Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Authoritarian Populism

[00:00:05]I appreciate everyone's attention at this late hour of the day but it's not going to be that difficult because of course our next speaker coming all the way from Australia as Pippa Norris who needs no introduction really but most of us know she's taught at Harvard more than a quarter of a century she's now currently the art laureate fellow and professor of government and international relations at the University of Sydney and a number of other titles Pippa I'm not going to give them all because time is short but we're really anxious to hear what you have to say and we appreciate your joining us from across the world so it's marvelous to be with you and I do apologize for the fact that this is late and I'm holding you from your drinks and your dinner but nevertheless I hope that we can have a good conversation and manage to listen to a little bit of the previous discussion on the Facebook night trend so I've been following along and of course lots of good friends are in the audience so what I'd like to do today is tell you a little bit about the new book and this is a book which I've done with Ron Englehart cultural backlash and it came about because we did a very short blog in The Washington Post in I think it was March 2016 and I thought it was kind of common sense but immediately everybody took off on the parallels between Europe and Trump and then it went viral and then we wrote a paper in again EPSA 2016 but the book has really expanded it's an enormous book now if I was to show you the manuscript it's a very large and this is basically a summary so what's it about well first what I'm going to do is pick up on some of the points that the previous panel talked about the actual concepts and I'd like us to rethink some of these and to abandon some of the work words that we've often used like radical right extremist right or even anti-democratic and I'm going to suggest that what the new concept is really about is a linkage between populism and authoritarianism and authoritarian is the classic concept it goes right back after all Derik Rodin's work of the 1940s to the authoritarian personality so it has reached in the profession and it helps us to understand the contemporary patterns then I'm going to take talk about the steps in the cultural backlash theory and obviously in a short talk I can't expect to go through the wall and I'll give you the basics of how we see the explanation about why now and why there's a rise of authoritarian populism in countries around the world but particularly in Europe and the United States are then pacify European parties along the lines of the concepts using Ches data and then give some European evidence about how powerful these particular appeals are in the electorate across Europe and in the United States at predicting support for these types of parties and the conclusions so this is what the book looks like and it's in bed now with Cambridge it'll be out in the fall if we're lucky but a PSA if not slightly later so I'm going to give you a little bit from the introduction the first two chapters and then just just smidgen from different parts of the rest of the book but obviously not going into the vast bulk of the detail which it goes on at great length so what's the concepts so we know about the idea of radical right and that's what I wrote a book about some time ago now ten years ago or more but obviously it's become more exciting and more interesting through the rise of Donald Trump but also brexit in the UK but also all the other parties and there are very strong linkages across all of these but I think we do need to rethink the ideas and our language using words like radical right doesn't help to clarify what this phenomena is about this is a little snapshot of how the particular part is that we classify as authoritarian populist have changed in their votes and their support from 1945 to to the most recent years and you can immediately see that the parties are ones in the lower house of parliament that were very fringe throughout the 40s 50s 60s 70s so these are parties which were like the National or the BNP or other remnants of post fascist parties after the war what changed and this is an important period to think it through is from the 1980s onwards so right now we estimate that across 32 developed democracies Western societies we're talking about parties which have on average about twelve percent of the vote there's still minor parties but as we can see in many countries such as in Italy such as in Austria such as in Germany that is critical for the balance of power and that means that they could disrupt party competition and really make headway on their policy issues and this is what the map looks like if we take these parties across Europe just in the last period since the turn of the century and it's the percentage of vote and what you can immediately see is the interesting fact that these parties have taken off in the north for example in Norway in Sweden in the most affluent welfare societies in the world like the Netherlands as well as in certain countries in the south as well as in a variety of other countries in central Eastern Europe so what's the definition and then how do we measure this well like you have been talking about we argue that populism is a form of rhetoric and it essentially has just two components and no more than two so we do differ from Cass Wood and various others but we say basically it's number one anti-establishment we all know that it's about denigrating elites whether they're scientists and experts whether the intellectuals established politicians parties governments capitalists corporate America etc all of these are seen as corrupt and not just wrong in a practical sense but also morally wrong morally corrupt and secondly the claim is of course if legitimate Authority does not line the elites it arise with popular sovereignty Vox Populi and therefore the rightful decisions are based on majority rule and popular sovereignty and this is I think is most clearly shown particularly in brexit where there's all sorts of issues about how close that referendum was 48 to 52 nevertheless every time anybody says should we have another referendum should we question the outcome everybody says the people have decided meaning 52 percent of the of the British population so in theory this can be a movement and a rhetoric that just justify expanding powers to the ordinary citizen to average people - people have been neglected through things like referendum popular rallies think about the way that Trump for example always goes on about his numbers whether they're on the mouth or whether they're in rallies or whether they're in opinion polls when they they look as though they good