Dan Banik and Adam Przeworski discuss the meaning of democracy, the links between democracy and development, and the crises of democracy.
Democracy is valued by many people because it enables us to achieve freedom and political equality in addition to numerous economic and social goals. But democracy also allows us to decide from time to time by whom we wish to be governed. Through elections, we can place in office those who we expect to like and also remove from office those we do not like.
Adam Przeworski argues that the essence of democracy is that it processes in relative liberty and peace whatever conflicts that arise in society. And elections are the main mechanism by which conflicts are managed. This is because elections generate temporary winners and losers designated by specific rules. Elections peacefully process conflicts when the losers do not find their defeat too painful and if they expect to have a reasonable chance of winning in the future. This also means that the winners do not inflict too much pain on the losers and do not foreclose the possibility of being removed from office.
Adam Przeworski is Emeritus Professor of Politics at New York University and one of the world’s foremost scholars on democracy. He has studied political regimes, democracy, autocracy, and their intermediate forms, the conditions under which regimes survive and change, as well as their consequences for economic development and income equality. His latest book is Crises of Democracy, where he discusses the political situation in established democracies, places this in the context of past misadventures of democratic regimes, and speculates on the future of democracy. Twitter: @AdamPrzeworski
Key highlights:
Introduction - 0:44
Definitions and understandings of democracy – 2:42
The distinction between democracy and freedom – 11:15
Democracy and minority rights – 17:54
Income and democracy – 30:08
Processing conflicts – 37:27
The future of democracy in Poland – 45:36
Host:
Professor Dan Banik, University of Oslo, Twitter: @danbanik @GlobalDevPod
https://in-pursuit-of-development.simplecast.com/
Banik It's so good to see you Adam, welcome to the show.
Przeworski I appreciate it.
Banik Let us start with a brief overview of how you, as one of the democracy gurus in the world, how you view democracy? Because it is often assumed that democracy is of intrinsic value, we like the smell of democracy and freedom, but it also has instrumental value that it leads leaders to actually understand what citizens want and demand, and therefore better address their needs. In much of your work, you’ve operated with very succinct, precise definitions of democracy. I thought I would, for the benefit of the listeners, say that one of the many definitions that you have provided is that democracy is a political arrangement in which people select governments through elections and have a reasonable possibility of removing incumbent governments they do not like. In your latest book, Crises of Democracy, you adopt a similar version of the definition of democracy where democracy is simply a system in which incumbents lose elections and leave when they do. So, Adam, over the years you've been studying democracy and there are so many different understandings and definitions, can you briefly tell us how your understanding of democracy has evolved and how did you get to this sort of very precise definition of democracy, as I've just described?
Przeworski I’ve been trying to both analyse what are the values that democracy can possibly realise, and I have been thinking about how it works as a mechanism. By point of departure, which is perhaps different from many other theories, is that democracy is a mechanism for processing whatever conflicts that may exist in a society. I've been very influenced by first the Austrian constitutionalist, Hans Kelsen and then very much by Joseph Schumpeter 1942 book, both of whom basically say that the original conception of representative government was based on the assumption of harmony of interests. The people can be united around some common goal, common interest, public interest, whatever these things are called and both Kelsen and Schumpeter say well, the problem is that they will disagree even if they agree about the goals; they will still disagree about the methods. So, we need some kind of a mechanism by which these conflicts can be handled and the conflicts, they there are ubiquitous, some are big, like conflicts over distribution of income, perhaps conflicts around some moral values, some are very small and yet evoke intense passions. There was a Weimer government which fell over the issue of the colour of the flag, my favourite example is a debate in France of whether the soccer players on the national team must be forced to sing the Marseillaise because one of the players, Nicola Ehlke said but the Marseillaise says aux armes citoyens which is citizens to arms and he said I'm a pacifist, I will not sing it and it was passionate. So, how are conflicts processed, and the main mechanisms are from elections, they're not the only mechanisms, we have collective bargaining systems, we have courts, so, there are other mechanisms for processing conflicts, but the main one in which in principle all citizens have an equal right, if not possibly to participate in our elections. I started one, trying to analyse how elections process conflicts and under what conditions and then, and this is my quote unquote minimalist theory of democracy, I started asking, so, what other goals can we expect elections to realise? And I've come up with a very minimalist conclusion, which is perhaps due to Karl Popper and then Norberto Bobbio, namely that the main virtue of elections is that they allow us to process conflicts in liberty and peace.
