[EAI-KAIS] Book Webinar Series - Backsliding, Stephan Haggard

YouTube 링크 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJJKlV-JFUQ

The East Asia Institute funded the June 18 <Book Webinar Series - Backsliding, Stephan Haggard> hosted by the Korean Association of International Studies. Designed to introduce and discuss newly published major political science and social science literature, this webinar series aims to raise the interest of domestic and international academic writing as well as provide opportunities to share various questions and opinions. In this webinar, "Backsliding" by Stephen Haggard is introduced. Professor Nam Kyu Kim (Korea University), Yunmin Nam (Kongju University), and Won-bin Cho (Sungkyunkwan University) participated in the discussion moderated by Professor Joo-Youn Jung (Korea University).

Program

Book Webinar

Program Manager

Junghye Suh Research Associate at East Asia Institute (EAI)

영상 스크립트

hello everyone uh welcome to the book webinar series on distinguished books in political science the book webinar is a new project organized by the korean association of international studies this year we have just successfully completed the very first book seminar last month and today we have the second seminar of the series sponsored by east asia institute by the way i am chongjin at korea university the moderator of today's webinar let me introduce today's participants to the audience uh first of all i'm excited

that we have professor stephen haggart as the presenter today i don't think that we need a long introduction for him since korean scholars are very familiar with his works but to briefly introduce him to the audience professor haggard is the lawrence and sally cross professor of korea pacific studies and the director of the korea pacific program at the school of global policy and strategy at uc san diego as we well know already he has extensively researched and written on north korea transitions to

and from democracy and east asian economic development today he'll be presenting his most recent book titled backsliding this book published in 2021 by cambridge university press we also have invited three specialists on democracy and authoritarian regimes as discussions first of all professor juan bin at san giungren university professor kim namgyu at korea university and professor nam new min at kungju national university um just to explain you how we will proceed today first ask professor heger to present on

his book for about 20 to 30 minutes and then ask each of the discussions to make comments for about 10 minutes each and then get back to professor haggart for his answers and then if there is any remaining time i will have further discussion hopefully uh including uh korea as well now without further ado let us welcome today's presenter professor hagen thanks very much julian for for hosting this i really it's uh it's great to see so many old friends and some unexpected ones as well uh chanchezong i didn't know that

he was going to be joining us as well and i'm very happy for the involvement of the east asia institute um if you'll permit me i'm going to share my um my screen and i hope people can see this and is everyone seeing that yes okay great so um let me just give a little background on this project um i started a project with robert kaufman my colleague at rutgers we've written three books together and edited another one on on the concept of transition on the concept of transitions to and from democratic rule

that came out as dictators and democrats in 2016 and this was looking at the effect of theories of inequality and regime change particularly theories advanced by assam ugly robinson and bosch and we were interested in in looking at those but then in the course of doing that book we started to look at cases um uh that that were outside of the developing world that were outside of transitions to outright uh authoritarianism including most notably the united states and we wrote this piece in perspectives on politics called

democratic decline in the united states what we what we can learn from middle-income countries and it was that a project which ultimately got us into uh this short book for cambridge and the elements series on backsliding so um backsliding and we we started a conversation on this it has a very particular meaning this is not any transition to authoritarian rule and it's not an authoritarian country becoming more authoritarian um it's it's a type of democratic regress and that involves the incremental

erosion of democratic institutions rules and norms but undertaken by a government which is itself duly and fairly elected so this is this is an important point you know this is not a theory about about what happens in in regimes that are already authoritarian and it's not about coups which dominated transitions to authoritarian rule in the post-war period it's about a process which we call purposeful institutional change in which elected incumbents are seeking uh to weaken a democratic rule and particularly the

three core components of it that we define as the existence of horizontal checks that is the classic conception of of checks and balances of government what we call the collapse of the separation of powers political rights and civil liberties including media freedom which is quite quite consequential as we'll see and then ultimately the integrity of the electoral system the idea that elections can be counted on by publics to be free and fair and i want to emphasize an important point because i think it's an

open question and that is that backsliding may or may not result in reversion to outright authoritarian rule in other words you can have an incremental erosion in the quality of democracy without a country necessarily becoming authoritarian which we can define in terms of the chances our likelihood of opposition seizing powers basically dropping to zero so um on on the process the way we proceeded was was really empirical in large part we wanted to first identify cases that fit this concept empirically

and so we selected on the outcome variable and and we can talk about the method here in more detail we looked at the period from 1974 to 2017 and we basically set a threshold of crossing a certain standard using vdem the the vdem electoral democracy index and the idea of having eight years above this threshold was we wanted to capture democracies that had consolidated to some extent so we weren't just interested in in countries that had been democratic for a very short time but those would cross some threshold for some

meaningful period of time and then backsliding is defined as an episode during which liberal democracy scores which capture some of these core features of democracy that i talked about fell significantly below their peak so so we're trying to capture a phenomena where a country has achieved a certain level of democracy it may be a democracy over a very long period like the united states or more recently like poland and then it experiences a drop and then we also tried to triangulate that with some

other um indicators some other data sets to make sure that our choices weren't idiosyncratic and the cases that emerged were somewhat surprising to us i mean they're very heterogeneous group of countries um some in in the andes bolivia ecuador venezuela of course is very well known as a kind of pioneer of backsliding hungary poland are also well-known turkey is a classic case that everyone knows but there were some less well-known cases as well such as the dominican republic um serbia ukraine and also of course more

recently sadly brazil has joined that list particularly under a bolsonaro so the method that we undertook was in part to undertake a comparative analysis of these cases against regional benchmarks so we were interested in looking at causal factors that might differentiate them from countries in their region and so for example we would consider indicators such as polarization you know this is these are measures i'm just showing these measures of polarization in brazil and ask questions is this country more polarized than its

regional comparators but most of the work in the book was done by what we call within case causal inference uh of a postulated causal sequence in which we did extensive case studies of each of these 16 and those case studies by the way are posted online in an appendix to the book which runs to several a hundred pages and actually a former student of mine in buckwheat who is currently at the kdi school played a big role in in helping us with this and and that um that um appendix both provides some of the

quantitative data that we use to identify these episodes so for example these are our 16 cases and showing exactly when they they recede including in the united states many of these as you can see are quite recent and then this is an example of the type of case material which we provide to validate our judgments about some of the underlying causes of of this backsliding process so basically we have in the book what i call a causal mechanism figure i'm a big fan of these anyone who's not doing a formal game theoretic model um

should probably consider in their books and articles to to um give this kind of uh provide this kind of causal mechanism figure but our basic intuitions uh were to focus on three uh underlying causal factors one was the existence of political polarization which we saw as a quite significant feature of all of these backsliding episodes but probably the and this is this is widely noted in the literature on backsliding i think this idea of polarization but probably one of our contributions to an understanding of backsliding is our

