Political Outsiders and Democratic Backsliding

• In Event: Political Leadership

Abstract

Throughout the democratic world, political parties sometimes turn to candidates for higher office with little experience in government -- political outsiders. Parties are most likely to select such candidates when these politicians possess a charismatic authority that appeals to the electorate. However, parties pay a cost for relying on such candidates -- reliance on a given candidate's charismatic authority for electoral success lessens the ability of the party to control the candidate when, and if, she is elected. In this paper, we model the interaction between a chief executive and her party. When parties become highly reliant on a leader's charisma, they grow less able to sanction the behavior of these leaders in office. This is particularly true in settings characterized by high levels of ideological polarization. For a variety of parameter values, this inversion of the power dynamic between parties and politicians increases the likelihood that demagogic politicians are able to enact anti-democratic policies, and everywhere it increases the likelihood that politicians who enact such policies get away with it. We test these claims using a biographical dataset of world leaders, coding leaders without a history of holding political office as outsiders. The presence of such leaders is anticipated to be predictive of autocratic reversions and democratic backsliding, across a variety of measures of such phenomena. We further examine several illustrative cases to identify whether the power inversion between candidate and party emphasized by our theory was central to the backsliding episode.

Authors

• James R. Hollyer, University of Minnesota

• Marko Klasnja, Georgetown University

• Rocio Titiunik, Princeton University