In The Arena

Episode HighlightsWhat Illiberalism Looks Like"I think all of us grew up on the idea, I don't know, from watching movies, you know, that there's such thing as democracy, and then there's a coup d'etat lead by, I don't know, a colonel and a tank and then, you know, they come over and they shoot up the Presidential Palace and then we have dictatorship. And that somehow, you know, you have one or you have the other and there's nothing in between. One of the things that's become really clear over the last decade is that there are some forms of politics that are in between. So, we have seen, for example, what it looks like in Hungary to have a Prime Minister, who once he took power, began to subtly, and sometimes unsubtly, alter the political system to make it very difficult for him to lose another election. And we saw the same thing in Poland, very similar, a little bit clumsier actually."Why Authoritarian States Have Elections"One of the effects of, I mean it's probably the long tail of 1989, one of the effects