for him but the danger of course is that this this is like a barnacle and fixes the rhetoric to a rock so the real question is what are the values which are really driving the policies the programs populism doesn't say what to do populism is about a philosophy of governance it's about a mitr it's about how power should rule so we think that what we need to think about is not just this but go back to the ideas of authoritarianism and authoritarianism as a concept was always associated with the authoritarian personality we don't use it in that way the way that we're using it in the book is very much about groups and tribes tribes are sticky they're how you belong they're who you're part of your group which can be defined in many many ways my nation or by ethnicity or by religion or by gender or by age or by community lots of different ways in which we can identify with tribes and the three core elements of authoritarian values are number one security this is critical and it's been around as a concept ever since the earliest studies of authoritarian for example the support for fascism Bolshevism so it's the importance of protecting the tribe against perceived risks of instability of disorder of women coming of people coming to steal our women of people who are going to steal our goods the idea that trade is unfair to protect ourselves from all of that so tribal protection secondly as a result because you're under threat because your norms are being changed potentially by outsiders you're critical of outside groups and you want to have conventionalism commercialism too whatever those norms are within your tribe now in many ways they're often seen as traditional norms particularly when the threats are seen to come from those with different norms different races or ethnicities or Islamophobia misogyny homophobia anti-semitism but basically it could also be norms within progressive movements for example if people are intolerant of those who don't go along with certain progressive values so it's security Istanbul one conventionalism is number two and thirdly both of this leads to a logic which says there should be loyalty and obedience towards the leader who is going to protect the triangle the person who can stop the threats the person who can reinforce the norms which is seen as morally right within that group so if you add authoritarian values to populist rhetoric the danger is that populism unlocks the door to all the protections which are there in any liberal democracy it says liberal legislators you can't trust your representative won't act for you parties are corrupt people in DC are all out for themselves so a strongman leader claiming to speak for the people and promote authoritarian values is a very powerful appeal which is clearly personified I'd argue in many many parties and of course in Trump but in many other phenomena as well social movements and so on now it's not just anti-democratic I think this is a mistake and again I think it's mistake we make in the West because we are trying to understand this phenomena particularly in Central Europe so we call them anti-democratic but that's because it's rather like we know what democracy is and so it's not us but authoritarianism is not simply anti-democratic has a whole range of other things within it which I think are really critical understand why people believe in the strongman leader and nor is it simply illegal in liberal that's part of it but really it's not central authoritarianism can be there for how you feel about different groups about your social reactions about your community about many things now just to qualify not all populace are authoritarians by any means and so we also have the phenomena of libertarian populist and there it's amplified by podemos potentially by the five star movement but also by some of the movements in Latin America and not all authoritarians of populist look at the election in Russia right now Putin is making a couple of Pappas claims he's going to boost salaries and he's going to strengthen defense but he hasn't been campaigning and actually he can rely upon coercion clintonism corruption and all of the other mechanisms he has to control the state so how do we understand and explain the phenomena comprehensive explanations in the past and this is work by Herbert Kitchel and part of my previous book have three main elements on the one hand the institutional context the rules of the game think about electoral systems and what threshold there is to translate votes in two seats think about the role of the electoral college in America if we hadn't have had that if the presidency had been determined by the popular vote then we wouldn't be having this conference today we wouldn't be writing this book about trunk secondly in the in the market model you've got demand side factors these are things in the mass electorate in the public in their values in their attitudes whether its dissatisfaction with existing politicians or attitudes towards social conformism and then you also have supply-side factors in the marketplace which are the incentives for parties and for elites for example after the German elections would Angela Merkel have the aft as part of her coalition or would you go for a grand coalition which excluded them was allowed them thereby to become the opposition party in the Bundestag so all of these interact and often we focus on but not all three but how do they interact so let me give you our model about how we think the process works and this is our core theory shown heuristic aliy just as the diagram that we expand throughout the book so we call it a cultural backlash framework and what we do is we divide up the process into three the first stage is about social values about culture about what people believe and the first part of the book starts from the theory that we all know so well from Englehart of the silent revolution the argument is that certain broad sociological structural changes have been transforming society and particularly generations so that as the younger generation grows up in more affluent societies as they have a welfare state as they have higher income then that generation is going to have more socially tolerant more post materialists more socially liberal values and that's a long term process as the older generation dies out as the younger generation comes into the electorate which transforms the culture in affluent countries education is equally a second building block just as profound just as transformational particularly college education and the proportion of those who've gone to college which reinforces the generational X thirdly changes profound in sex roles and gender identities and gender equality a tremendous revolution in our time social diversity which is not simply immigration because now of