it's not very democratic. I mean that's one reason it's an arbitrary sequence of states. You have low voter turnout. And I would be much more in favor of something like which some states have begun to introduce an open primary, a little bit like let's say the French presidential election where anybody can run in the first round and then the top candidate vote getters make it to the second round. But I agree that our current system is broken. But as far as I know, I've never seen a better system. I mean there are no, I mean our primary system is broken. But what the kind of tragic thing in some ways I think is that many democracies around the world are increasingly adopting our kind of model. And so, you know, for most of British history you didn't have this kind of system. And most of German post war German history you didn't have the system where you have kind of voters choosing the candidates. And in fact as they've introduced this, it's not clear we've gotten much better outcomes.
>> Luigi Zingales: You started by saying that you want to judge a democracy on procedure, not outcome. And the procedure is competition for power. Actually the system of primary makes competition power less effective and so is less democratic. We want a system more democratic with more competition power. And then he said no, no, no, because this is not necessarily good because the outcome we get are not very good. So are we measuring outcome or Procedure. Because if we measure procedure, more open primaries are more democratic.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, well I agree with you on that. I mean as I said, I'm in favor of open primaries. I just think that it's sometimes overstated degree to which our party establishment dominates the primary process. Agree. And when I say good outcomes, I mean good democratic outcomes in the sense of free and fair competition. I mean good procedural outcomes. But I think anything that increases competition and participation and civil liberties is more democratic. And so if one can imagine a dream up of a primary process that does that, I'm all in favor of it. I guess I was just challenging the notion that the party establishment always sort of tilts the playing field against outsiders. I mean I think we saw in 2008 that wasn't the case with Barack Obama. To come to that. Back to the example, you know, sometimes the insiders win, sometimes they don't. So it's a little bit less, it's a little more open ended I guess than sometimes people interpret it.
>> Bethany McLean: So one thing you didn't mention in your definition of democracies and if what we need is this whole, and I'm going to see if I can spit out the word, I realized I have trouble pronouncing it counter majoritarianism. Given that the argument in your book is that counter majoritarianism has been used to essentially corrupt our democracy, why do we need it at all?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, so counter majoritarianism just essentially is a multis syllabic word which means limits on majorities. Democracy is more than just majority rule. I mean without majority rule, as you both have been saying, I mean democracy has becomes meaningless. On the other hand, liberal democracy as it's developed over the last century has required some constraints in some areas on majorities. And so, and the danger maybe is most kind of clearly exemplified in a case, let's say of Hungary in the Victkor Orbn era where he was able in one election to get a super majority of the vote and in a one chamber assembly kind of outlaw, in effect not directly the opposition or make it really hard for the opposition to win by hacking the courts, by changing election rules so that the opposition can never win again, by changing media rules. All doing this simply through a majority rule. So there was a famous Supreme Court decision Back in the 1940s US Supreme Court decision where Justice Jackson wrote that certain things should be beyond the reach of majorities. And what the premise here was that certain things like civil liberties, the freedom of speech, freedom of association, as well as the democratic Process itself should be beyond the reach of majorities. You shouldn't be able to put up to a vote whether people have the right to vote or right to vote or not, or people have the right to free expression. So there have to be certain areas that are carved out. And so our premise, though a little bit more sympathetic I guess with your question, is that there's certain areas where majorities need to be able to govern and where they don't. Currently in the United States, whoever wins the most votes should win power. And I think what's so striking about the American system today with the electoral colleges is that very often the party with the most votes doesn't necessarily win power. So that's where majority should certainly govern. And similarly, within legislatures, majorities should govern. If you have a majority, whether through coalition or with a single party, you should be able to pass laws, provided you're not trampling on the rights of, fellow citizens. And in the American system with the filibuster, with the US Senate, with the Electoral College, with the Supreme Court, we have a system in which majorities are limited. Other democracies over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries have empowered majorities, got weaken in the House of Lords, let's say in Britain, eliminated upper chambers in a lot of Scandinavian countries. Whereas because our Constitution is so hard to change, we still limit majorities in such a way that we have many public policies that are really out of sync with what voters want. So too much counter majoritarianism and counter majoritarianism in the wrong arenas can be very destructive.