focus on the role that's played by legislatures because executives whether in parliamentary systems or presidents obviously inherit a lot of powers on coming to office there's lots that they can do by themselves often invoking or using or pushing the envelope of powers which they have as chief executives but it's often the legislature which is quite crucial to delegating powers to the executive or simply faltering on their exercise of oversight powers and so the executive um isn't doing this alone but is typically

doing this with support of legislative coalitions and we take that up in chapter three and then in chapter four we talk about the incremental nature of the process which is i'll explain also we think has causal effect so let me just go through each of these quickly um so on polarization one point i want to make clear is that bob and i are agnostic on the ultimate sources of polarization because if you look at this list of countries one of the things that's striking is that some backsliding cases backslide

from the left so to speak for example of venezuela and nicaragua the latin american case is actually ecuador and bolivia as well and um and other cases outside latin america like greece and arguably the united states were clearly affected by socio-economic inequalities so polarization having this kind of economic foundation but then a number of countries polarized from the right around ethnic racial religious or tribal commitments and of course we have this broader phenomena of cultural resentments that we see

both in the united states and in a number of the post-communist cases where the main axis of polarization is in part between uh cosmopolitan and nationalist ideologies but for our purposes the these sources of polarization are less significant than what happens to the polity both to elites and publics in polarization which is this creation or this emergence this process by which uh political adversaries opponents come to see each other in these us them binaries in which poland polarization actually becomes an issue

of affect or even identity and those of you who have have followed the work on effective polarization in the united states know that in the united states right now you know if you're a democrat republicans are just treated as a kind of other and vice versa and and this kind of effective polarization kicks in which has a number of adverse effects we think for democratic rule so three effects of polarization in particular uh attracted our attention first it can contribute directly to government dysfunction

um polarized parties polarized polities find it difficult to act collectively because it's difficult to reach agreement which in turn undermines faith in political institutions more broadly and so there's a reservoir of distrust of institutions that comes from polarization by definition polarization weakens the center and incentivizes anti-system and populist appeals that demonize oppositions and and what we see in most of these backsliding cases is a resurgence of what we call majoritarian or for those of you who are political

theorists might know as republican conceptions of democracy and these are conceptions of democracy which place much less emphasis on rights and checks and much more emphasis on the right of majorities to rule and what we argue is that in these kind of polarized settings these factors kind of combine to incentivize acquiescence to bad elite behavior they they incentivize acquiescence to bad elite behavior and what i mean by that is captured in this very nice formal model by milan's folic in which he points out that if you

believe that your political adversary is really an enemy who is going to be destructive of the polity then you will support the actions of your guy whatever those might be to prevent that from happening and that kind of effect of polarization of generating support for anti-democratic actions is really in some ways the starting point of the backsliding process the fact that you would be willing to tolerate this kind of behavior because you believe that the alternatives are so much worse now the point about legislatures i think

can be stated very simply there's an irony here because um of course autocratic control of legislatures can weaken the very power of the legislature and and so there's a kind of irony that that legislatures would be complicit in this process but in the chapters that deal with the legislature we show how legislative coalitions are quite crucial to the backsliding process and we talk about how the autocrats come to control legislatures in venezuela bolivia and ecuador they autocrats just simply formed parallel constitutive assemblies

in some cases the the electoral process there's a kind of collective failure of oppositions to check an autocrat i you know in an odd way the israeli case is very interesting here i mean you know netanyahu has benefited from the fact that it's been very difficult for oppositions to form against him and you see the tremendous coordination difficulties of challenging the potential autocrat i mean there's an eight-party coalition now which is finally formed in israel to get rid of netanyahu but but it's a very fragile coalition so

it's it's difficult to stop these movements um and then we find that disproportionality actually is quite significant that many of these systems it's not that the the autocrats enjoy uh majority or super majority support but they benefit from disproportional electoral systems which both the united states and korea have by the way and as you know in the united states it's the uh electoral college which which allowed president trump to be elected the popular vote went uh against him by a quite significant

margin in 20 um in 2016. so um what do legislatures do well first of all um they they uh give up on oversight they abandon their oversight function they support appointments to the judiciary and the executive branch which basically ensconce the cronies of the autocrat so the appointment function is quite important and then we also find that they can delegate powers outright to the executive um and and we see in in places like turkey where constitutional amendments result in a in a parliamentary system

actually being um transformed into a presidential system and erdogan's power is being quite significantly increased as a result of constitutional amendments and obviously a common feature of these backsliding cases is the relaxation of term limits this comes up in a number of these cases so not only do autocrats have more power but they're granted the authority to exercise that power over much longer time horizons and at the extreme we have people like chavis who is in power for a dozen years putin and erdogan going on

20 years now so legislatures play a role in delegating those powers and extending presidential term now the last stage in this process which we found interesting and i think there's a lot of potential here for experimental and other types of work to to push this along is the fact that that backsliding occurs incrementally this is not like a coup it's not as if all at once the political system is fundamentally transformed you don't have a general standing in front of a bank of microphones announcing you know a change in

government for example has happened in thailand uh this is this is democratic regress by stealth as adam schwarzki put it and and what we argue in the book is that this incremental nature of backsliding itself has causal effect it has causal effect because first the components of democratic rule are mutually constitutive so if i attack and can control the courts for example if i can weaken the independence of the courts then one of the effects of that is i can use the courts to go after my political

opponents and reduce their civil liberties i can enter i can attack the integrity of the electoral system so so these core components of democracy are mutually constitutive and if i i'm capable of undermining them incrementally then undermining one component of the system result can result in the undermining of the next component of the system and i think there's still a lot of work to be done on these this particular feature of of backsliding the way in which the component pieces of backsliding are interrelated

how an attack on civil liberties or on the media affects the um the separation of powers how that in turn affects uh civil liberties and the integrity of the electoral system but there's also um we think an interesting social psychology of incrementalism and this is the area where i think it'd really be interesting to see some experimental research which is that um uh the actions of the autocrat become normalized and i know that anyone who lives and has lived in the united states or in putin's russia will know what i'm

talking about masha giesen talks about this and her fantastic work on on the putin system that that that you get used to this process and you can't tell whether it's going on or not because disinformation is rampant and so publics are disoriented it's difficult to know you know is this really happening i mean this was a debate again referring to the united states which we see in many of these backsliding cases is this going on um hungary again as an example and even the european union was unclear

at what point do we say that orban is really dismantling hungarian democracy well it took a long time to figure that out and by the time it was figured out he had moved the the the needle he had moved the center of gravity in that system in a more authoritarian direction but we were really struck you know in how long it often took these backsliding processes to unfold you know you think of venezuela for example as being a country in which you know chavez comes in and you know the the the political system is

fundamentally changed but even in a case like venezuela it's not true this is a country these are just indicators of you know the repression of civil society groups the integrity of the of the electoral monitoring uh system the high court independence the independence of the media these are things that were declined in venezuela over two decades you know this didn't happen all at once and so there's something about incrementalism which we think is um you know is really worth uh considering uh let me just conclude by by raising a