course societies are more open through a variety of different forms of race and language and nationality and urbanization something which we kind of ignored in the past but again transforming every country as people move from provincial peripheral areas to use the classic phrase to the towns and the cities largely to pursue the college education then settling there so first is the structural changes that leads to the revolution and again I won't go into that because you're so familiar with all of that argument and remember that the first book which Englehart wrote on that was observing the changes in the 60s and 70s amongst the younger generations demonstrating in new york in washington in london in tokyo with new sets of post material values but what the silent revolution book and what Engel hearts work in the past have never really thought about in a serious way are the losers from that process we've always thought about it as progressive we've always thought about it as the world is going in a certain direction and that because of our own values as scholars is often seen as fairly positive but what about those who've been left behind what about those who do not share those values who find them immoral who find trends of gay marriage who've our changes in women's roles who find the threats from permissive values on drugs and a whole range of other attitudes to be something which threatens them so what we say is that certain social developments which are period effects are likely to change that and all three of these factors are going to lead to a tipping point or a cultural backlash now what do we mean by tipping point this is really important tipping points exist in many different phenomena and the idea is it's not simply a long-term secular linear change instead a group that was predominant 60% 70% of the population a set of values that was predominant and the attitudes and beliefs that go along with that have been in steady decline at a certain point they become the new minority and we're most familiar with that in terms of for example racial diversity and ethnic diversity in America where we can also think of this in cultural values as well so in many ways what we're arguing is that the silent revolution of the 60s and 70s the new values of the Millennials and the Gen X is pushing against the values of the social conservatives and again when they there were the majority that wasn't necessarily a substantial problem for them they didn't feel under threat but when that group now feels that they're become the minority not yet a small minor do not get 10% not yet 15 but around the 45% kind of level when things have just tipped that's when you get this backlash and it activates and mobilizes those who feel angry that the values around them whether they're in Britain and Europe or whether they're in America have really been lost and the things which they thought were important like religion like patriotism like family and marriage are no longer the values which had been depicted in the media in Hollywood values no longer being represented in legislators because legislators by and large despite the fact of having a diversity of views often have very liberal and well-educated representatives who are not going to go back on issues of sexism or racism necessarily and so they feel that they're not being represented and therefore that's a potential for being activated by parties who feel that they can make political gains through this and that they can articulate these values and authoritarian reflex kicks in amongst those who feel insecure in their values among whom Fiat those who feel that conventionalism is both being violated and that they have a strong leader who could push back a transgressive leader he doesn't care if it's politically correct and this is where we then move to the stage of votes so if there's a strong party a strong leader an authoritarian populist party they can use this as a basis to get their 12 percent of the vote 15 percent whatever it is now in his turn this is conditioned by the rules of the game for example what share of the vote do you need in order to get seats and so in the past for example in Germany small parties on the radical right which were for example the NPD they only got less than five percent but they got no seats but the AFD has broken through and many parties in Europe by going from the five percent we observed in the in the seventies to the twelve percent or so in the 1980s have actually gained representation meaning a platform meaning resources but party competition also matters and of course the other parties aren't going to stand still they're not going to allow simply new parties to take these issues and run with them and so as we see in the Netherlands for example in the last election when being threatened by builders group the Prime Minister would have a stronger position on immigration and similarly Angela Merkel just now just in the last few days when she talked about the coalition said that immigrants in Germany have to conform have to belong to Germany so the rhetoric and the issues and the policy agenda can shift and mainstream parties can become increasingly populist and increasingly authoritarian and the classic case for this in the book which we study is UK and the Conservatives in Britain essentially you kit rose up in 2015 they had a victory in the 2016 Brit referendum they faded totally and became irrelevant in terms of the 2017 election but by that stage it didn't matter because of course the Conservatives under Teresa may have become increasingly authoritarian on immigration and very very populist and they have adopted all their policies so essentially populism as a phenomenon lives even if populist parties decline and become flash parties and all of this has an impact then on the third stage in our model which is the impact on the civic culture things like social tolerance and Trust things like polarization things like understanding across party lines the policy of gender and things like immigration becoming more hardline build a wall etc and the liberal democracy the quality of liberal democracy in general when parties become polarized because of these new political forces so this is our comprehensive model of how we think the process works or what explains both the rise of these parties and then their impact on government now I can't give you all the evidence obviously it's 175 thousand word book which is ridiculously long but nevertheless let me just give you a little bit of evidence and then we'll have a clearer name and see whether you disagree or agree or what feedback we've got if the cultural backlash thesis is true above all what we should find is differences by generation which are consistent by education the college education cleavage urbanization religiosity