Defending Democracy: The Politics of Militant Measures

A live-streamed video of this event will appear above at the appointed time.

Isabela Mares
Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science
Yale University

We live in an era marked by a global rise in the electoral strength of extremist parties that challenge key democratic institutions. How do democracies defend themselves? This leture, based on a paper co-authored with Qixuan Yang, will examine a variety of measures of democratic defense, ranging from targeted, militant tools such as immunity removal and party bans to systemic reforms such as electoral reform. The paper makes three broad contributions to the study of policies of democratic defense. First, compared to existing studies, it presents a broader menu of possible policies. The authors propose a new typology that examines variation along two dimensions: the scope of the target and the key actors involved. This new typology is useful for identifying the political and institutional trade-offs associated with different policies, as well as for normatively assessing the degree of illiberalism of a particular intervention against illiberal actors. Second, the paper argues that it is important to consider systemic policies of democratic defense in addition to individual and collective militant strategies. It shows that the early activation of electoral rule changes creates a favorable terrain for democratic resilience, limiting the demand for collective militant democracy policies that are less normatively desirable. Finally, the authors propose a theoretical model to understand the conditions under which mainstream parties activate militant democratic policies. Their analysis highlights the important role played by mainstream parties that are ideologically close to the extremist party, and shows that the decisions of these parties to demarcate (or establish a cordon sanitaire) with respect to the proximate extremist parties are a necessary precondition for the adoption of militant democratic policies. The paper draws on historical evidence from the Third and Fourth Republic (1870–1940, 1946–1958), as well as in Weimar and postwar (West) Germany (1918–1933, 1949 onwards), to study all three forms of democratic defense.

Isabela Mares is the Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science and Director of the European Union Center at Yale University, specializing in the comparative politics of Europe, labor market and social policy reforms, and the political economy of taxation and electoral clientelism. She is the author of several award-winning books and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, with current research focusing on political responses to antiparliamentarism and reforms limiting electoral corruption.