Banik I want to ask you about this distinction between the minimalist and more substantive forms of democracy. As you just mentioned, you are inspired by Schumpeter, who defined democracy as a system for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the peoples vote. But, in your writings, you've also pointed out that that doesn't mean that it can be any government, governments must be able to govern competently so that minimalist definition requires that there is some sort of efficient, competent government in place, that's one thing. How do you then view the more substantive forms of democracy that a lot of people say are important? It's not just elections, you need something more, it's not just the minimum levels of freedom, but the more broader sets of challenges that we need to address in terms of climate change, poverty etc, requires a longer list of things that should be added, what is your view on that?
Przeworski My approach here is to distinguish, people are sticking to notions of democracy, all kinds of substantive goals, and there are many writings, which say that unless democracy produces this or that, then it is not a democracy. My strategy always has been analytical that is, I thought we should distinguish, we should ask. So, suppose that governments are selected and replaced by reasonably free and competitive elections, what should we expect of this mechanism? Should we expect it's going to produce rational decisions? Should we expect that this will produce governments which are responsible to voter’s preferences? Should we expect, this can produce economic development? Should we expect this complete reduce in inequality? But these for me are analytical and empirical questions which can be posed if and only if we don't stick everything into the definition, once we stick everything in the definition, we don't know what to do next.
Banik So basically it is about what is a democracy versus whether democracy is a good or a bad thing?
Przeworski Well, what is a democracy in this minimal sense, a mechanism for processing conflicts or elections, and then what does it generate? What should we expect it to change? I spent a large part of my life thinking about transitions to democracy during the time when the world was governed by many nasty dictatorships and participated in the Spirit project on Transitions to Democracy. Democracy was something that we didn't have, and everybody expected that once we have democracy, then we're going to get everything else, we're going to get accountability, development, quality, and everything else. A lot of these expectations were bitterly disappointed, who is to joke that this process is going to go through stages, there is liberalisation, transition and then dissolution. Which is what influenced my research agenda very much, it became important for me to start asking what should be reasonably expecting of democracy because unrealistic expectations are politically dangerous.
Banik Here I think it is particularly interesting to distinguish between democracy and freedom. Democracy and freedom do not necessarily enjoy a directly proportional relationship, and maximising both can be a challenge. I remember reading something that you wrote in the year 2000 where you argued that whereas democracy is a system of political rights, these are definitional, and it is not a system that necessarily furnishes the conditions for effective exercise of these rights
Przeworski Yes, well democracy is a system of equal political rights and there I follow probably Marx in 1846 but also Pierre Rosanvallon, the French political historian. When people become citizens, when they acquired this bundle of rights associated with citizenship, they become indistinguishable as citizens, there are no fat citizens and thin citizens, rich citizens, and poor citizens, black citizens and white citizens, citizens are, to use the title of a classical Austrian novel, they are people without qualities, they don't have any other quality other than being citizen. But the moment they become political actors, then all of these other characteristics which become anonymized when you become a citizen start mattering. Rich people have better conditions for all kinds of actions than poor people, and maybe in some societies black people have fewer possibilities of exercising their rights than white people. So, while this concept of political rights, the concept of citizenship makes us anonymous in real life, we're not anonymous, we still have all these qualities, and these qualities determine the extent to which we can exercise these rights. There is a very nice book by Stephen Holmes The Cost of Rights, rights have to be capacitated in order to be able to be exercised and we know in most countries there is just a very simple correlation between income and voting first.
Banik This reminds me of Isaiah Berlin's distinction between positive and negative liberty. In many societies, it's not just enough to have a democracy, but to facilitate people to actually exercise those rights, there's education, health, jobs, etc, so those enabling conditions are important.