>> Bethany McLean: So one way, to argue the premise of your book is that the Republican Party has become anti democratic. But then you could stretch that one step further and say that a majority are close to a majority of Americans have actually become anti democratic. So what does it mean if people themselves become anti democratic? Is that then democratic?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: I mean, I don't think it's right to say most Americans are anti democratic even if they vote for a candidate who acts in undemocratic ways. Because I think most voters both voted against Donald Trump and for Donald Trump were not voting really on democracy. I mean, I think if you look around the world, incumbents are incredibly unpopular, you know, and so I think in many ways what people were doing when they voted for Donald Trump was voting against the status quo, voting against the establishment. And that in a sense is what democratic citizens should do. The notion of a self correcting democracy is one in which when people are unhappy with the status quo, they should vote the incumbents out and that's just what happened. And so in that sense it's a quite democratic process. The problem in the United States is that the only other option on offer was a candidate who I regard as having been a problem for democracy is probably having contributed to, will contribute to ongoing democratic instability. So the problem is really not the voters. The problem is what the choices on offer were, number one. And number two, you know that we only had two choices on offer. I mean, so I'm very much in favor of a multi party system. If we had multiple parties, you, we wouldn't have had this outcome. So I don't blame the voters. I have much more focus on political elites and their fail.
>> Luigi Zingales: So in your book you say that one of the conditions for a peaceful transfer of power is that the losing candidate is suffiently confident that even if he loses, his essential rights are preserved afterward. Now imagine, I know it's hard to, but imagine you are Donald Trump. Do you think that if you are losing, your essential rights are going to be preserved?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Well, you know, the odds are probably that he may have, there would have been some kind of prosecutions against him. And so that's, I think exactly why he was so certain on winning and had he lost would have probably challenged the outcome. It raised the stakes and I think contributed to the kind of sense of instability of our political system. Does that mean that there ought not have been a legal process against him? You know, I'm not so sure. I mean, I tended to be, a kind of person who thinks that we should use the electoral process rather than a legal process to try to exclude people from power. But the idea that Donald Trump's rights were being violated, I mean, I think, you know, there was courts, there was no sense in which the court processes themselves were unfair. But I agree with you, that this kind of, criminalization of our politics in the sense where each side is accusing the other side of being a criminal, leads to democratic deconsolidation because it raises the stakes of politics. You know, the question of whether the legal investigations of him were valid or not. I mean, another point I guess I would make is that in many democracies people have been charged of crimes. you know, heads of state, heads of government have been charged of crimes. I don't think that means that if you have people in positions of power who've committed crimes, that they have to be immune from this forever. I think it's important for the rule of law for this to be done impartially, of course, but you know, the process requires that the rule of law apply to everybody.
>> Bethany McLean: But here we are post election with Biden's pardon of his son. How do you think about that through this lens does what I would see is both parties complicity in undermining our Americans faith in the judicial system points a dark and dangerous finger at both parties, for undermining Democr.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: I think by pardoning his son. What he did, it's not that he, empowered Trump to do this, he was gonna do this anyway. But what it does is it weakens the criticisms now when Trump does the same thing. And I think anything that facilitates the abuse of the rule of law and by weakening the criticisms, in effect what you're doing is allowing this to proceed in a way, you know, where it's much harder to criticize this. CNN and every network's going to have people on. And anytime anybody criticizes Trump for pardening the January 6th participants, the retort's goingna be, well, Biden did this too. And so by having done that, I think it really, you know'not. It's not helpful. It helps Trump at the end of the day.
>> Luigi Zingales: So in your book, you talk about the Thai Takim, who was a, democratically elected and that was basically deposed by lawfare of a party that calls itself, Democratic. I am Italian, of course. And you have a legitimately elected president, Prime Minister Berlusconi, who was basically deposed by a party that calls itself Democratic using lawfare in the United States. And I'm not saying that all the troubles of Trump were, manufactured. However, it is true that least in some cases, and I think particularly the staffff in New York, you had an Attorney General, Letitia James, that campaign on I'm going to put, Trump in jail. So you have a party call itelf Democratic. They use lawfare to basically preempt a party to participate. So how do you reconcile this and what is the similarities? What is the difference between these cases?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I have to say, Luigi, your work on Berlusconi, comparing Trump to Berlusconi in 2016 was, I mean, one of the early kind of comparative efforts to understand Trump and I think really, was far ahead of the game. But I think the language that Trump has used in running for office has been more overtly anti Democratic than either ##in or especially Berlusconi, you know, and calling on the enemies of the people and we're gonna arrest my political opponents and all this stuff. But I think it is important to distinguish between these different lawsuits that we're facing. Trump, I mean, I think the lawsuits connected to January 6, the lawsuits connected to his documents, were legitimate federal investigations. I agree with you that this kind of Mickey Mouse stuff in New York, they were searching for exemptions, A, didn't ever achieve their goal legally, and B, probably increased his popularity. And so, you know, in our book, How Democracies Die, we argue against, what we call constitutional hardball, where you weaponize the state and use any means you have at your disposal to go to your opponent. Now, you know, we accus Republicans of doing that, but in this case, I think it turns out probably Democrats did this as well, and they would have been much more well advised to just focus on winning in an election.