race ethnicity and sex as well as by socially conservative attitudes and authoritarian values so these are our empirical predictors of the cultural backlash thesis both in terms of values what's changed I mean in terms of votes and against that I won't go into this explanation because we don't have time but obviously this is one of the conventional views that we've talked about in previous work which is that it's not so much culture but it's more about the instrumental economic insecurity arguments in which case we should find a different set of indicators that support for these values and votes should be concentrated amongst unskilled workers those lacking college degrees the unemployed those living in inner cities the welfare dependent those who feel economically insecure and those who lack social mobility you know that argument very well that's an alternative view and would you look at it we have a complete chapter on this but these are the two alternative empirical ways to think about these arguments so quickly how do we classify parties what we do is we use the chess data which is the Chapel Hill expert survey it's a little out of date now but because they're in the field for a new one but this is 2014 but it covers 31 countries and as you can see what we've done is a factor analysis these ask experts to put the position of parties on ten-point scales in each country on these types of items so the gulten as they call it has a whole range of different values which are classically associated with libertarian are you as the party pro machinist do they save a tough law in order are there against multiculturalism etc those are all good measures we feel of the authoritarianism of political parties then we have two measures of populism and these aren't perfect and I'm pleased to say that chess is added a third item in the current wave but we do have two items that serve their purpose so for parties how much do they emphasize anti-corruption and how much do they emphasize anti-establishment rhetoric and then lastly we have the classic left-right so this is a gaming chairs market regulation etc so three dimensions of what we're talking about not two and not one how to parties map onto this so what we're going to do is use those data points develop scales and our prediction is you therefore get this type of division so some parties are going to reflect those types of authoritarian values the opposite the antithesis for us are libertarian parties and we get those who are populist and the opposite for us is a pluralist parties and then of course you also have left right but as we'll show they've actually declined the left-right cleavage both as predictors of party and as a policy agenda now this is really small I know so I don't know how well you'll see the image on your own screen it's also available through our website if you want to look at any of the detail but what we've got here is the three-dimensional map of party competition across a wide range of different countries including in the chest data primarily European so what we do across the bottom these are the pluralist populist parties the populist big anti-establishment and anti-corruption the pluralist not having those characteristics and then on the vertical dimension the ones which in libertarian which are at the bottom the ones which are authoritarian in their values at the top and the critical aspect is this category here and as you can see it actually classifies and man is very nicely to capture empirically most of the parties that in the past have been termed radical right but which we think are very misleading we should not use that term because as you can also see by color we've also classified what their economic policies are and some are certainly conservative or right-wing towards markets others are very left-wing particularly in central Eastern Europe so you can see in Poland for example is a party which is very much authoritarian and populist in its values but is left-wing in its economic policies similarly in Greece similarly in Finland and the Swedish Social Democrats on the other hand you could also see some parties in this category which are clearly very right-wing in their economic position but to also very authoritarian in their social values and also populist in their appeals and again if you look at the other categories it's actually rather nice because this classifies for example traditional socially conservative parties say Norway or in Germany the CSU or in Ireland or in Italy as and Hungary for example turns out in this view to be authoritarian conservative in its social values but more pluralism for example some of the other Hungarian parties and you can also see that many many parties are libertarian pluralists that's some ways mainstream for example many of the socialist parties in the Netherlands in Britain in Germany and France the German SDP and also you can see that they again there are conservative and labor parties in that category and we can also see in the libertarian populist bottom some categories some populist parties which libertarian in their values and a game of Spanish podemos is the classic example they actually they actually favor homosexual and gay rights and they're also progressive on a range of other issues even though they're populist in their appeal once is near our grassroots referendum and wanting to have a breakup of the old system and attacking corruption and Greece interestingly Sarita falls into that category and the size by the way is the size of the party so you've got in fact four dimensions on this which I think helps to capture the complexities of party competition now let's look at those lists and just briefly this is what it looks like and this just shows you the major and minor categories which people are familiar with the Swiss People's Party for example very strong in government the progress party in Norway in coalition the Freedom Party of Austria the Danish People's Party all very familiar parties there's a whole range of other fringe parties that haven't listed but they're in the book as well we've got about 50 parties in total and then in central Eastern Europe again a range of parties which are quite familiar visits Croatian Democratic Union law and justice in government in Poland's we'll be near etc or quite successful as you can see and then other minor parties and some fringe parties as well so what's the evidence that its values which is driving support for the parties so what we arguing here remember is that there's a tipping point and the first tipping point is just in the size of the populations so let's look at our groups and this is the interwar and the baby boom generation and just in the most recent decade you can see clearly how they've declined in the electorate so that those two groups