Przeworski This is sort of the contradiction of liberalism that is, everybody has political rights and at the same time, liberals think that we should reduce the role of the state. But in order to be able to access those rights, we need the state the state has enabled the exercise of these rights. On this by the way, I would strongly recommend the writings of my colleagues, Stephen Holmes; he's a liberal who understands that rights are empty unless the state creates the conditions for their exercise.
Banik Going back to the idea of a minimalist definition, and given that you live in the United States, there is always this tension between a minimalist state and a more substantive state and there are all of these debates, how much should the state regulate our lives? So, when you propose, say, a minimalist definition of democracy, are you then assuming that a democracy will be classified according to the minimalist criteria and then evolve into some sort of a strong state structure that provides the incentives for citizens to exercise those rights. Is there some sort of a sequential movement you see?
Przeworski Well, I call it minimalist my view of democracy, it's minimalist, it's not that minimalist in the following sense, so think of Robert Dahl's view of democracy, which in the end is very similar to mine. But he says democracy is possible if and only if, and he actually has seven conditions for it, including, effective exercise of rights. For that mechanism which I have in mind, which in the end for me is that governments lose elections that entails a lot of conditions, preconditions, including political freedom, including some conditions for people to be able to exercise their rights, free press, so, some conditions are entailed in our capacity to act politically, select governments and remove government.
Banik Talking about Dahl, one of my favourite pieces is where he says that elections are not the start of a process but the culmination of many rights that are gradually institutionalised and that elections come towards the end of that process of institutionalisation. Do you agree with that?
Przeworski I completely agree with that. That actually goes back to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist and says the counting of the votes is only the final stage of a long process in which etc. There are preconditions that this relationship between democracy and freedom and Schumpeter is very good at it as he is on many other topics. He says, democracy may reinforce freedoms, but freedom is a precondition for democracy, unless people are free to vote and free to exercise their rights, we cannot have the markers, so it's not as much of an effect as a condition for.
Banik In recent years, of course, some of the big problems or the debates on democracy has revolved around minority rights and even as we speak India, the world largest electoral democracy is struggling with that. In your works, you've also referred to some of the debates that have been characterised as being illiberal democracy debates. I recall that you've written previously, I think in the book the “Crises of Democracy”, you write that to govern effectively, governments must satisfy a majority and yet not ignored the views of intense minorities. How is that, in your view, playing out today? Where are the problems? Why is it that many large democracies face precisely that issue and consider that to be a big problem to address the needs of these intense minority?
Przeworski The question of why is it true today? I will immediately say, I don't know, I spent my time on it as you know. We do see people call it backsliding, erosion and retrogression of democracies in some countries around the world. Now, I'm not one of these people who say there is a generalised world crisis of democracy, I don't think so. There are a lot of countries where democracy is functioning quite well, Germany, maybe Korea, Chile, so it’s not that I think there's a universal crisis of democracy. I think if you look at it carefully, what you will find is that the number of backsliding governments has increased around the world and political polarisation, which inclines some political forces not to respect the results of elections, that phenomenon also increased in some countries around the world. The number of such countries has increased recently, but it doesn't mean that the whole world is going in that direction. I don't know how technical I can be, but if you plotted the distribution of governments which are backsliding and not backsliding, I don't think that the average number has increased, I think more of them existed detail of this distribution and India is one of them and my native country, Poland is another one of them. I think we can distinguish two different situations; one is the backsliding government or quote unquote populist government. These are governments which are subverting democracy with the support of majorities, majorities are getting either material or symbolic goods which people value and people are willing to close their eyes to transgressions against democracy by the government in exchange for getting what they want. Scholar political scientist at Yale, Milan Svolik has beautiful evidence about the United States in which he shows that voters are willing to tolerate democratic transgressions in exchange of getting desirable policy, so, that's one type of situation. Another type of situation is that we're getting polarisation, which means that losers of elections are not willing to tolerate electoral defeats, resulting for application of existing rules. The United States is obviously a primary example, what's going to happen in Brazil in a few months is very unclear, so that kind of two dangers of democracy, one is quote unquote populism and two is quote unquote polarisation.