>> Bethany McLean: What do you think? It's not a subject that you explicitly touch on in your book, but what do you think about the growing rise of corporate power and how we almost seem today to live in a world where it's government by the corporation for the corporation. How does that filter into your worldview?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, so the heart of democracy is a kind of notion of political equality. That's a sort of normative underpinning. That's why we want competition and inclusion of everybody, that there's some sense that all citizens have equal value, should have equal input, all have one ballot. The problem with big money, especially when the guardrails limiting big money in the form of campaign finance laws are lessened, is that it means that some people have more power than others. And that's always gonna be the case. But this exaggerates it to a degree. That sort of undermines political quality just in terms of pure definition. so that's one point. I mean, so one thing I should say is that there's sort of big money on both sides, right? So there's big money on the Democratic side, there's big money on the Republican side. so it's not as if this necessarily favors one side over the other. But what it does do is undermine this basic principle of political quality. There's another way also that big money is a problem, which is that because it distorts our politics, you know, so let's say consider like the minimum wage. You know, there's overwhelming majorities of Americans in favor of a higher national minimum wage. This stuff gets blocked and it creates legitimacy crises for our democracy because more and more citizens feel that government's out of touch. Then you're attracted to outsiders who in some cases may be good, but in other cases may be demagogic. And so you create opportunities for demagogues to play on the resentments of citizens. So I think it's very destructive. and I think you know, it's really taken on a kind of new more visible in your face kind of form in the current incoming administration with the richest man in the world, you know, side by side with the President of the United States. I mean this is incredibly overt, know and I think at the end of the day, you know, I imagine there'be backlash eventually against this. But it's certainly distorting of kind of those basic principles that I talked about about political fair and free competition and broad participation. Because although people continue to vote, how meaningful is that vote if policy is being determined by people who are closer and earshot to the President?
>> Luigi Zingales: I much prefer the second part of your answer to the first one because the first one is said oh, the one that many of my colleagues say or there is money on both sides so money doesn't matter. That's not true is that money changes the conversation we have. So the certain topics are not even on the agenda when it is s the last time that somebody campaign of eliminating the loophole for private equity or taxes more heavily capital gains. Actually Kamal Hars try and then she to eat it back during the campaign because she needed more funding. So I think there is an enormous distortion that makes democracy not work for the people and that's my view of a more substantive version and then creates all the resentment so that at the end of the day people don't trust the system and are willing to take bet with crazy outsiders. Shortly after the first election of Donald Trump I coordinated with some people at the law school conference called Populist Plutocrats A lesson from abroad. Well we didn't talk about Trump but we did talk about Takim. We did talk about Thelusconi, we did talk about Fujimori. We did talk about actually the Filippine bless because there have two of them. There was Dutart and before that Estraataa. And what is unbelievable in all these stories and says you put them all together and they are so similar it's not even funny. And the similarity is precisely that there is a major failure and the major failure could be a financial crisis, could be inflation, could be terrorists in the Philippines when the elite fails miserably, people want a change and if the system is not able to provide them a change, they experiment with the craziest people on the face of earth. And what they don't understand is the more the elite pies on them, the more they vote for him. And it'the amazing thing about Est strda that was, I think, a so opera actor in the Philippines, everybody was making fun of him. Every newspaper, like, the local New York Times was making fun of this guy who basically was this B rated actor, was not just an actor, a B rated actor. And in spite of that, actually because of that, he got elected in the landslide. Because people want a change. So I think that we need to look more carefully about, in my view, how money is changing the democratic game in a way that makes people don't feel they have anything to lose.
>> Daniel Ziblatt: I mean, the question is why have these concentrations of wealth come? I mean part of it is certainly technological globalization, et cetera, but the concentrations of political power have come, through the weakness of the counterbalance. I mean the counterbalance of labor in some ways has weakened you in the United States and in the other countries you've talked about. In many ways, maybe there never was a labor movement sufficient to serve as a counterbalance. And so how to get out of this situation seemed to me to be the theme of the age in the moment in which we're living with Elon Musk on the stage. And he's just a symbol in some ways of broader problems, that the kind of big problem of our age is exactly what you're describing here. These concentrations of wealth, you know, what people call crony capitalism, and then how in turn this distorts the democratic process and it's this terrible self reinforcing spiral.
