Roberto Stefan Foa is university lecturer in politics at the University of Cambridge, director of the YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opinion Research, and co-director of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Democracy.
While analysts of populism have focused on economic woes and “cultural backlash,” a thirst for the restoration of order may better explain the appeal of authoritarian populists in fragile democracies where governance is falling short.
Embracing a new model of capitalist authoritarianism, a number of nondemocratic regimes have made startling gains in state capacity, posing a new challenge to the appeal and advance of liberal democracy.
Political scientists have long assumed that “democratic consolidation” is a one-way street, but survey evidence of declining support for democracy from across the established democracies suggests that deconsolidation is a genuine danger.
Is democratic deconsolidation underway in the United States and Europe? In recent years, support for democracy, especially among millennials, has been dwindling in a number of established democracies.