Banik So where do you see minority rights coming in here?
Przeworski Look, this language of minority rights is so much ideologically clothed that unravelling it is not easy. What were the minority rights when the first republics, because they were not democracies, were created, what were the minority’s rights? The minority rights were the rights of the properties, and the entire systems of representative government were designed to protect the status quo by all kinds of super majoritarian or anti majoritarian devices, and the status quo, was private property of means of production and concentration of wealth in some hands. Now when we say minority rights, we basically think in terms of, well we used to think in terms of poor people who were never minority than we thought of women, who are never a minority with 51% of the world population. But now we're beginning to think of smaller and smaller minorities very often defined by the criteria of Americans badly called diversity, basically our phenotypes, such as skin colours and maybe sexual preferences, that language is completely evolved. Now, what is new in there is the concept of quote unquote liberal democracy and what does it mean? People say elections are not enough, you also need something called rule of law and Rosanvallon and all of their noisy proponents of this view, some of the people you interviewed are also noisy proponent of this view. Which basically says, Rosanvallon I'm always quoting, says, these days we do not consider as a democracy a system which does not have some mechanisms of constraining majority, some anti majoritarian or contra majoritarian offices. Now that for me is pure ideology, it's the dominant ideology everybody uses this term we need the rule of law, which means we need some super majoritarian or contra majoritarian devices. Now one, there are very good logical arguments that that is not necessary, and two, there is not a shred of evidence for that kind of assertion. I mean the idea that more majoritarian systems, one is more likely to violate minority rights, and two, as these people claim that majoritarian governments lead to larger policy swings there's not a shred of evidence in their support. Just think of it this way probably the most majoritarian system in the world until very recently, Sweden, unicameral legislation, nobody can veto the decisions of the legislature, there was no judicial review, Sweden values minority rights, Sweden has large swings of policy and the same is true statistically. The best point I know they claim that you need to constrain somehow from the outside the rule of majority in order to protect minority rights and in order to avoid policy swings, there’s no foundation, it’s pure ideology.
Banik Maybe there is quite a lot of focus on this democracy backsliding, or as my friend, Larry Diamond calls it, democratic recession and all of these reports by Freedom House and V-Dem, all of these reports saying that there are fewer democracies now than before, and we should be concerned. Some of this, and I'd like to hear your views on this, is because of lower quality democracy, it's maybe setting the bar high and then saying that they have regressed that there are certain things that they were doing well that they're not doing as well now. If I understand you correctly, you are saying if you adopt the kind of minimalist definition of democracy as you do, then all of this talk about regression, recession, backsliding is not that important. Have I understood you correctly?
Przeworski No, no, I think it is important, I am not saying that, I think that what's happening in Venezuela, Poland, Hungary, India that's dangerous, it's dangerous to democracy. In what sense is there danger? I think that the erosion of democracy, whatever you call it, has two dimensions. One is that the incumbent governments basically make themselves impossible to be replaced, they take all kinds of steps. Some obviously anti-democratic and some that seem democratic, but which have the effect of just making it impossible for them to be replaced even if they lose elections like Maduro does, then they have a referendum which overrides the result of the election. Why is that dangerous? Well, because what is democracy? It is our capacity to choose the government and then to remove the ones we don't like. So, democracy is in danger because that capacity is in danger. The second dimension, which is different, which is that these governments also increase their discretion in policymaking. That is, they begin to take decisions which previously they could not have been taken later, that previously required some elaborate process to be effective. So yes, I think that the dangers are there, I just don't think that these dangers are universal. Spain has all kinds of conflicts, the Catalonia conflict but it's a healthy, vibrant democracy and so is Germany, I don't think that's true everywhere, I don't know why it's occurring now. But, let me make one observation which is, we have this populist critique or populist onslaught, what is the populist onslaught? The language is that we're ruled by an elite and we cannot do anything against that, we have what the Spanish call economic and political cost, which is then opposed to the people and people have to somehow conquer their power. Now this language appeared in history every so often, but that is very popular and very widespread. As I see it, there's a lot of reason to that, let me put it this way, one cannot, as many of these critics of populism maintain, one cannot at the same time bemoan the populist critique and lament about inequality. If our representative institutions work the way they should have worked, the way they were expected to work, we would not have had the inequality that we do, so, there is something real there. Now, I think the solutions are either pointless or dangerous, but the critique, the populist critique of representative institutions, I think, has a big grain of salt in it.