few issues for further debate and research and the first thing i want to say is you know this is a short book and we by no means have solved this problem and this is a very complicated issue and and i'm sure there are other causal factors that might come into play but but let me let me just um uh close by three uh you know by by raising three questions that we might uh you know might have a discussion about the first is is whether um backsliding is stable so to speak or does it necessarily not only erode democracy but

lead to outright uh autocratic rule and here you know the the the news is kind of mixed because one thing that's really quite interesting here is if we look at if we divide the cases the 16 cases we look at into those that began as liberal democracies and those that began as uh electoral democracies that is that that had a somewhat lower standard of democracy you know these are countries in which you had some electoral freedom some checks and balances but there weren't what we would call consolidated liberal democracies

it's interesting that that among this group at the time we wrote the book none of the consolidated liberal democracies reverted to authoritarian rule now i think that question that might be challenged now by poland i mean i think i would now say that poland is probably an authoritarian regime but notice that most of the middle income countries that started this backsliding process ended up as being authoritarian regimes so there's a question here about can backsliding be stopped i mean what what are the risks to to the

advanced industrial states can you get rebounds are we seeing a rebound now in the united states where the backsliding process has stopped i would argue we are but that may be more difficult in countries that are are less consolidated the second area which is is something i'm i'm conducting research on now myself uh in other settings is this question of the international context and the role that external forces might play in the backsliding process so we now have two authoritarian great powers russia

and china and they are exercising influence in their neighborhoods and beyond them and there's a question about whether there's they provide external supports for regimes which are engaged in backsliding such as orban um in in hungary and the polish case uh and and so you know we also want to look at at international institutions whether whether authoritarian international institutions are playing a role in this backsliding process of protecting our regimes that are that are are sliding backwards

and and then we also have to ask about the role that that the the core countries in the system play if if democracy in europe uh the united states and japan korea is not seen as an attractive proposition then obviously it makes it more difficult for defenders of democracy elsewhere to uh to to support it in the face of challenge and then the final question of course and in some ways i think the most profound one is uh and again this is speaking as an american is just you know the the whole social

psychology of democracy and i think this is probably one of the most significant policy issues to come out of these backsliding episodes is is whether democracy can survive in what might be called a post-truth world can you have democracy in a setting in which the competing parties just can't even agree on basic sets of facts and what independent role might technology media and disinformation in particular play in the erosion of democracy i would say this last question is probably the one of the most

significant policy questions because obviously thinking about how to control social media um and and regulate social media uh plays very importantly into the question of of whether democracy itself will survive i'm going to stop sharing my screen but i just want to thank all of you for joining me here today those who are both sitting in the room now and who are watching online and i hope that if you have thoughts on any of these things you'll feel free to contact me i'm always interested in talking about these ideas

thank you thank you professor hegart for a presentation on such an important topic so now let us invite comments uh from our discussions and why don't we go by alphabetical order um so professor joe uh professor kim and then professor nam so first of all professor joe please okay really i really enjoy the book and then also you present it wonderfully and while i reading this book i really it is quite easy for me to follow up because i'd like to first mention my background and i'm studying democracy and typically

democracy in emerging democracies and the i'm more interested in african cases but i'm also interested in the political institution so those the components actually when i read this book you know even though you you categorize the democracy backsliding but most of the euro the you know the theoretical framework actually well fit for many african emerging democracy or young democracy right now except one that is the you know i'd like to start the my questions or comments on this book and first one is

no political polarizations i think that is a very you know fundamental the beginning of your books right and then many you know existing democracy and younger democracy right now facing those political civilizations and then you mentioned you just simply describe you know what is the origins of the political polarization and you mentioned and the socio-economic inequality will be one of the resources and then social structures as you mentioned the ethnicity or religious etc and when i read those foundations i also would like to

raise some questions how about the political institution more broadly how about the regime so we don't i mean maybe i'm not good at many australian regime but do you think any authoritarianism has a political colonization no i don't think so and you you mentioned at the last you know you raise also questions about the rules of the two authoritarian regimes like china also russia and so i'm what i'm asking you know whether this political polarization is because of democracy you know because democracy allowed you

know competitions and participations i said those are very key components of democracy because the regime allowed competitions and it means the political alert can mobilize their supporters so this political polarize and education is due because of the democracy so in an and also if that is the case then how about you know because i'm interested in the political institutions and you know about the government types so usually among those 16 cases majority of them are having a presidential system right usually those president system

unlike the united states many emerging democracy power of the president the degree of the power of the president is very strong so you know whether those the political polarization is more occurred under the presidential system or parliamentary system have you thought about those the issues so i think you know maybe you can you know elaborate you know existing your the socio-economic origins and cultural or the social structuralism but also as a in origin for the political polarization i would like you to think

about whether the regime itself or whether within the democracy is there any government type also actually can contribute uprising those political polarizations so that is my first question i would like to raise and the second one i know i'd like you know again you know those the scenario those uh you know sequences in in your discerical framework again most of them actually very familiar to me when i studying many the african young democracy so unlike the those you know the 16 cases except the zambia as you know in african

continents actually many of the countries go through the democratic transition in mid-1990s and that was very surprising it is certainly you can see number of the electoral democracy in african continent not available you know 28th or 29th so actually majority of the those sub-saharan african countries go through the democratic tradition and then they regularly held multi-party elections however as you imagine as you described you know there is not many cases it goes through the power donation or power

turnover so those elite those the political party have been ruled under australianism and they introduced the multi-party elections but they already have their own network and their resources and also as you know because those young democracy typically opposition party is very weak so the ruling party always can dominate even resources and they can mobilize they can network they can even using the bureaucratic network as well as they have resources they can easily beat those opposition parties and

they can easily win those majority seat in the legislatures and even as you know maybe you know zambia was not successful but like uganda was you know someone that they was successfully to changing their constitution you know they checked first when they they introduced multi-party election they have a two turnover limit but as time goes on you know they get rid of those the limit for the first president so you know those sequences i can easily see from many those you know in electoral democracy in africa so

according to your theories or the you know there is no bright futures in africa i know that is the case that is the case part but you know like uh even you didn't mention so you you raise them question whether it is the democratic religion erosion should it be stables or not but from my perspective you know even among african countries there is like a ghana i think i like the ghana because they they go through the democratic democrat transition and even until now they have a three times a power turnover

so there is some good cases in africa still we we need to figure it out what make those good cases instead of you know just you as you mentioned i mean this is very clever and bright warning about the for typically for the young democracy so they go through the transition and people are very happy with that but right now as you mentioned those political elites or the you know ruling party they really using this mechanism for their consolidating their power instead of consolidating their democracy

so i think in that case is this is very you know insightful you know the warning for like myself to studying the young democracy in in africa but you know my second question would be relate with another government type so through the mechanism you know the you know this among these 16 cases many of them are presidential system and but having a parliamentary system you know the prison system has mechanically actually come up with a divided government it is possible under the the presidential system but as you

mentioned those ruling party actually can mobilize the supporters they can occupy the majority seat in the parliament but you know the parliamentary system it is mechanically you know much easier for the ruling party to occupy the majority seat because the executive government depends on majority support from the legislative ranges so have you thought about this the you know the incremental processing much easier for the young democracy or democracy have a parliamentary system instead of the presidential system

