Tom Pepinsky

Category: Current Affairs

  • State and Society in an Era of Backsliding

    State and Society in an Era of Backsliding

    In a new working paper, I argue that comparative politics scholarship on democratic backsliding needs to think explicitly about state-society relations. Here is the abstract.

    Recent scholarship on democratic backsliding has focused on measuring its global prevalence and identifying the causal processes and mechanisms that produce or inhibit backsliding around the world. But many of the political dynamics that motivate both scholarly and popular concern about the state of democracy are about the desired model of society and the proper role of the state rather than about electoral democracy. This manuscript examines pluralist, populist, corporatist, and integralist models of state-society relations, conceptualizing them with reference to normative models of the modern state and beliefs about the nature of society, and using them to identify distinct varieties of democratic backsliding and axes of conflict within backsliders. Treating conflict over the social ontology of the modern state as “democratic backsliding” obscures a deeper politics of state-society relations, and how those politics independently shape regime contestation in contemporary electoral regimes.

    My argument is mainly conceptual, eclectic, and polemical. I want this to be read by scholars and citizens who see the world around us in terms of democratic backsliding, who wonder what it would mean for politics to be actually fascist, who wonder what specifically is populist about Fidesz rule in Hungary or corporatist about Golkar in Indonesia, and who want to organize the cacophony of antiliberal arguments made by actors who support backsliding in the United States and around the world.

    I also think that it would do good to move beyond the question of whether or how democratic backsliding takes places, and towards deeper analyses of why and what for. I have been thinking about this quote from Jan-Werner Müller‘s Contesting Democracy:

    …seeing the twentieth century simply as an age of irrational extremes or even as an ‘age of hatred’ means failing to understand that ordinary men and women—and not just intellectuals and political leaders—saw many of the ideologies contained in abstruse books (and the institutions that we justified with their help) as real answers to their problems… Many of the institutions…made a further promise to function much better than those of liberalism, which in the eyes of many Europeans seemed like a hopelessly outdated relic of the nineteenth century.

    Here is Table 1, the classic comparative politics 2×2 table. (Please read the paper before you get upset about my terminology.)

    And here are the conjectures with which I close the essay.*

    • Former Soviet and Eastern European countries lived under a form of nondemocratic rule with an explicitly categorical social ontology in the form of Soviet communism in the former USSR and related variants in Eastern Europe. These political orders varied over time and across countries between integralism and corporatism (see e.g. Bunce 1983). Might this history have created a political vocabulary and a societal experience that makes the corporatism of Gladden Pappin (2020) and the integralism of Aleksandr Dugin (2014) particularly resonant within these countries?
    • Within modern American conservatism, can we better understand the political alignments that separate Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and Elon Musk by focusing on how they imagine the desired the role of the state and their normative model of society (see also Zúquete and Hawley 2024)?
    • When conceptualizing Chinese, Saudi, Russian, or any other form of nondemocratic politics, how important is their common absence of competitive elections relative to their distinct models of state-society relations?
    • Two what degree is contemporary concern with democratic backsliding actually a defense of pluralism, the model of state-society relations that is most amenable to a liberal, republican, constitutional government?
    • To what extent do different types of antiliberal politics—as actually practiced in organizational and partisan form—map onto left-right or second dimension politics?
    • What other political alignments (racial identitarianism with social welfarism, technolibertarianism with populism, unionism with clericalism) might be explained by their common social ontologies? To what extent are such alignments anti-democratic by definition?

    NOTE

    * If you were wondering what could possibly lead me to read Aleksandr Dugin and his political theory of neo-Eurasianism (large PDF), this is why.

  • Teaching and Democracy in America

    Teaching and Democracy in America

    I have a new essay just published at Liberties, titled “Teaching and Democracy in America.” In it, I reflect on the truly unprecedented task of teaching introduction to comparative politics in the United States in Spring 2025. Here’s the intro—click the link above to read the whole thing.

    Every year, hundreds of thousands of college students enroll in a course whose title is something like “Principles of Comparative Politics” or “Introduction to Comparative Government.” These are bread-and-butter courses for any modern political science department, but they aren’t the flashy or sexy ones. Students who study government and political science normally come to these courses with an interest in current events or great debates. Those looking for a deep dive into U.S. politics will take a course like “Introduction to American Politics.” Students who are interested in war and peace or climate or globalization will gravitate to “Introduction to International Relations.” Those more interested in the philosophical roots of politics will choose classes with names like “Introduction to Political Theory” or “Foundations of Political Philosophy.” Few college students are intrinsically interested in comparing things.

    As a result, comparative politics — the field in which I work, and which is concerned with the internal politics of countries around the world — has a reputation for being rather dry. Introductory courses in comparative politics are often about building vocabulary and learning concepts rather than current events, historical precedents, or deep philosophical debates. Students encounter equations and formulas and read analyses of the political systems of countries they will never visit. They learn about research designs and how to test hypotheses. These are the parts of academic political science that drain politics of all passion and principle. 

    It is understandable that comparative politics has this reputation. What is more interesting to you right now: unitary executive theory and the U.S. Constitution, or how prime ministers are selected in Australia? What student really cares that Fiji, Israel, and the Netherlands each have only one electoral district from which all legislators are elected, rather than 435 districts that each elect one legislator, as in the U.S. House of Representatives? So what that Argentina has a federal system of government, but Finland does not? What does it matter that Germany and Japan were late colonizers, or that Nigeria, Brazil, and Indonesia are multiethnic, multireligious states? Did you even know that these are the topics that a comparative politics course covers?

    In normal times, students like to argue, and they like controversy. But Spring 2025 is no normal time, especially for the American university and for students who want to learn about politics. The second Trump administration treats universities as hotbeds of radicalism and anti-Americanism, and has used its control over federal research funds as a cudgel to threaten administrators and punish researchers. Everything is fraught, and anyone teaching anything controversial is on high alert. Should we talk about what’s going on in the current administration? Should we talk about what’s going on in Ukraine? In Gaza? Among our students? With our friends and our loved ones? Students are just as nervous as we are, and just as hesitant to share their views and to speak their minds, especially those who are not U.S. citizens.

    This is the context in which I taught introductory comparative politics to my own undergraduate students this spring. It was an ordinary class taught under extraordinary circumstances, both for my university and for my country. By the end, the experience had changed me, both as a teacher and as a citizen.