Banik In your work with your ex doctoral student Fernando Limongi, you find that the probability of democracy surviving increases steeply as income in the country rises and that no democracy in a country with per capita incomes higher that of either Argentina in 1976 or Thailand in 2006 have ever collapsed. So, we are talking about 69 consolidated democracies lasting a total of 1957 years with incomes higher than that of Thailand in 2006, and none of these actually fell, is that how you would mainly characterise the relationship between democracy and development? That it is one of rapidly increasing incomes, that economic growth was much slower in democracies that fell than in those that survived. How would you characterise that relationship between democracy and economic development as you see it today?
Przeworski This is a relationship which goes two ways. One question is whether democracy is more likely to survive and to function peacefully in wealthier, more developed countries, that's one side of the question. The other side of the question is whether democracies are conducive to faster development, that is where there are two causal relations from development to democracy, and from democracy to develop. In my work with Fernando Limongi, we did find that no democracy ever fell in the country with per capita income higher than Argentina in 1976 and since then Thailand has somewhat higher income. There, I go back to democracy as a system for processing conflicts, which is that under standard economic assumptions, the intensity of conflict should decrease when people have higher incomes. Why? Because if the political conflict is, should we have, a lower tax rate or higher tax rate? For people with higher incomes that potential difference in their incomes, whether one party wins or another party wins, it makes a difference. Through that mechanism, what I call the stakes in elections become lower. But I have to put a caveat to it, I am shaken by what happened in the United States in 2020, I'm shaken by that because that should not have happened according to my research.
Banik I'm sorry, shaken by what? What aspect of the election?
Przeworski Shaken by the fact that this country came to a brink of a coup d’état. This is one of the wealthiest countries in the world; this is a country which had 22 peaceful changes of presidencies between parties in its history. When you combine the income and what I call habituation, that is the past of democracy, you would expect that the election should just work absolutely automatically and smoothly. When I apply my statistical models to the United States the probability that the loser of an election United States would not obey the outcome, I calculated to be 1 in 1.6 million. Now something is wrong with my thinking, the world may have changed, but I'm just totally puzzled by what's happening, what happened and what probably will happen in this country.
Banik And it is fascinating to see every day new books coming out from former Trump administration officials, including the latest one by the Defence Secretary, the former Defence Secretary about all the antics, all the efforts by Trump administration to prevent him from making all of these very dictatorial decisions.
Przeworski It takes me by surprise, and I do not say that lightly because it makes me doubt my understanding of the world and many of my previous results. Something here is different, something here is new, and I can't quite figure it out.
Banik Could it be inequality? Because while we're talking about incomes at a national level within countries, there is much more dissatisfaction about rising inequality income inequality, which many attribute to Brexit or Brexit took place and Trump came to power, because of this dissatisfaction with globalisation and with inequality. Do you subscribe to some of those explanations?
Przeworski You’ve read my book, so you have seen it, there are so many candidates for explanations there are inequality stagnation of income, reductionist, intergenerational mobility, this is something that really strikes me. If you ask Americans and Europeans today whether they expect that their offspring will be better off financially than they were, it's 64% in Europe and 60% in the United States say no that. Really shakes me because from the industrial revolution on from the 1820s, we acquired this belief in progress and that meant our children will be better off than we are. So, the fact that this is shaken is important. But I'm digressing. You have all kinds of economic explanation, but then you also have all kinds of cultural or psychological explanations in reaction to immigration, the threat of the traditional way of life etc. One of the conclusions I draw from having read hundreds of these studies is we just can't tell which it is, when you look at these studies, everything matters a little bit, but nothing matters very much, so I'm just agnostic about causes, there are too many potential candidates for causes which we cannot reject.