because of the check and balance mechanism working differently between these two governments and also and you know the last one you know i totally agree with you because you know right now the china actually if you look at you know because i'm studying african young democracy and then i look at the newspaper in africa really chinese government really mobilize you know african people you know their system is much disappear to the united states etc so right now really in in typically in those marginal reasons

called like african cases you know the chinese government actually really put a lot of resources to bring their model to those developing countries who struggle with economically i think that is really big concern for me and we have to really considering about the futures of those young democracy in many the marginalized area okay i'd like to stop here thank you great questions yeah thank you thank you yes do you want me to respond to each briefly or uh why don't we go over with the comments first and then

um get back to you what about that okay it's gonna be a long list i'll try to keep down okay um so then uh professor kim namgyu please yes okay so can you hear me okay okay so okay thank you for your presentation so i enjoy a lot your presentation and your book to be honest actually i'm a huge fan of your recent books and articles on democratic transitions breakdown and this one backsliding yeah so i like to begin with what i like about this book so i think this is really well written book so with as i reading every time i found

myself with the question that issue was immediately addressed later also i found that these books related very well classic studies on democratic breakdown at the same time it draws on very recent studies on democracy backsliding and political polarization also it presents a very clear and persuasive explanation of democratic backsliding so particularly i agree that the incremental nature of backsliding has significant coded effects on the acceleration of backsliding and also i agree with that controlling

legislature is a key step in the process of backsliding also methodology methodologically in the diagram cross-tracing method culture process observation and try to identify intervening cultural mechanism from antecedent condition to backsliding so to do so we first identify right so full entire universal backsliding cases and check whether the quadrant mechanism proposed by others actually exist in the case right so this is very different from other qualitative studies sampling certain cases and focusing on

them so given that the dependent variable backsliding is a rare event it is i think very useful strategy to analyze it also i found that uh this book has additional methodological strength so i think this group illustrates very well how scholars can use quantitative cross national data for case studies so last strength of this rule i found is that it provides not only a full list of backsliding cases also case narratives supported by this creative statistic in the appendix i think the appendix is really great resource for scholars

and students who are interested in backsliding phenomena and i have uh three or four questions after this uh reading this book so first one is uh so i'm wondering about how you think about the role of popular protest in stopping democratic backsliding so in many cases institutional constraints onto leaders failed to protect democracy even u.s case shows not only the strengths of institutional checks but also their weakness so i think this is consistent with very wine guest argument right so it is

a famous 1997 south article he emphasized that for democracy and the rule of law to be self-enforcing citizens should coordinate their reaction their protests against anti-democratic behavior of leaders so only when citizens coordinate their reaction they can discourage leaders from violating their rights so having said that i also understand both the context of high polarization and the incremental nature of backsliding make coordination among citizens more difficult nonetheless i think or i guess mobilization might be the

less result to protect democracy again of autographs who led backsliding so i like to ask what you think about the role of mass protest in stopping or slowing down democratic sliding at this point also related to a more general question so this will try to survey the process of democratic backsliding thus it does not attempt to explain right what can prevent the occurrence of democratic sliding or slow down or stop ongoing vaccinating process well there might be some factors that can prevent or stop backsliding

so if you have any idea about these potential factors so please your thoughts with us my second command is kind of related to professor george command so the book briefly addressed the effect of political institutional arrangement such as government thai and electoral system so i wonder whether a certain type of institutional setup or arrangement is more prone to backsliding so for example the books mention the potential effect of government types on the election of autocrats and their legislative support but it didn't give

full consideration of how presidentialism might affect the degree of political polarization and executive aggrandizement so i'm not expert on government type presidentialism or parliamentarian but i guess that maybe presidential democracy might be more prone to political polarization or emergence of populism and the concentration of executive power so of course the u.s case is characterized by strong tech and virus separation of power for many presidential democracy display the winner takes all politics separation

power does not work well so some presidentialism allow institutionally strong president so i think these factors help the concentration of executive power you know this um presidentialism is more likely to allow political outsiders to seize political power so uh there might be uh some association between predationism and populism even though both presidentialism and parliamentarism exist in backsliding cases so i'd like to know so what you think about this association between presidential regime and backsliding

uh next one is about imperial issue so i'd like to ask you about the measure of polarization so actually i thought about similar projects that examined the relationship between political polarization and backsliding so one of my important puzzle to me was so how to measure empirically political polarization at the country level right so you utilize prevents the digital society society project dataset well i like i wonder uh maybe have you thought about other method of measuring polarization at the country level

uh maybe have you considered using uh individual level survey data or party level data so i wonder also why you chose right to use the fidenz measure of polarization yeah the joke so thank you again for your presentation again and just terrific comments i'll have i'll have something to say about all of it okay uh thank you professor kim then uh professor nam please so thank you thank you for your presentation and first of all i really enjoyed reading your book and enjoyed your presentation yes this book was great and i think this

book shows a clear picture of the democratic backsliding and i think this will also combine in depth theoretical explanation with uh excellent case studies but as a discussion as a discussion i will make several comments and questions i understand the democratic tax leading process has largely three stages so first it begins with the polarization and then the elected government have control over the registration and finally they demolish the democratic institutions and democratic norms i think it is

theoretically very clear and simple and these three stages of backsliding make me easily understand the complex causal process of backsliding and you did case study on several countries backsliding countries such as brazil poland and united states but to show how their politics and how their society became polarized but i think so each backsliding cases has somewhat different stories regarding polarizations i think in brazil's economic crisis brought about polarization but in poland the political party called pis play an

important role so polarizing society and politics and i think united states has more complicated story of polarization because the racial or so cultural conflict were combined with economic difficulty or inequality so um so i know the common precondition of backsliding it is a polarization but i understand democracies can face the risk of polarization in a variety of different ways so so i wondering and i wanted to ask you so what is the main trigger of polarization and what is the common independent variable of

polarization yes we we expected um if our democracy experiences polarization we can expect that democracy to be ready to break down but we it is very difficult to expect when a country will be polarized soon okay and and i also and i also understand your book argued once polarization occurs so autographs emerge and they mobilize theirs so laboratory and so demonize the uh opposition and they finally destroys the democratic institution and norms so bit by bit but without so any resistance from the civil

society so i think in your book the democratic backsliding is mainly driven by the duly elected government so i understand duly elected government so they are the main actor in the market in backsliding process so they can weaken horizontal checks on the executive executive and they can read out electoral system finally so so while democratic institution is damaged by dually elected government so where is the civil society and well so your case studies uh uh in your book dimensions what the civil

society was doing but a response of the civil society to to democratic uh regress so it was not a big deal in your argument in your in your case study so i don't know whether my understanding is correct or not but i think this book assumed that civil society is already softened or so weakened after polarization so and the case studies consider the civil society as a passive actor and they just silenced concerning the democratic of the best lighting but i think civil society they can play on important role in monitoring corruption