are roughly 50 percent across Europe as Gen X has come in and as the Millennials have come in but what's also important is not just their electorate but also in terms of the population and you can see that because older people vote across Europe and this is the pooled comparison the older generations of the baby boomers in the inter Ward are still just a majority of the electorate and Gen X and Millennials which have been expanding in the population of course managed to stay in bed when you have votes like brexit they don't bother to get up as a result they're underrepresented in those of the voting population so let's measure the values of the voters and see whether we can identify the tipping point and what we've got here is from the European Social Survey although the book also uses other surveys like the Gallup polls like the NES unlike the VA yes but just from the ESS we have a range of questions which are known as the Schwartz scale these are really good because they don't refer to issues like immigration they don't refer to issues like attitudes towards nationalism or protectionism they refer to your personal values and we've got things like do you agree or disagree in the electorate it's important to behave properly it's important to live in secure surroundings it's important that government has safety tradition and you believe that you should do what you're told so these concepts are rooted in the older concepts of childhood values which go right back again to the authoritarian personality and the social psychological literature but they've been updated and these form a cluster of values and then we also have a cluster of values which are about libertarian things for example people who look for new things to do who like adventure who like new ideas so the big question then has there been a tipping point in authoritarian libertarian values and do these predict how you vote first these values are very strong predictors of how somebody votes so again this is across 30 different countries in the pooled European social survey 2002 to the most recent wave and all we've got here is how people see themselves across the bottom on those Swart scales which turns into a hundred point scale and then whether they voted for parties which are located as list of four atonium on the chess scales I should have just mentioned by the way to explain our methods that we don't try to protect by-and-large whether you vote only for a populist authoritarian party as a binary cleavage as a naught 1 instead we classify all parties on these scales because every party could be populist and everybody can be authoritarianism education equally powerful just as you would expect a classic cleavage the more educated with higher education in Europe the less likely you are to be authoritarian so these are two of the building blocks this shows you what it looks like if we break it down by country and again it's the Swartz personal values the dominance of those values in each country versus the support in the share of the boats for authoritarian parties and it's a really beautiful relationship so of course in Turkey in Greece in Slovakia in Bulgaria very strong support for both and in Sweden of course good old liberal Sweden the most liberal in Europe libertarian to a bone and they have far less support for and and France and Germany are in the same category what about populism well we do see as you saw that it's a separate dimension and what most predicts populist voting support for populist parties that's to say those who are empty elite Anti Corruption is all about political trust it's not necessarily authoritarianism so here it's things like did the electorate have trust in parties Parliament's a wide range of different institutions global institutions as well and again you can see there's a nice relationship and again a country level what we have is did you vote for a more populist party or less populist party and then do you trust politicians this is got some outliers particularly cyprus slovenia italy but nevertheless there is a strong relationship and again countries where mistrust is high like Bulgaria are also ones where people vote for populist parties who are unseen elites and this is a very powerful illustration of what we're talking about when we mean a tipping point so remember tipping point is when you go from a majority to our minority so what we've done is we've shown you here the swartz valley scales how far people support those authoritarian ideas of obedience of loyalty and of tradition ISM and we've done it by cohort at Birth going across the bottom versus those who favor of libertarianism freedom adventure autonomy and we've standardized this so these are Z or Z scores so we've got to me in the whole population across all of Europe in the pooled survey and you can immediately see how the authoritarian values have been shrinking amongst the younger generation those who are born part post 1960s and remember the whole point about the silent revolution is it started with value changes that became evident with the hippies anti protests in the 1960s and we can see that libertarian values have been going up by these cohorts versus authoritarian values which will be going down I can break it down by country and again this is exactly the same thing but if you can see what we've done is we've broken it down and it actually makes a lot of sense if you look at a few countries just to illustrate that so for example when you've got countries like Switzerland which is in the top of Austria which is in the top row you can immediately see how the libertarians in red have really expanded amongst the millennial generation early on and so it was a shift that occurred from the interwar to the baby boom generations but look at the cases in Russia or Ukraine or turkey and immediately you can see that although there's similar trendline the balance hasn't yet tipped so in Turkey the major beta as you can see it is still the black line which is the the largest group the millenniums are just starting to turn but they haven't yet turned so the tipping point means that those who hold authoritarian values and those who hold socially conservative values are under threat that we believe is what's going on and just briefly I now am running out of time but I'll briefly show you a little bit of American evidence these are some of the trends in socially liberal and conservative identification this is from Gallup and again the emphasis for us is generational change not individual change it's not that those who are conservative or liberal have shifted their attitudes or their values or their identities what happens is that the older generation gets those values and persists with those values the traditionalists the oldest generation is at the top the youngest generation