>> Bethany McLean: So part of the gist of your book is also this idea that tyranny of the minority, that it is indeed a minority, and that it is a minority that is motivated by racial resentment in part or in large part. How do the results of the election change your're thinking if it's no longer a minority? And do you still feel as clearly that the chief motivation is racial resentment?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, you know, our account was really intended to try to explain why in the first part of the 20th, 21st century you had the rise of Trump, you know, up till 2016. Really, I think what drove this is some of these economic factors we've been talking about, but also the transformed culture of Americ society. Just as West European societies have become more diverse, the US has become more diverse due to immigration. And part of the thing that fueled the transformation of the Republican party is a sense, at least of Some of its voters, the country they grew up in, was being taken away from them. and a lot of the racial conservatives, as political scientists call them in the US south, who had used vot used to vote for the Democratic Party, increasingly were picked up by the Republican Party. And this pushed the Republican Party further and further to the right. Now, one of the points that we make in our book is that if the Republican Party could become a multi ethhnic party, or at least the logic of the book is that in some ways what this would mean is that they could win majorities. And if they could win majorities, at least they wouldn't challenge the results of elections and engage in violence to hold ont to power. And that's in fact sort of what we saw in 2024. By becoming a multi ethnic party, they're able to win a Democratic majority. you know, one may not like the policies they pursue, but in some sense their Democratic credentials are pretty solid. But I think there continue to be these other economic issues that are weighing on our democracy. But the kind of process of radicalization is driven by, and the reason demagogues can take advantage of economic, dislocation in a way that benefits them is often to play ono these racial resentments. And I think those have been a perennial part of American democracy. I think they continue to be there. But in a sense, I mean, in terms of what I have'adjusted my thinking, if our parties are no longer polarized on race, and they still are to a degree, we shouldn't exaggerate it. But if the Republican Party can really become a multi ehnnic party, I think ultimately this would probably be a good thing for American democracy.
>> Bethany McLean: A last question for me, isn't there a fundamental contradiction in that though, that even as you argue the Republican Party doubled down on its radicalism, it also at the same time seems to have become a multi-ethnic party. How did those two things happen at the same time?
>> Daniel Ziblatt: Yeah, I think. Yeah, no, it's a good point. I mean, this is a party that should have been able to win majorities, never was really able to did in 2024 know. And so it's a time for some hard reflection on that. I mean, is there some way in which the Republican Party has genuinely tapped into some deep changes that the Democratic Party has missed? Or is this simply a kind of little bit of a flaluke in that all parties, all incumbent parties around the west since COVID are incredibly unpopularous? So the Democrats delivered, but just we're not Given the credit for it, you know, I don't want to be one of these people who thinks that any fact, you know, interpret the election as just confirming everything I thought. I think that's a mistake. On the other hand, I think there's this other kind of equally pernicious tendency, which is to kind of be a free floating intellectual and just to have none of your prior theoretical commitments or prior arguments constrain you and just say, okay, yeah, no, actually everything I said before, not doesn't work and I'm just gonna adapt with the times and come up with an interpretation that kind of is current with the times. I think we need to really think hard what, but what was right about our interpretation of the past? How should we revise that in the face of new facts? And I, you know, I'm personally in the process of doing that right now. You'll have to invite me back in a couple of years and I'll let you know what my thoughts are.
>> Bethany McLean: If you're enjoying the discussions Luigi and I are having on this show, there's another University of Chicago podcast network show you should also check out. It's called Not Another Politics Podcast. Not Another Politics Podcast provides a fresh perspective on the biggest political stories. It's not told through opinions and anecdotes, but rather through rigorous scholarship, massive data sets and a deep knowledge of theory. So if you want to understand the political science behind the political headlines, then listen to Not Another Politics Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast network.
>> Luigi Zingales: I think political scientists are really obsessed with this, competition argument. But then they don't really take it to, in my view, the logical consequences. Because if you really think that what defines democracy is competition, competition, one definitionialist in economics is free entry. Really we don't have free entry in politics is very difficult. There are a lot of buyers to entry and to some extent you have to admit that the Republican Party is more open to free entry than Democratic Party. So if you go through a purely procedural issue, I think that the Republican Party is more Democratic, but he wasn't willing to admit that.