president president elections and protesting authoritarian government and registering democratic backsliding and this book argue also the social psychological mechanisms come into play in the last stage so incremental process of democratic backsliding and so the public so they became irrational and they are easily deceived by propaganda or social media controlled by the authoritarian government and they were acclimated to new undemocratic norms and authoritarian rules so that means does the public elect or support

bank sliders because they have diminished their support for a democracy or or the public has still have still maintained their support for a democracy and they try to resist democratic backsliding but is the public or the resistance uh opposite opposed by authoritarian government during the bacheloring process i i asked this question because this book said uh autocratic government they are a master of propaganda and a master of polarization and they can manipulate a citizen's preference and citizen support for democracy

but yes i know social psychological mechanisms have a key role to play in the in the incremental process of backsliding but i think it is different question and i think i stu this book needs to show the public they are really their preferences really damaged by the elected government during the elected government but this book just focused on how the dually elected government to make the public insensible to undemocratic institution and authoritarian norms so even though authoritarian government

were orthographic readers they tried to incrementally manipulate a citizen's preference or citizen's support for a democracy so using social media or propaganda the public may i think probably may still have a potential passion for democracy so so if their country so really fall back into fully authoritarian government the public and the people they may have they may regain passion for democracy and they may begin to resist democratic backsliding and authoritarian regime so yeah well this book shows the

extent of backsliding and extent of polarization but at the country level but it is still questionable whether the public and their preference for a democracy is really damaged by the dually elected government so i think this will need to show the public does not they do not love democratic value anymore at the individual level and i think this show the uh whether so social psychological mechanism really work or not and in in conclusion and this book so unfortunately suggested a gloomy perspective for the future of

democracy so you worried about kind of a spiritual effect of rising authoritarian powers such as china and russia and you also mentioned the united states so has no longer spread uh democratic barriers around the world especially during the trump era so i think the democratic backsliding is not only indigenous exercise it is also accelera accelerated by exogenous exogenous uh factors so backsliding can be understood by in international context so that means it seems to be very very difficult to start global

so backsliding phenomenon but i hope and i believe so democracy is especially its long-standing democracies they have the resilience and they can't cope with challenges they can christ they can recover from the crisis and they finally thrive again and you and also the biden so by then took the office and the biden administration is expected to to return to the liberal spirit of democracy and to to demonstrate global resonance of democratic failure and and unknowns so i want and i expect more optimistic perspective on the future of

democracy from you so do you think there is any possibility or any ways to to make a vaccinating country's bounce back so that is my question rastication okay thank you boy this is a tough audience they're they're they're terrific they're terrific questions and they're just so many of them i i i hardly know where to start i think i'll i might take them in reverse order and kind of group some of the questions together because um yunmin nam's last intervention you know touches on this whole question

of civil society and it provides me an opportunity to to um to talk about some issues we struggled with in in doing the project and so several of you raised this question of of civil society and the role that civil society plays and i think young men suggested well you know you portray a civil society as as passive um i i don't think that's our intention because remember the the the distinctive feature of backsliding first and foremost is that it's a demand-driven phenomena it has to be because because it's

defined as a setting in which publics are voting for political candidates who are promising backsliding so so civil society in some ways is a piece of this discussion from the beginning because you've got voters who are willing to vote for politicians who are promising this majoritarian approach to politics so i think i think that that what is not as clear in this book as it could be is that we don't try to resolve the question of whether polarization is an elite or mass phenomena you know it's it's clearly both you know

publics are divided and elites are divided and and the elites divide the publics and the publics divide the elites and i don't think we're going to solve that that question you know fully certainly not in this book but i have to say that some of those like um like mophie arena in the united states who claims that polarization is solely an elite phenomenon i just don't think that's correct i mean the publics in the united states are also divided and that gets to another point you made is they're divided about democracy

they're divided about democracy because remember you know the the concept of polarization means that there are those that are going to see the autocrat as a threat and are going to try to push back so so the public is not uniformly you know fooled by this process i mean the polarization extends to divisions over whether backsliding is going on in fact you know so so i i think we have to from the beginning think of civil society as itself divided and polarized into those that are more amenable to autocratic solutions and

those that are less amenable to autocratic solutions and so then the question becomes you know how does that balance between those two contending forces play out in different settings and can civil society reassert itself as i think it was i think it was it was numb q made this point you know can civil society reassert itself as a sort of check on this autocratic behavior so i'm i'm not sure i'm doing a good job at answering your question but i think the important thing to keep in mind is that civil society is heterogeneous

on these autocrats you know they do face opposition they don't have a hundred percent of people aren't supporting president trump in the united states because the system is polarized that's a defining feature there are people who are as strongly anti-trump as there are people who are who are pro-trump right now let me let me turn to a very interesting set of questions that that come out of um of a young men's intervention and namgu's intervention which is this whole question of whether popular protest

acts as a check and i think this is going to be a big area of future research because because i just really don't know the answer to this question um you know on the one hand you could say yes you know that public protest is is sort of the last resort against autocratic behavior you know look at developments in belarus you know if you can't get people on the street then then you know the autocrat will prevail but but you know it's interesting to see how these autocrats also exploit protest as an excuse for

tightening autocratic control right so so again i'm using a lot of american examples but we could replicate them you know i mean the trump administration during the summer of 2020 was focused on blm on black lives matter and was saying you know this is where the threat is coming from in this society it's coming from these protesters and so so the effects of protest are are sort of ambiguous i mean you know take take another example you know putin's russia you know the existence of protest is an excuse

for for tougher interventions and crackdowns and so there's there there are sort of conflicting dynamics there of whether protest can act as a check or whether autocrats can exploit protest for the purpose of continuing in there in their march to try to uh restrict the political sphere um let me take up another you know very interesting question i don't want to monopolize i really like to have more of a discussion but let me take up another question which is this question of of whether um institutions matter in the sense of

where whether um you know it's more possible for presidents or you know par elementary systems to to backslide and i thought it was interesting because because even though you were raising uh several of you raised this question of whether presidential systems might be more prone to backsliding you actually presented arguments that suggested it could be the other way because of course in a westminster kind of uh system um you you've got a sort of fusion of the executive and legislative functions which you would think would be more

dangerous while in a presidential system you at least have the potential for legislatures to act as a check and again to use american examples it's quite interesting that you know the legislature in the united states was certainly supported trump the republican legislature you know prior to 2018 certainly supported trump but the but american congress was not going to transfer more power to president trump uh i mean they were very testy about their own prerogatives and believed you know in in the integrity of

of congressional powers so they certainly went along on such issues of appointments but you didn't you would never see an american congress voting to suspend term limits for example or to you know transfer more powers directly to the executive you know they even republicans wanted to maintain their their prerogatives so i i'm i'm agnostic on this i mean i think it's a good um issue for future research whether whether institutions matter but i'll just point out that that even though we don't do a