Banik I want to return to this core idea that you've also mentioned here, but it's also in the book democracy as a way of processing conflicts. I think there's something there that we could further delve into because in the book you write about how political institutions manage conflicts in an orderly way by structuring the way social antagonisms are organised politically absorbing whatever conflicts may threaten public order and regulating them according to some rules. So, institutions are in place, there needs to be trust, we need to trust our representatives to resolve these conflicts. There is some predictability to these conflicts being resolved and conflicts are orderly, you write, if all political forces expect that they may achieve something at the present or at least in some not-too-distant future by processing their interests within the institutional framework, while they see little to be gained by actions outside the institutional realm. I think that is really the crucial point here that maybe what is happening in the United States is that lack of trust in that institutional framework that may be political polarisation has led to total lack of trust. You cannot expect a president, or count on the president leaving office, even though he or she may lose the election, and this goes back to your original definition of democracy.
Przeworski I have to say the claim that I was really present because when Trump got elected in 2016, very soon after, he said the only possible way I could lose the next election is by fraud, he said that I think a few months after he was elected and that scared the hell out of me already. Bolsonaro in Brazil is saying exactly the same and that really scared me. Why? Because that was precisely the bomb under the trust in the institutions that regulate conflict. Republicans today in the United States and this kind of a paradoxical situation at the same time they say, elections were stolen we cannot trust the elections, go and vote. They're doing that, there was just an election in Georgia, the primary election, that's exactly the languages, but yes, they have undermined trust in institutions. But you know there is another aspect to it, which for me is very important, which is in the passage that you read. That is the problem is that conflicts are not structured by intermediating institutions, and that mainly means political parties. We used to have political parties and the political parties were pretty much vertical organisations, people express their demands, their dissatisfactions, their protests through the parties and the trade unions. That's I think what has become eroded, that structuring of conflicts through the parties. Now conflicts are kind of between quote unquote the masses of the people and the politicians not absorbed structures through political parties. But that's I think the most striking thing of Western Europe that if you look at the electoral fate of the traditional parties centre left and centre right, they have really been weakened, things have become fragmented and chaotic.
Banik I think one of the biggest takeaways I got from your book is that democracy works well when the stakes entailed in institutionalised conflicts are neither too small or too large, and I think that provides a very useful starting point to understand whether if the stakes are too big, the guardrails come off.
Przeworski Elections cannot produce a situation in which the defeat is intolerable so the stakes cannot be too big, and they cannot be too small, because then people conclude that the elections make no difference and then why bother. So yes, I very much believe they have to be intermediate and the second condition for me for successful functioning of democracy is that the losers of today have some chances of winning in the future.
Banik Let's look at the African continent, I've been studying many of those countries. What typically happens is you could have democracy on paper, as Acemoglu and Robinson called paper Leviathans that they project power, it looks like everything is okay, a democratic election has taken place and after four or five years, they lose the election and there are widespread reports of corruption, human rights abuses. It could be not just Africa, it could be anywhere in the world, and so it makes sense for the new regime to somehow prosecute the previous leaders, rightly or wrongly, but this leads to this allegation that this is witch hunting and so then automatically the stakes become too big.
Przeworski I agree I think that going after defeated Presidents or defeated politicians is very dangerous because what does it mean? It means that people who are in power now are afraid that that's going to happen to them, and they'll try to stick to power by any means. I was very influenced, I said this often, I was very influenced by a conversation I had with a Polish communist reformer in Warsaw in 1987 1986, something like this, he's a very close friend of mine, he was my teacher. We were walking and he said one time, you know we are thinking of having a competitive election and I said to him, but you are going to lose. to which his reply was, it's not really whether we lose or win that matters, but what we will lose. He meant that it doesn't mean that we are going to be killed, go to jail or that our property will be confiscated, or does it just mean that we are going to go into opposition and continue our political and private activities. Unless you have that expectation, the expectation that if you lose nothing much is going to happen to you, unless you have that expectation democracy will not work.