>> Bethany McLean: Well, do you think that's true? I actually don't know the answer to this. So I'm asking, does the Republican Party do something differently such that it is more democratic, or are you simply taking the rise of Trump to say it must be more Democratic because Trump was able to succeed in the Republican Party where a similar outsider like a Bernie Sanders wasn't able to succeed in the Democratic Party because then I might push back on that Because I think the Trump phenomenon is unique and I don't know if it owes itself to any any greater Democratic leanings within the Republican Party. I'm getting hung up on Democrats and Democrats, big D and small d.
>> Luigi Zingales: Actually, it’s not just Trump. Think about historically you have a John McCain which was clearly not part of the establishment. In fact a bunch of the establishment rejected him even as a presidential candidate and he was able to be nominated presidential candidate go back in history. Even Barry Goldwater and he Sen was a crazy choice because lost by the largest margin in recent history. But that suggests that the system is less the rigged to begin with and I am not an expert in party politics but my understanding is the system of delegates is not rig in a way to give a disproportionate power to the establishment like was the Democratic primaries until recently. I think it is a first pass the post in most states and so whoever wins the most states win and sometimes they have crazy candidates. Even the election of Ronald Reagan now is easy to say because he became the establishment but when he was elected was considered like a California cowboy. People were afraid that this guy was crazy ettera, etc. And again I think that the Republican Party has been able more to change in my view than the Democratic Party.
>> Bethany McLean: Huh, well, if any of our listeners out there know the answer to this I'd actually love to understand it a little bit better because I don’t think Ive ever seen anything written on that. I really appreciated his nuanced answer about the use of the judicial system and the Hunter Biden party because I'm frankly appalled by that and I was appalled by the prosecution of Trump in New York as well Both because I thought it was a faulty prosecution and because I thought it would stoke his followers whip his followers into an even greater frenzy. I think that is to me one of the most One of the more frightening things about where we sit now is that the most frequently articulated view of why the pardon of Hunter Biden was okay is that well we're going to play their game and since this is the way the Republicans play we're going to do it too. And I just think that's a descecent into madness.
>> Luigi Zingales: I'm sorry but I am mad twice I'm mad for the reason you said but also I met because the guy made a promise to the American people he will not do it. How can you trust politics if even the most long term politicians that had very little at stake at this point, etc. Does not follow his own promises when there wasn't any new fact. In a sense, had he discovered that, God forbid, hund cancer, and at least it would be a justification for, say, I do that because out of compassion or some new evidence. No, as far as I know, nothing changed between the moment in which, which he said, I will never pardon him, and now he said, oh, I changed my mind. I pardon him. How can people trust anything coming out from any politician?
>> Bethany McLean: I also really, I did like, I know you weren't as thrilled with his answer about the role of corporate power in all of this, but I did find it a missing part of his book, and I was glad to hear him expound on it a little bit more in our conversation because I have been thinking about how it is that corporations have become as power, powerful as people, and the long process by which that has happened. And where we sit now, where a man in his corporations are essentially an unelected man, and his corporations are essentially among the most powerful people in the US Government, if not the most powerful. Meaning Elon Musk.
>> Luigi Zingales: I agree with you 100%. My question, and maybe I'm a little bit cynical here, but my question is whether this is one of the ideas where he changed with the election. Because, now this is clearly that corporate power is represented by Elon Musk. So when corporate power was represented by Jamie Dimond and Mark Benioff, Mark Cuban, and, then was like, benign, but all of a sudden now has become evil because it's on the other side.
>> Bethany McLean: Well, I'm with you. I think it's always evil on both sides. I didn't think he quite said that. I thought he was actually pretty clear that there was money on both sides. He didn't make it just about money on one side of the aisle.
>> Luigi Zingales: Yeah, but he started with a typical reaction of saying there is money on both sides, so it doesn't really matter that much. But now is really problematic because we have Elon Musk.
>> Bethany McLean: It's really depressing to watch the way in which. And I would be saying this, by the way, if there were people who were, if Biden had won and Elon Musk and his crowd were now going to Biden hat in hand. There's something just disgusting about watching the groveling after an election as people try to be liked by the person in power in order to pick up political favors. I didn't hear that in his answer as clearly as you did. I thought he said, I didn't think he said that it wasn't a problem as long as there was money on both sides. I thought he said it was still a problem because the money was influencing the ideas and it was no longer each person with equal weighting. It was an entity with disproportionate weighting wherever the money was coming from. So maybe we both heard what we were looking for.