systematic econometric analysis of this there's certainly both types of systems included in this sample because poland hungary ukraine at various times turkey initially these were all parliamentary systems initially or systems in which the the president was you know a weak presidency now it is interesting that that in the turkish system that transitioned from a parliamentary to a presidential system but the backsliding phenomena there started under parliamentary auspices and i can i can i think i can tell

stories about how parliamentary systems also have checks i mean even in a westminster system like the united kingdom there's certainly a variety of institutionalized checks from the back benchers within the party to the strength of judicial institutions and just norms that you might think would check backsliding but boy you know i mean britain is a potential case um where the divisions over brexit suggested backsliding like processes under under um boris johnson um i mean there's just so many good questions here i i

i'm not ignoring your question because i i don't think it's important i've got whole lists of of comments but again i think it might be useful to to have more of a discussion but let me come back to um some things that one been raised which is is is how to think about this in in relationship to broader processes of authoritarian regress and let me just again underline you know this this important point which is the systems we're talking about here are not systems that are only you know limited are competitive authoritarian to begin

with if you can figure out one been a way in which we can link this to competitive authoritarianism then maybe we should write it up and and produce something on that but but you know these are you know the the distinctive feature of of these backsliding cases is exactly that they that it's it's elected dem it's elected duly elected fairly elected democratic leaders that are leading this charge and so i think that in the african cases those that did not cross some democratic threshold you know i mean ghana may be at risk in

the future of this but if you're talking about the competitive authoritarian systems those are systems in which the executive already has levers of power that tilt the balance against you know the possibilities the democratic forces would be able to operate and so i think that's again a somewhat different you know set of issues and the concern i think for the african cases or other regions where we haven't seen um backsliding yet is that if those democracies that if those countries in africa that have

democratized were to become polarized then would there be this kind of risk and and that allows me to raise you know a last question partly for you because i know i haven't asked all these questions we can come back to them but you know it's how do you think about a country such as korea because you know korea clearly isn't a democratic country it is becoming more polarized it seems to be coming more polarized and is there risk that that polarization could uh empower executives to exploit as yunman points out you know a strong

executive for the purpose of going after political enemies and i think the answer to that in part is that this has partly occurred in korea you know to at least some extent and it's certainly a debate in korea now about whether these kinds of forces could be could be in play there either in the past in the present or or into the future um i realize there is one last question which i really have to to address and it has to do with these sources of of polarization i think human quite rightly raised this and so i want

to come back to him on this and that is you know the question of whether there is a kind of single tap route to use hobbs hobson's term you know whether there's a kind of common source of polarization and i think the conclusion we came to is we didn't want to go there because we didn't see it in the world i mean we really saw you know these different sources of polarization and so it could in some cases be economic inequality that gets mobilized um it could be uh ethnicity it could be the difference between

cosmopolitans and nationalists it could be religious in the case of a country like turkey or even to some extent in poland and hungary but i think what we're arguing is that the sources of the polarization are are less significant than the fact of polarization you know that this can come from many sources you've got right populists who are mobilizing ethnic and cosmopolitan anti-cosmopolitan grievances you've got left populists who are mobilizing economic resentments and that happened in greece it happened in the united

states it happened you know in a number of places um but it's not the sources that matter so much as it is that you view your political rivals as enemies that you really get these sharp binaries where you're either one of us or you're one of them and if you have a polity where you have those kinds of very sharp divisions then you're you're willing to tolerate um these kinds of backsliding processes because you think that the autocrat is actually protecting you from your enemies they're protecting you from your enemies

and and that's that's really the terrain on which you know democratic politics gets very dangerous when you perceive of your political adversaries not as someone like you who's just trying to do the best they can in a setting where you're different where your preferences diverge but as someone who really is outside you know and is trying to destroy the system from within and and that's that's when um you know democratic politics gets uh dangerous so i think i'll stop i'm just gonna um turn on my light here

so that i can see you better but i can hear you so please uh uh julion why don't you lead us yes sure um thank you um well uh why don't we go for the second round of questions and answer um first uh if you have any follow-up questions or comments um three discussions we'll have the chance first and then i will collect questions from the floor um and then let's ask professor hacker to answer our questions and can i can i just make a suggestion about procedure sure if if i did not answer your question

it's it's not because it wasn't a good question i just didn't want to do all the talking so if you ask a question before would you feel i didn't answer then just briefly restate the question and i'll come back to it because you know i want to have this kind of exchange to the extent we can yes of course um any follow-up questions or comments um including um the case of south korea actually okay let me because you know even the haggard already includes in his book about rising those authoritarian countries like china

and russia but oh yeah i'd like to you know again you know what is your perspective you know on the impact of the china on this the democratic backsliding and we are coming back to kind of the new four-door era what do you think briefly thank you yeah well i i have a paper which you know i've had a hard time getting published but i'll i'll cert i'll circulate an older version of it if anyone is interested but with a graduate student named christina cortiero we've done some econometric work where we're basically looking at whether

the membership in autocratic authoritarian institutions that is international institutions which are dominated by authoritarian governments whether that has an effect on political liberalization and the likelihood that you will democratize and we find that it does it has an adverse effect so if you're a member of an autocratic io a regional international organization whether it be in in the middle east or in africa or increasingly in central asia then the prospects for you democratizing go down so so i you know we have you know we

have some a little bit of econometric evidence in this paper for this one proposition but i think that the the the tools of influence here are much broader than just through these um and international organizations like the shanghai cooperation organization because they also extend to things like the bri and the belt and road initiative and i don't know what the discourse is in south korea on the bri but it's it's gotten much more alarmist in the united states and western europe over the last just two years because there's a

perception that the bri can be used and and and particular investments that are undertaken by the bri including in things like media and telecommunications and chinese internet firms you know that are investing very widely that these are actually facilitators of either authoritarian rule or potentially backsliding you know to go back to one bin their points at which these two sets of arguments converge and you know clearly putin has tried to build connections with and support the governments in poland and

and hungary you know as a way of kind of dividing the european union and we see we see that these international organizations are operating in africa with the purpose of supporting you know semi-democratic or competitive authoritarian regimes to to shore up autocratic regimes there and you know i think the the most interesting place to look at this uh going forward is going to be in in the bri you know in the in the whole area to china's west where it's clearly seeking to stabilize uh central asia in a way to prevent

color revolutions from from from recurring as they did in georgia and ukraine so so i think i think this is i think this is going to be a major area of research going forward and and again to to put a little korean spin on this you know when when president moon came to to uh to to washington for what i thought was a very successful summit overall this whole issue of korea standing for values and whether it would make value-oriented statements in support of democracy how its southern initiative would link with what

the united states was trying to do in in in southeast asia you know that these kinds of issues are are very much alive any further comments follow-up comments from professor kim or nam no um then um let's open it up uh to the floor uh professor huang chun li um do you have any question comments yes professor han uh thanks a lot for your wonderful uh the presentation and the discussion uh by other the commentators and then actually like uh professor kim namguro i'm a great fan of your the books and