Banik That also means that if you know that nothing bad is going to happen to you, you should also behave in that same way when you are in power.
Przeworski Exactly, this is why I think the habituation matters, because if you've been in power for a long time and then allow yourself to have an election and if you lose, you don't know what these other people are going to do to you. Think of Putin, even before the war, he could not lose any election, because if he lost the election he'd be thrown out through the window.
Banik So the incentive of staying on is greater when you are threatened.
Przeworski That's exactly right. This is why I think the stakes cannot be too large.
Banik You mentioned Poland and Poland frequently crops up in these debates on democratic recession, backsliding together with Hungary and many other countries. When you think about your childhood, I saw a tweet in February of this year where you recall when you were four years old a bomb falling, I don't know where in Poland it was, I believe it was Warsaw, when you see what's happening in the Ukraine that you were reminded of something similar. This brings me to the final set of issues about whether democracy is really in a crisis. Do you argue that, well, we need to first be clear what constitutes a crisis, is there a checklist? If you could first say something about, what should we be looking for? Is there a 1 to 10 checklist that we could tick off and say if this country is doing this and that this is heading towards a crisis? Is there a universal idea in your view of what a crisis should look like?
Przeworski Well, there is a sort of a checklist that in my book I create a selective checklist of that kind. I think that it's important that there be institutions that absorb and process conflict and more than that, these institutions have to be able to discipline their supporters, they have to be able to say come and do it, but they also have to come and be able to say don't do it anymore. They have to be able to demobilise not only mobilise, because otherwise you can have a genie coming out of a bottle that's no longer controllable, which may be happening with Trump in the United States. I think that is a very important indication.
Banik My understanding Adam when I study development and democracy is that there are such high expectations in many parts of the world, and this goes back to how we started the conversation on what democracy will bring. There is the idea that any transition from a non-democratic setup to a democracy is going to usher in development and is going to usher in progress; lives are going to be radically changed. When that does not happen in the first 5, 10, 15, 20 years, people get upset, they're disappointed. This brings me to what I really enjoyed reading in the book among many things is when you write democracy may still be and I believe it is the least bad way of organising our lives as a collective, but any political arrangement faces limits as to what they can achieve, and democracies are no different. Are we putting too much pressure on democracy to deliver?
Przeworski I think we definitely do, and I think it's dangerous. I have a little book that is called Why Bother with Elections that was actually translated in about 10 languages. My intention is exactly that, my intention is to say look here is what we can reasonably expect and here is what we cannot expect, and it's dangerous to expect more than a system can deliver. Democracies function and societies, no government can completely transform a society. The limitations are there for one, democracies function as capitalist societies and the power of economic entities cannot be ignored. The political part of quote unquote the market cannot ignore every government has to anticipate. There are limits to what a democracy can achieve and some function better and some function works, but it's within those limits. I'm even more a little bit cynical people tend to blame governments for everything. When they are unhappy about something they say, it's the government, even though it may have nothing to do with the government or there are things about which governments can do nothing. So yes, full of expectations, which doesn't mean that we should close our eyes to reforms that are possible. I'm not saying just be passive, accept things as they are, we have to constantly think about how to improve democracies.
Banik And what about Poland? What is the future of democracy in Poland?
Przeworski I think that the future of democracy in Poland is that it's going to huff and puff, but nothing dramatic is going to occur. There the influence of Europe is very important, Europe just forced Poland to dismantle the nasty institutions through which the government was trying to control judges. Poland is facing a choice of being in Europe or not being in Europe and the constraint of being in Europe is so strong that they cannot go too far. They try everything they can, they throw money around every time there's a little political crisis trying to buy people off, they play with all the nasty symbols, but I don't think anything dramatic is going to happen.
Banik You've been one of my heroes, I've really learned a lot from reading your work, and this was such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you very much.
Przeworski It was a wonderful conversation, I very much enjoyed it. Thank you.