Rachel Beatty Riedl Says Economic Inequality Is Fueling Democratic Backsliding

I'm by nature optimistic, but am extremely worried because of the structural moment we live in.

Rachel Beatty Riedl

Political scientist Rachel Beatty Riedl joins host Justin Kempf to examine how extreme economic inequality and the growing power of transnational elites have contributed to democratic backsliding. Drawing on experiences from Africa and other third-wave democracies, Riedl explains how concentrated wealth can weaken states, distort political competition, and prevent citizens’ preferences from being represented equally in government.

Rachel Beatty Riedl is a Professor in the Brooks School of Public Policy and in the Department of Government at Cornell University and the Peggy J. Koenig ’78 Director of the Cornell Center on Democracy. She is the coeditor of Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience with Valerie Bunce, Tom Pepinsky, and Ken Roberts and the author of many articles including “Neoliberalism and the Third Wave" in the Journal of Democracy. 

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. 

Read the full transcript here.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• The Third Wave's Broken Bargain - 4:16
• Elites Without Borders - 14:50
• The Reagan Test - 24:35
• The Rocky Road Ahead - 34:26

Links

Learn more about the Cornell Center on Democracy 

Read the book Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience

Read her article “Neoliberalism and the Third Wave" in the Journal of Democracy

Learn more about Rachel Beatty Riedl.

Learn more about the Kellogg Institute

Apes of the State created all Music

Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com

Transcript

Introduction

Today’s guest is Rachel Beatty Riedl. She’s a returning guest who previously discussed Benin on the show as part of our series of episodes on democracies in hard places. Recently, she’s published a number of articles as well as coediting the volume Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding, Autocracy, and Resilience with Valerie Bunce, Tom Pepinsky, and Ken Roberts. 

Our conversation centers on a piece published in the Journal of Democracy last year called “Neoliberalism and the Third Wave.” I found this was the clearest expression Rachel has made about the relationship between capitalism and democracy. For a long time, economic inequality was viewed as a serious threat to any form of republican government. But the rise of communism led many theorists to view capitalism and representative government as complementary. 

In recent years, I have seen a growing number of scholars argue economic inequality is an underlying cause for the most recent episodes of democratic backsliding. We’ve had a few of them on the show as well as some voices who disagree. Rachel is among those who believe rising economic inequality has led to democratic backsliding. What makes her perspective interesting, however, is her focus on Africa rather than the United States and Europe. 

Rachel and I discuss how the changing economic environment impacts democratic politics. I find her arguments are most persuasive when we consider smaller countries with less developed economies. That doesn’t mean the same arguments cannot apply to the United States. But I do believe it’s important to consider how much harder circumstances have become for many countries to govern democratically in the current political and economic environment. 

My challenge to you is to decide whether neoliberalism is antidemocratic. I encourage you to develop a nuanced answer for this one. It doesn’t have to be a simple yes or no. I ask Rachel this question, for example, and her own answer is somewhere between the two. 

But I’d like to hear your thoughts. If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.

The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Rachel Beatty Riedl…

Podcast Transcript

jmk: Rachel Beatty Riedl, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Thanks for having me. So glad to be here.

jmk: Rachel, I've been really impressed with this absolute proliferation of articles and even an edited volume that you came out with primarily last year in 2025. I mean, you came out with a bunch of key works.

Here, let me just read off a couple of them. You had "Neoliberalism and the Third Wave," which you had written on your own in the Journal of Democracy. But you also had a couple other key articles, such as "Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and Partial Recoveries," as well as "Democratic Backsliding, Resilience, and Resistance."

And then you had an edited volume called Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding Autocracy and Resilience. And I mention all of these because they are different pieces individually, but I do feel like they kind of construct a narrative whole of some different ideas that I'd like to explore in this conversation.

And going back to that first Journal of Democracy article, there was a quote that really stood out to me. I mean, you're linking together ideas of neoliberalism and democracy, which seems to be a theme within all of the works, more so in the individual article, but to somewhat of an extent within all of the pieces.

