On our minds: A dark consequence of right-wing populism's decline. |
Loser's Consent and the Future of Democracy |
 | | Andrej Babis, right, the Czech prime minister, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary last month in Prague.David W. Cerny/Reuters |
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Last week's election in the Czech Republic seemed to suggest an answer to a question that has hung over the era of right-wing populism. |
Leaders from that movement tend to be disdainful of democratic norms, such as accepting opposition parties as legitimate or honoring election results. How can democracies remain fully democratic if right-wing populists undermine the means by which citizens can peacefully vote them out? |
That's been the question in, for example, Hungary, where Prime Minister Viktor Orban has weakened the independent news media and opposition parties. Or, for that matter, in the United States, where President Donald J. Trump sought to overturn his loss in last year's election. |
The Czech Republic's answer was party politics. Otherwise-divided opposition parties, including those on the left and the center-right, united to oppose Andrej Babis, the country's right-wing populist prime minister since 2017. Those parties do not agree on much beyond a fear that Mr. Babis was eroding their democracy. But that was enough to defeat him in last week's election and by a large enough margin to force him to accept the loss. |
Political scientists call this a "pacted transition." A critical mass of a country's political elite, usually including some in power, decides to band together to force a change. These events are not necessarily democratic; some coups are orchestrated this way. But a number of countries have also democratized through pacted transitions — for example, Spain and Portugal in the 1970s. |
(This is arguably an element of what happened in the United States last year, too. When members of Mr. Trump's party in Congress and state governments broke with him on the election, certifying Joe Biden's victory against his orders, they were primarily honoring the democratic process. But they were also, in effect, ushering a transition from the version of American governance that Mr. Trump oversaw, which many political scientists considered less than fully democratic, to a new one.) |
But while pacted transitions can remove a leader who refuses to leave office, they are entirely top-down affairs and so cannot resolve the bottom-up forces that elevate would-be strongmen in the first place. |
Popular opposition to liberal democracy, particularly its protections for minorities and migrants, has been rising for years. So has distrust of political institutions and desire for strong-fisted rulers who will impose order. And political scientists have identified a rise in polarization that goes beyond political disagreement, "focusing less on triumphs of ideas than on dominating the abhorrent supporters of the opposing party," according to a recent paper. |
"The political sectarianism of the public incentivizes politicians to adopt antidemocratic tactics when pursuing electoral or political victories," the paper's authors wrote. |
When voters believe that it would be dangerous for the other side to take power, they become much more supportive of leaders who will prevent that from happening, whatever it takes. |
That sentiment is especially deep in the United States. According to a recent study, 78 percent of Trump voters consider partisan Democrats to pose a "clear and present danger to American democracy." Among Biden voters, 75 percent said the same about partisan Republicans. |
This sense of an existential threat and a high-stakes battle for control can obliterate an essential feature of an democracy: the assumption that parties will honor an electoral loss. Political scientists call it "losers' consent." |
"If democratic procedures are to continue in the long run, then the losers must, somehow, overcome any bitterness and resentment and be willing, first, to accept the decision of the election, and, second, to play again next time," a team of scholars wrote in a 2005 book. |
For that to happen, "the losers must value the institution of the government more than they value control of the government," Matt Germer, an elections scholar at a center-right think tank, R Street, wrote in a new research paper. |
That formula is getting scrambled. Right-wing populism, by nature skeptical of institutions and norms, places less value on preserving them. And in a highly polarized society, control of the government can feel like a matter of life or death, too important to give up. Losers' consent is coming under greater pressure. |
The Czech Republic did not so much resolve this problem as circumvent it. The country's political parties, by banding together against Mr. Babis, largely foreclosed his ability to portray the election as undemocratic or stolen. With parties representing three-quarters of the electorate and much of the government agreeing he'd lost, his consent was all but compelled. |
But such a thing is unlikely to work in the United States for one simple reason: the two-party system. |
In most Czech elections, citizens vote for a party rather than an individual. Each party then takes a share of seats in the legislature equivalent to its share of the national vote. This is called proportional representation. In contrast to American-style elections, which are winner-take-all and therefore produce a two-party system, proportional electorates can fragment across many different parties. |
This cuts down on polarization because there are not, as in the U.S., just two parties to polarize between. It also enables, say, the center-right to break from the populist right, because each has its own party and independent base of support. |
The two-party system may also mean that, even as right-wing populism seems to be declining in popularity across the West, it retains an iron grip on one of America's two parties — heightening the stakes of a refusal to concede losses. |
Losers' consent is more readily granted in proportional systems, research has found. A multiparty democracy, Mr. Germer wrote, "directly encourages losers' consent by diminishing the number of people who fall squarely in the 'loser' category and ensures that political minorities still have a voice in their government." |
This is more than just a revealing comparison between systems. Some experts believe that it represents the gap between a democracy that can thrive in today's era and one that can't. The decline of losers' consent — and, in the U.S., perhaps its end, with many Republicans only growing bolder in rejecting last year's results — may indicate deeper, fundamental flaws. |
"There is no reasonable or timely way to fix this broken system," Lee Drutman, a political scientist at the New America Foundation, wrote in a recent New York Times opinion essay. "Multiparty democracy would facilitate the shifting alliances and bargaining that are essential in democracy but have largely disappeared in today's zero-sum conflict." |
Mr. Drutman is hardly alone in advocating an overhaul of American elections. Several groups now push for alternate voting methods that might break the two-party hold. In some cases, they're getting it. New York City's most recent mayoral elections were conducted by ranked-choice voting. |
Still, the odds of bringing European-style proportional representation to Congress are probably long. But the mere fact that many experts now propose such drastic measures should tell you something about how grave they consider the problem to be. |
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