the Millennials is at the bottom in blue but as the population changes as the older generation dies out as the younger generation comes in that creates the cumulative value change in society as a whole as a result you can see the gaps amongst the Millennials liberals as a proportion outweigh just the proportion of conservatives and identity amongst the interwar generation solidly conservative in their social values and social identities this is again the American data and how people see themselves and there's a tremendous wealth their data we go through which shows you this in all sorts of issues whether it's gun control whether it's support for gay rights whether its support and religiosity or whether it's any other sort of social value about nationalism patriotism religion and so on and this I think is again a very nice way this starts to link it in to how people vote in America and we have moral conservatism scale which has got a range of different issues which we think nicely taps into this sense of support for traditional values which are under threat so there should be more emphasis on traditional family values newer lifestyles are breaking down society the world is always changing and we should adjust does a disagreeing we should be more tolerant of other moral stance disagree so fairly broad statements these will be conservative values those who are opposed and they beautifully predict how somebody is supporting either Clinton or Trump and this again is the tipping point Illustrated through different data Illustrated in this case was the 2016 NES where we can see that those who are opposing moral change are strongly related to how far people felt close or away from Trump using a feeling thermometer so those who oppose moral change are solidly for Trump those who are against it of solidly for Clinton and post-materialism which is included in the latest wave the world values in America beautifully predicts this as well so it's not just one measure it's not just one indicator all of these points in the same direction post materialists are for Clinton materialists of the trumpet and this I just ripped from the headlines this is the most recent Pew you can go to the Pew Research Center to find it out and again the generational differences in approval of Obama and Trump are enormous look at what changed look at the Millennials look at Obama look at Trump those approving kilometer amongst the Millennials two-thirds of proof of Obama the young cool hit president but also the one epitomizing social liberalism 27 percent of Millennials approve of Trump and as you can see a flatter picture for the other generate for the other groups but again Gen X we also see a decline so the generational cleavages is enormous in Britain right it's enormous in America it protects so much and by contrast just to show you household income this is a game from the NES doesn't protect much it's kind of flat this is who voted for Clinton or Trump and he the lowest income in fact it's not the strongest supporter for Trump they voted for Clinton it's only that the middle income kind of 80,000 is the peak for the Trump but overall it's pretty flat it's not a strong predictor it's only a predictor once you divide it by race but race is a cultural cleavage not an economic one and by contrast again NES this just shows you the figures and it's a staggering contrast 39 percent of Millennials basically voted for Trump 58% of the interwar generation so conclusions and questions and answers and so on there's a lot more data I haven't gone into it because it's a book and it's a big book and you know I almost drowned in data because there's so much out there and I could have continued to write but our broad message is that clearly age and generation matters educational matters as the nuclear bridge now education is related to income but it's also fundamentally related to culture you can't really divide that very clearly but we argue that it's college education which creates and generates and strengthens knowledge and experience which all leads to greater libertarian views urbanization is important we live in the isolated and peripheral regions just like Rock'em suggested in the 1950s you're much more likely to be in regions which are an economic decline but also which are aging and also which have low education the reason quite simply social mobility the younger generation in these areas leaves it to go to college in places like wisconsin-madison and they stay there because that's where the jobs are so you're left with a smaller group which are Jews Obama's phrase cling to their guns and religion they believe that they're still the majority of America because their community has these values but they're really under threat by the culture which is expanding in urban areas which is socially diverse and by the way immigration what matters is not the diversity in your community but your cultural attitudes towards immigration many of the more peripheral regions and the rural areas are much whiter than the urban areas but in fact it's not that which is predicting you're I seduced towards immigration and directly your cultural values your support for authoritarian values support predicts your vote for authoritarian and populist parties in Europe and in America and the change is a complex issue I don't think we've proved it in the book despite the length but clearly the tipping point thesis is a plausible explanation for what triggers authoritarianism and it's bigger than Trump it's bigger than the pen it's bigger than builders it's bigger than any leaders it's bigger than communications it's bigger than any media changes it's social changes in sociology 101 structural changes which link to these cultural changes which lead to these political epiphenomena now it doesn't mean to say there aren't period effects doesn't mean to say that the housing crash and the banking crisis didn't reinforce these values it did but we also demonstrate that these are temporary phenomena which actually come back after the end of the recession in Europe so for example support for the huge went down in the crisis restores in more recent years social diversity and immigration again the high rate of immigration following Angela Merkel's openness of the German borders has certainly been part of the rhetoric of the leaders had certainly been part of strengthening authoritarian values but it's not the heart of the issue because your racial attitudes your ethnic values are just as much triggered by issues of gay marriage which is nothing whatever to do with immigration it's just as much triggered by attitudes towards other traditional values like for example religion and the role of religion in the state now populist leaders and parties respond and mainstream parties and leaders respond and