arguments but not in this field but in north korea and international relations because i study uh the ayal and the north korea's foreign policy so i would like to ask a question uh that is related to your previous you know the connection between your previous book that you authored with the market's knowledge the hard target with this book then you in your previous previous book had a target you talked about you mentioned about the international you know that economic uh sanctions and the investment on north

korea like the you know north korea is also like the authoritarian and ecology regime although it's not like the the backsliding uh country so i my question is uh simple and uh what is the the international effect on uh the backsliding uh countries although you know that the political leaders in the backsliding countries are less likely to give up their the power you know and their grip on uh power uh but anyway so i think there is some kind of implication that uh the you know that the international

effect on external you know the effect on the the domestic backsliding uh backsliding effect in those uh the uh the countries although you know i i know you mentioned about the international context of uh the the backsliding uh like the great powers of china and russia but this is a different one because maybe the international uh the effect of on the backsliding okay yeah no i mean this this is this is a really interesting question you know of not only you know so so the way that the question was originally

posed by one business i understood it was the whole question of whether the international environment is becoming more conducive for backsliding to occur that is more permissive but what g1 is arguing as i understand it is he's asking the opposite question which is what happens in a context where you have either more backsliding countries or just more authoritarian countries and i think that i think that it contributes to a kind of global strategic polarization because because countries that are

autocratic have potential allies and will realign with other authoritarian countries and and you know i i'm a little skeptical of the idea of a coalition of democracies um but but you know it really is true that if if the united states western europe uh korea japan are standing up more strongly for human rights and are conducting a diplomacy which to some extent targets and tries to weaken autocratic countries or at least reverse their autocratic practices then naturally this incentivizes those countries to seek support

from other autocracies and so so um you know this is a i'm currently looking at the 1930s i have a paper about you know how i'm working on i have a draft about you know how the united states looked at this question of democracy and autocracy in the 1920s and 30s as you saw this wave of authoritarian reversals and it is interesting that over time this idea that world politics that the cleavages and world politics fell along regime-type lines became more and more pronounced now is this a good idea

well that's where i become a little bit more of a realist and less than a that less of a liberal because i'm not sure it really is a good idea if we're seeing a world politics through a regime-type lens because the united states has to uh interact pragmatically with countries that are autocratic including with china and if we're seeing the world divided along regime type through a regime type lands it may contribute to the hardening of these kind of cleavages and the re-emergence of a cold war setting to a greater extent than i might

prefer so i'm a democrat but you know liberals have to interact with illiberal countries in a productive way and and in some in some cases um you know pushing the human rights agenda to the fore and my south korean colleagues will know exactly what i'm talking about may or may not be the most productive thing to do honestly i mean i personally think that south koreans should be able to south korean ngos that are human rights organizations should have the freedom to speak but i can certainly imagine

why president moon or president no or kim dae-jong before him doesn't have an interest in putting human rights at the top of the agenda you know and interacting with with the north korea did am i am i making sense julian yeah thank you definitely yeah thanks a lot great um if i may i would like to throw in some questions as well um i'm not an i'm not an expert on democracy or democratic transition at all but reading your book which actually by the way um fascinating um i constantly had questions regarding the

definition and implications of the concept of backsliding actually so first uh regarding the definition of backsliding i have some worries about the conceptual stretch and equivalence between cases don't get me wrong i totally share your concerns about the threat even to the most advanced democracies including the u.s but i'm not really sure if we can throw in the u.s or the western european countries and for example the eight cases that eventually declined into competitive authoritarianism into a same category of backsliding

because if so i mean the question is how can we distinguish between the ebb and flow normal ebb and flow in political progress or democracy and backsliding because political progress is not a linear process right you can sometimes take two steps back and one step forward fluctuations take place everywhere so if it's true that we are looking at this phenomena that you call as backsliding but um are some of them simply the ebb and flow of the democracy or political process of course i noticed that you emphasize

that it is mistaken to think that nothing much has ultimately changed in the us i kind of agree but at the same time for example you call those elected duly elected leaders as autocrats in the cases of course you analyze but if you call trump an autocrat and both stalin and trump can fall into the category of autocrats i mean what's the use of the concept autocrat that that's my first question right conceptual stretching and the equivalence between cases and my second question is about the implications of this concept

backsliding um i really appreciate uh your effort uh put um in the first part of your book defining uh the concept of backsliding the defining characteristics of backsliding i love them but all these key characteristics of backsliding they are kind of ex post-facto depictions of the phenomena we are observing today so uh if this backsliding has this phenomena of backsliding have certain characteristics key characteristics that you have already explained very well why these particular characteristics at

this particular time and what will be the analytic importance of these key characteristics to us political scientists who are interested in democracy and backsliding phenomena these two will be my questions yeah these are these are great questions and and tough ones so so let me um let me address um let me address your first question which i think is related to your second one by by sharing my screen again if i could and and showing you some pictures because i think it'll help it'll help um uh you know

you know maybe not maybe not answer your question but clarify how we dealt with it right so so notice so these are thumbnails of all of the cases look at the united states right i mean for for for most of this period this this line you know these these liberal these you know electoral democracy scores these are liberal democracy scores i think um you know are just it's just sort of flat right there isn't very much change and then you get this statistically significant regress which is very small in this case

right and doesn't mean that the united states is no longer a liberal democracy but then you've got other cases like venezuela was considered for for decades a relatively consolidated emerging country democracy and then it starts this process but then it just continues right and so so clearly you know backsliding processes don't necessarily follow the same path nor do they end in the same place and i suspect when you look at vdem data going forward there's likely to be a bounce back here and we see other cases like ecuador for

example where correa ultimately was forced from office and you know the regime kind of bounced back and we've got north macedonia where we also had an autocrat who was voted out of office and someone else was put back in so so i don't think we're we're saying that there's any you know tendency for this process to end in the same place um and when we say that someone is an autocrat i think it's fair i think your criticism is fair that you know trump is not stalin but but what these are what these autocratic

leaders maybe we should call them something like that do have in common is they're willing to engage in what might be called reverse institutional engineering they're seeking and this gets to you know i think your second question which is what the component dimensions of this process are and we really go back to the kind of triad of what constitutes a liberal democracy which is it it has an electoral system with integrity it has a certain um element of guarantee of rights and particularly the core politic the core freedoms that

are necessary for political freedoms you know the right to assembly to petition the media freedom of speech and then you've got this um you know more complex component which is horizontal checks which is that you know executives are subject to some degree of check from the judiciary or from other independent agencies within the executive branch and so so i think that the the concept of backsliding is that is not that all of these things erode in tandem but that typically all of these simultaneously see some kind of erosion

you know some sort of deterioration and i think the reason why the concept is is difficult to grapple with is exactly because you're not dealing with an obvious regime change you're dealing with something which is more initially more incremental in scope and even if these declines are sharper in venezuela you know than they were in the united states i mean look at brazil i mean if you push this forward you know brazil would would be further along than we once thought right and again i'm not sure i'm