>> Luigi Zingales: No, I think that you are re right. I think he started the way I remember. He started by saying there's more in both sides. So it doesn't really matter. However, and that's the reason why I like the second part and not the first part of the answer because and it is surprising actually how so little political scientists are really interested in the power of money. And you know there is an entire branch of political science that shows that money doesn't matter in politics.
>> Bethany McLean: Really?
>> Luigi Zingales: Yeah.
>> Bethany McLean: Did–and is that still, is that a branch that existed in the past or is that actually still an argument that people make with a straight face today?
>> Luigi Zingales: I think there are some people who still make it with a straight face.
>> Bethany McLean: Oh my goodness gracious. Well that is interesting because one of the things I think about a lot is the dangers of our hyper specialized modern world where everybody's in their own little bucket and see things, these things through the framework of that bucket. And so political scientists not thinking about money or economics is a classic example of that. Right. And we interdisciplinary studies where you have the role of money and economics in politics or in political science would seem to me to be an area that is ripe for exploration. Anyway, I was a little disappointed that he didn't have an answer to this idea because part of the core of his book and I, my cynical side, I couldn't tell if he was catering to New York Times readers by basically in the book making it seem that everyone who was a, modern Republican must, must be a racially resentful white. And that was obviously, if you can't quite call it a coalition, a multiet ethhnnic coalition that propelled Trump to victory was certainly more multi-ethnic than anybody would have foreseen. And I think that, that I appreciated that he said he didn't have the answer to that, but, but I want to know the answer.
>> Luigi Zingales: Yeah, but give him some credit. He's thinking and maybe in two years he will have an answer. So I think that that's what actually a good academics does. It doesn't sort of necessarily blur an answer that's not well thought out. So I think that–
>> Bethany McLean: Here's the difference between academics and journalists, Luigi. We just blot out whatever– blur out–we just blurt out whatever we think. I'm teasing. That's not quite true. Luigi, what was your major takeaway from reading his book and talking to him? Did it change the way you thought about anything beforehand?
>> Luigi Zingales: I'm sorry to say, not really. I think that the book was very interesting in documenting all this, distortion of democracy. I think that maybe the point that I will take with me is what he said toward the end that said, look, democracies these days are not taken over by tanks, but are killed in other ways that are more sophisticated and less visible. but then becomes a little bit tricky of who again, who is democratic, who is not. so in Berlusconi was basically deposed by the European Union, and by the financial crisis, and so was that a modern form of tanks coming down the street or was a good thing? We know that, now Romania went from the first round of election and because of the first round, a pro Russian guy was winning, they call off the election. and is this like, So I would desperately like to have some scientific approach that is not very partisan. And it seems that at the end of the day, what we like is democratic and what we don't like is not democratic. And that's not very sophisticated. I'm sorry to say that, but I'm struggling.
>> Bethany McLean: Yeah, I felt the same way. I thought that to me, the most interesting takeaway. I had never thought about this notion in his book that all democracies have to be tempered by a degree of counter majoritarianism. and the democracy is e. Essentially have to empower both majorities and empower minorities. And I think part of the reason that there's no good answer to your question or no perhaps formula is that it is nuanced. It's a balance. And it's pretty easy to say you can align yourself with the majority or the minority then depending on whether which one is reflecting the views, the views that you like. And so it's hard to come up with a framework when they. There's no specific scientific, quantitative balance between that majority and that minority rule. I thought that was really interesting. I also thought his point about how so much of this is done legally now. It's not illegal, it's not a tank rolling down the street. It's actually through co opting the norms, of a democracy or co opting the rules of a democracy that the danger happens. And I thought that was a really interesting point too. And it just brings me back to this point that words and definitions really matter. And so when you say democracy, you actually have to say what you're talking about instead of just taking for granted that everybody knows what you mean when you say democracy, because it can actually mean a lot of really different things.
>> Luigi Zingales: Perfect Ending.
>> Matt Hodap: Capitalism is a podcast from the University of Chicago Podcast Network and the Stigler Center, in collaboration with the Chicago Booth Review show is produced by me, Matt Hodep and Leia Cezreen, with production assistance from Utsav Gandhi, Sodam Kim, Sebastian Burca, Andy Shi, and Brooke Fox. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to take our conversation further, also check out promarket.org, a publication of the Stigler Center, and subscribe to our newsletter. Sign up at chicagobooth.edu/stigler to discover exciting new content, events, and insights. We hope you'll join our community today, again, at chicagobooth.edu/stigler.