they of course seek to reinforce and heighten these threats so we have the people who are coming are rapists etc all sorts of outrageous claims which are being made and they're being made by Viktor Orban in Hungary they're made by the pen in France they're made by Trump in America and just on the last word before we left before when I was listening to the video I heard sherry say populism MF Laura terrorism varies from one country to another in a way because of the cultural values I think not I think it is predictable I think how strong these values are in a culture it's certainly not consistent across every culture Spain for example the Mediterranean is very different to Northern Europe Northern Europe is very different to the central Eastern Europe and Latin America doesn't mean to say it's not predictable and I think there's an enormous agenda for communication scholars to understand and document the rhetoric and the role of the media in transmitting these these messages and by the way in Britain for example the role with media in being an TEUs fundamental including the Daily Mail the express and the end of times and it continues to be critical but that is another agenda that we haven't managed to get to ourselves but we really should understand this and get out of an American framework and understand this is a threat which is an existential threat to civic cultures which is a threat to party polarization and the party agenda but up fundamentally is a threat to the checks and balances in liberal democracy they're being thrown away in hybrid states like turkey Venezuela Hungary Philippines Thailand the system has gone back so far that essentially we've seen not just democratic backsliding but authoritarian resurgence in established democracies our argument is that there are potential threats but they haven't yet been realized in terms of major setbacks in most European countries to basic human rights to civil liberties the institution's so far have primarily served to work quite well in protecting pluralist democracy but of course in America as my colleague Steve Levitsky and and others have argued democracy can die and so on a very gloomy note we have to say that even though there's been tremendous resistance from the media we've done a brilliant job from the courts from other agencies pushing back from young people on guns from women in pink hats and from candidates standing for the Democratic Party with renewed energy it's not yet clear how far the authoritarian threat is going to do more damage which cannot be reversed oh and the last thing to think about that you can have authoritarian cultures you can have authoritarian leaders but the leaders can come and go think for example of fujimori in Peru and then the culture can come back and so can the regime but you can also have authoritarian regimes that's to say when you have a constitutional change or a shift in the norms which is such they can't be reversed and that of course is the most critical danger primarily in hybrid states that haven't yet consolidated but all of this is a grand experiment to see how far American democracy is also resilient an argument which is still playing out as we write our book so more details all available at my website and I really welcome your thoughts and comments and discussion sorry if I went on continue thank you so much that we have about ten minutes to think about it I know in your work you're saying that economic initiatives actually kind of exacerbate these trends it's not that you're saying economics don't matter but I'm just thank you so much and what I've got this is incredibly small regression analysis with all sorts of controls and all sorts of factors I didn't wish to give you those because it's painful when I do you those in my any presentation as you know right so I always go for the visuals first but I'm very happy to share with you in advance what we're finding when we do that and so what we try to do is say how far there's a range of economic indicators predict support first for values and therefore those and authoritarian populist values authoritarian populist votes etcetera and I do agree with you Kathy that what's most important out of all of these indicators with millions of controls etc etc did you work in manufacturing industry what's your household income have you ever been unemployed and so on the most consistent factor that comes out is subjective income insecurity meaning how do you got savings that you think you can live by or not so that does have an independent effect irrespective of and when controls for age sex da-da-da-da-da the problem partly though is how subjective is this so it's rather like those questions which were asked immediately before and after the 2016 election Kathy when people were asked about the state of the economy and before when Obama was in charge Republicans and people who voted for Trump said oh it's dreadful da da da da everything's going to hell in a handbasket and like two months afterwards Oh the economy is great everything's going great and of course there was a very short small amount of difference in terms of the actual objective indicators of jobs or inflation or anything like that the subjective financial security is important the question really in some ways in is that actually explained by up indicators or is it explained by perceptions of threat and perceptions are obviously very different actuality and I think these are perceptions perceptions which are complex to get at we also look at this by the way by communities so rather like you've done we looked at things like how far does this predict at community level across Europe where the people felt worse off if your factories are closing around you if you haven't got growth if people are leaving all of those things very important you don't want to be one-dimensional Catholic but overall we also find that essentially we think that economic and security can reinforce authoritarian values but it doesn't have a direct effect it doesn't have a central effect and I tell you the clearest example of that without any charts or any evidence where are these parties strong if these parties are strong in countries like Norway which has one of the highest per capita incomes in the world which has a welfare state which is cradle-to-grave where everybody has paternity rights as well the maternity rights and cradle to grave security then it's implausible to say that greater economic inequality or reductions in economic inequality in other societies is going to fix this problem it won't it's a much deeper sense of what's going on and some of the most unequal societies in our comparison across Europe some of the countries like Spain do not have an authoritarian populist party they have a libertarian populist party and Spain and Greece have