completely answering your question but i i think we're all i guess i'm saying is that we're aware of the fact that the initiation of this process doesn't necessarily either start or end in the same place and i think it's an open question about what the and several of the of the people on the call raised this you know what the political forces are which ultimately you know permit these systems to to bounce back okay thank you very much for your answers um i do appreciate them absolutely but i don't

think that was a good answer but it was a good question i can tell you that great answers um any other oh young one did you professor lee i think you're muted professor lee you're muted thank you sorry actually this wonderful talk and then uh your presentation and discuss discussion seems to be flying me back into graduate seminar i took a long time ago comparisons so i have one simple maybe a question maybe related or only that is about my long healthy question about the separation of powers and then there's a big story in your

text sliding narratives and descriptions and then that is um actually what is the basis or normative or logical basis upon which we we can claim that we have a separation of power when uh supreme court justice or justice not democratically elected actually you know executive branches appoint obviously we go through hearings and with uh we it requires congressional you know uh sort of you know approval but still they are appointed and we have a lot of politicking in korea about uh appointment of supreme court justice

and justice so i always think of the question whether or not we really have ever had good balance of separation of power even in advanced democracies so i don't know oh boy well i mean you know that'll be justified we really have separation of powers when you when we or executive branches appoint supreme court justice i don't know how this related or unrelated but that's my question that's a korea question i mean the prosecutor's office i mean you know this is the whole issue of the reform of the

prosecutorial power in korea of course has been just a central question and and the potential abuse of the prosecutor's office because of the fact that it combines the power to investigate and indict i mean i have been following you know the reforms which president moon has tried to introduce in that regard but but look you know i think i think the the answer to this question has to be pragmatic you know i mean no one including madison believed that you know the powers of these branches were going to be tightly separated

and i think it's in federalist 82 where he talks about the judiciary and and the fact that the judiciary is a weak branch and so forth but i think we do have what might be called realist theories about why political opponents might want to agree on a certain neutral arbiter and it's just simply because of the fact that you're in office today but you may not be in office tomorrow i mean that as simple as it sounds that carries tremendous theoretical significance because you know if you and i are political opponents even if we're

divided i would prefer to have an independent you know judiciary if i'm going to be out of office in the future and so you know there are limits i think they're practical limits to the extent to which competing parties in a democracy really want to see the judiciary fundamentally undermined you know and we're having this debate in the united states because there's i think the court you know here and and i'm sure that there's similar debates in korea on the korean court is do we run a risk of delegitimation

if we're too closely and i'm not talking about judges that are corrupt and have been indicted i'm just talking about as an institution does the judiciary run risk if it's seen as basically being an instrument for for partisan ends so um you know look you know there there are a lot of details about the the korean case that i would actually like to discuss if you want to push them about how this issue has been has been addressed there but i don't think i don't think that anyone who believes in the separation

of powers don't you know believes that these branches are completely independent it's their independent in a sense by by a kind of acquiescence or an acknowledgement that there's utility for both sides to maintaining you know these kind of checks and i think the same could be said for legislative power frankly i mean you know the legislature doesn't want an executive that's too strong and you know the the executive doesn't want an executive does the legislature doesn't want an executive too strong and

then you know the the executive has an interest in in in freeing itself when it can you know from national assembly to take the korean case uh constraints right i mean korea is a strange case because it you know has an unusually strong executive and so you know these issues of checks and balances there are quite are are i think of a different order of magnitude than in the united states even where you know the the congress is very powerful and you know is not going to just acquiesce to shifting power to the

to the um to the executive but i should just note you know for those of you who who made the case that maybe maybe institutions matter here i mean you know back benchers in fidesh were willing to grant orban an incredible amount of power despite the fact that it was a parliamentary system you know so so i don't see you know unnecessary connection there between um the fundamental institutional form and and the capacity for these guys to uh to uh to do damage i mean you know you can even make the case that in

parliamentary systems it's easier to control two of the branches and interestingly in both hungary and poland one of the first signs of backsliding to go back to ju young's question were attacks on which branch the judiciary the judiciary because it was the branch which you know the parties didn't control okay thank you thank you for yourself thank you okay i think i have to ask one last question i think it's far uh past your dinner time you must be hungry so sorry for that i'm getting fed here what are you

talking about you got a feast you guys are are feeding me i have a very broad question you know most of the viewers are political scientists in south korea so i want to ask about your view of the discipline of comparative politics in the united states how your critical view of the scholarly landscape of comparative politics there because in ir i feel there is strong criticism against the american trend of studying international relations the absence of theory the depth of ir theory in general theory

as a hypothesis not really as a genuine theory so is there any opinion about your status oh boy i mean you know that you know comparative politics is such a diverse field because you know i mean here i am we're talking to one bin you know and my student inbox re is an african as you know korea korea's now got the whole world you know it's its rise as a as a significant middle middle income power and its global reach which means you're seeing comparative politics expand in in south korea so you're you're seeing

similar kinds of processes i'm gonna answer your question by um by deflecting a little bit i think one thing that concerns me it's not i'm not concerned about the development of method exactly i think it's appropriate and i always try to urge my students to train themselves and acquire the skills they need both quantitative and qualitative but i think one thing that that worries me a little bit about some strands of of uh north american social science the political science which is changing actually i think it's changing

for the positive is is encouraging graduate students and faculty to be engaged in in substantive debates in the public arena i mean i i if i worry about one thing it's not that people aren't doing good work or that it's too narrow but it's more that i think we should be encouraged as social scientists to speak to to issues of public policy and i mean you know i think i think for koreans this is much more natural i think i think many korean social scientists political science have always been engaged in politics maybe too much

they're engaged in politics too much too much drinking with their with their their bureaucratic friends you know rather than writing their articles but i do think that they're in the united states the risk is a little bit different you know that that that there's a lot of concern in both international relations and comparative politics that that that the academy academic political sciences drifted away from from the political arena and um you know it's it's it's surprising the extent to which people who are

in the policy world rely so infrequently on what political scientists do and i think it's partly because they political scientists myself included are not necessarily good at communicating the value of what they do to someone who's a policy maker and so i guess i worry more about that you know that that if you're teaching your students or you're a junior faculty member write your papers get them in the ssci journals all those things you have to do but don't be afraid of commenting on um foreign policy issues or um that are

that your work speaks to i think that's i think that's not something that should be avoided i think it's an obligation of obligation on us yeah it's a great question chisel great we are way past the time and definitely this topic ignites the passion inside us political scientists and i would love to continue with the discussion but i guess we have to let go of the audience so let's at least wrap up this official part we can continue uh chatting afterwards but um thank you so much professor haggard

for sharing your insights and thoughts and your research with us uh we greatly appreciate this chance to learn from you uh and thank you a lot of fun you know to me that that's that's the that's the real measure of a good conversation as you walk away feeling like you've learned something and you've also had some fun so it's really good seeing those of you i know and meeting those of you i have thanks for having me yeah definitely definitely and thank you all the discussions for coming here today and thank you for all the great

comments so um we'll come back next month with the third book webinar and uh meet you again then goodbye thanks for having me okay thanks a lot