What I’m Reading: Why Democracy Erodes From the Top

Greetings from London’s long, hot* summer, where I am keeping cool through the traditional method of my people: staying inside and reading books.

First up is an interesting academic work on democratic backsliding — that is, the process of countries turning less democratic over time, eventually becoming semi-autocratic “hybrid” regimes, or even outright autocracies. In “Democracy Erodes From the Top: Leaders, Citizens and the Challenges of Populism in Europe,” published last year, Larry Bartels, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, uses public opinion data to challenge the popular understanding of the links between right-wing populism and democratic backsliding in Europe.

While many people assume right-wing populism erodes democracy, the data tells a different story, Bartels writes. In a number of European countries where the populist far right has gained more public support over recent decades, democracy itself seems to be doing fine. And in Poland and Hungary, two settings of recent democratic backsliding in Europe, the governments only took a far-right populist turn after being elected on promises of more mainstream political agendas. (In Hungary, in fact, a different far-right party did very poorly during the period in which Viktor Orban, the leader who ultimately dismantled many of the country’s democratic protections, came to power.)

I’m also reading some light historical fiction that turns out to connect with modern events more than I expected. “The Wealth of Shadows,” by Graham Moore, is a novel whose plot seems like obvious Interpreter bait. It tells the mostly-true story of a small group of economists and lawyers within the U.S. Treasury Department who set out to use the international financial system to hobble the Nazi war machine in 1939. They worked in secret because the United States had not yet entered the war, and had officially adopted a position of neutrality in the conflict, making some of their efforts questionably legal — and all of them politically unpopular.

Moore manages to inject urgency and drama into scenes of people showing documents to one another, transforming what might have been a tale of bureaucracy and bank accounts into something that reads like a spy novel.

However, his characters’ certainty that the international financial system could halt conflict or even prevent countries from going to war made me wonder what they would have thought of Russia’s war in Ukraine. In the early days of the invasion, the United States and many other countries systematically severed Russia’s access to international banking institutions and other financial mechanisms in an effort to isolate President Vladimir Putin and constrain his country’s ability to fight. But Russia adapted quickly, shifting its trade relationships to China and other countries that refused to cut economic ties, and the war has continued.