been two of the worst hit and again in Greece cereza is liberal in its values but strong in its populism so it's complex and it's not immediately obvious that the economic explanation works at country level nor does it work very well at individual level when you bring it into a variety Muggs but it's not without some importance if you could speak I think you said that there is a cultural backlash I'm wondering if that cultural backlash actually in dangers the silencer is it in the long term yes we're arguing that because of this change essentially the tipping point is what catalyzes the polarization the tipping point is what catalyzes the anger on both sides so the as you're a minority gaining if you're a woman in America if you're gay if you're african-american you've gained in civil rights you've gained in opportunities so you feel more satisfied with how things are working you've had those values and you thought you were predominant and you were head go monic then you lose that tipping point is the maximum point of conflict if you like when people become aware of the differences they become aware of the loss and then because that group is more active and articulate because that group has a champion and remember that with donald trump we're talking about 40 percent of the electorate or so right now supporting him the 60 percent have become more liberal also get angry because they realize that they're losing ground politically even though if you look at things like gun control the majority of Americans are against it in the long term as that conservative group and the authoritarian group and the interwar generation dies out then liberal values will take over and we can't say precisely that for example you know it's a 45% 55% sort of balance but you can imagine that there are various ways to respond when you become more than new minority so go back to Norman you've become you could have basically a spiral of silence you could just become quieter you could John accept it once you become a 20 percent minority because you don't want to offend you don't want to have conflict or at this stage we think you could have an activism that energy I and energy on both sides which is fueled by a leader whose transfer recive and who stands for your values and the fact that you really think after Obama that you're losing out and after the normal term trends which all around you and it's not a full sense of loss it's a real sense of loss it's a genuine sense of loss in the game Cathy captured that very well we're not saying that it's a perception and we're not saying again that people are simply being in Liberal for the sake of it they're being a liberal because they're losing status they've got a right to be a liberal in a way but it really messes up what we do in response and the last part of the book has three ways to respond one in a social democrat should say well let's put you know economic solutions first so we'll get job training programs apprenticeships regional aid improve education etc well yeah I don't think that's going to work per se that's just throwing kind of Bernie Sanders the solutions of things which I'm going to actually do the trick secondly you can try and change people's values and attitudes but that's almost impossible and you can also go towards these groups by for example bringing in put sample restrictions on immigrations which are fair and which meet certain standards of human rights but still do meet genuine worries and genuine concerns or you can say this generational conflict is just going to heighten in the short term and they know the long term is probably probably going to climb but you know in the long term we're going to be dead so this is a problem for the next thirty years where we're not dead presumably and we have to live with this extreme polarization that evil heart has been analyzing forever and he's being very strong arguments in the past [Music] earlier you heard that I think it's like out fire on the opinion poor people always quote the one which is just wrong and but it's kind of dramatic right so for a monk very nice to young boys they're just wrong in their graph they're wrong in their data they're wrong in their analysis now does that mean to say that Americans are not in favor of strong leaders and has there been some shifts they have but in our book we look at that and what we demonstrate is it's very much a an amazing shift actually between Republicans and Democrats so there are four items in the world value survey that we use all the time to measure support for these political phenomena so is democracy the best do you support a strong leader without elections do you want the army to take over da da da da da when you look at those the the big change has been between Democrats and Republicans and again sherry I'm happy to share the evidence with you and to show you that and I shall show you what the patterns are and this is really very worrying not not least the fact the proportion of Republicans under Trump who explicitly say strong leader no elections what's the problem that's exactly what they're that's exactly what they'd like and this is in a later related chapter in the book that we that we look at this in some detail to say whether it's whether it is it damaging the city culture but it's not a generational thing I mean that's just a myth an urban myth if you like and the fact that all journalists are sending it around we always use it is just not credible and again I have my article which is in electoral studies sorry Journal of democracy if you want to see any you so it's posted on their website and by the way in this book we don't really use post-materialism too much largely because in most countries it hasn't been measured recently so we have to shift from using post-materialism where the trends kind of finished around 2002 looking at other indicators what we term social liberalism or social conservatism and those are kind of attitudes towards policy issues like gender equality religion etc etc also I'm not I'm not wrong so we are allowed to differ on some issues actually you can defend his but I could depend on yes hold on one sec hold on I think I think we are exhausted maybe pipa that was that was an extraordinary presentation we'll give us all a lot to chew on for the next day and some and many many months after that thank you so much for joining us you may hold on one sec I have to plug you in again if you can see out my window you'll see the center the Tasman Sea and palm trees and various things like that so this is just to make you all heartily jealous of us all come to Sydney at some stage this is great you should be in February in March but in Wisconsin enjoy your drinks have a great time wish I could be with you you know regards to everybody level have a good day you