And in that article you wrote, "Neoliberalism's inherent contradictions have intensified dramatically and its crisis has become democracy's crisis." So the question I've got for you is, how do you think of neoliberalism's crisis? Because that sounds like it's necessary to understand how you think of democracy's crisis today.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Yes. Well, thanks so much for having the opportunity to talk about this, and it's really a set of ongoing conversations as we live through a period of intense technological change and innovation. So we have economic change in terms of the concentration of resources. We have social change that's relating to these technological changes in terms of how we relate to one another and what kind of information we have.

So we're living through a huge period of global change that's akin to the Industrial Revolution. We're living through a digital technological revolution. And so how does neoliberalism and what I call in the Journal of Democracy piece, late-stage neoliberal extractive capitalism relate to that? And what are the crises that we see in this period?

So I really think that to start with this kind of extractive late-stage neoliberalism, there are a couple of core problems or issues that we see. And the first is very abundantly clear that we have the extreme concentration of capital within a transnational economic elite. And that transnational economic elite — call it the 0.01 percent, the 0.001 percent — has their own set of resources and interests that increasingly seem to be untappable or uncontrolled by domestic regime politics.

So if we go back to the core of theories of democracy, thinking about why do elites fear democracy? Because they feared the potential for the people to have redistribution, to tax the wealthy, and to use that taxation towards public services and opportunities for the people as a whole. That's kind of at the basis of the core articles by Carles Boix and Acemoglu and Robinson.

How do we think about the relationship between inequality and democracy and the growth of a middle class that could demand and process that redistributive demand and create a middle class that was a pro-democratic actor? So these are all kind of our core theories of how economic development and political development and competition are linked.

But what we see in this period of extreme concentration of resources and the inability of domestic regimes to really be able to tap that and pull it back into society's investment is that the link to political competition then starts to be limited and constrained by the economic concentration itself.

So when you have such extreme economic control, it begins to also limit political competition in the sphere of who becomes political candidates, what kinds of representative demands are heard and acted upon, who has power in the political system — it's so highly controlled by this series of extreme economic elite that the domestic political bargain of competition and accountability and representation becomes in crisis.

jmk: So you mentioned Boix as well as Acemoglu and Robinson. Their work feels like it came at a very different historical moment. So that was kind of in the very late tail of the third wave of democratization, a much more optimistic period. And it feels like at that time, the key argument that they were making was that democracy was almost a middle ground road as opposed to revolution, which completely tried to redistribute everything into almost a communist state, versus a more autocratic route, which tried to preserve high amounts of inequality.

It feels like you're saying that basic bargain has broken down, that instead of having this middle ground where we have some redistribution, the way that the economy has globalized has broken that agreement because the truly wealthy no longer actually belong to any individual state, and so they're not actually part of that agreement.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Yeah, absolutely. So the reason why I wrote this piece for the Journal of Democracy was as part of a compilation of authors, and we were reflecting on fifty years since the start of the third wave. What lessons can we take from fifty years since the start of the third wave, and what has changed? And so I wanted to focus on, well, what has changed?

And we see a whole body of really robust scholarship that looked at the patterns associated with first, second, and third wave democratization and what were the structural and social requisites that allowed that democratization to take place. And so Acemoglu and Robinson, Boix, and many others — amazing scholars — were looking at the relationship between high levels of development, economic growth, the emergence of a robust, educated, literate middle class, et cetera.

All of those things help support democratic competition. It helps support the competition of ideas, of people, the expression of those ideas, full participation in suffrage, and crucially, equal representation. The idea that our voices, as expressed in the public square, are channeled through some kind of distributive channel, some kind of representative channel to shape the outputs of governance in line with society's needs and demands.

Now, of course, that's never been perfectly implemented, but that basic bargain was a simultaneous transition to political competition and economic liberalization. So these were so linked, and we were going from state-controlled market and price setting to a series of privatization transitions that were incredibly transformative and difficult.

They caused social shocks, economic shocks, new terms of ownership and competition. So that was the context of the third wave in terms of how we think about it, and it meant an incredible opportunity for competition across all sectors of society. But what that has engendered fifty years later, in particular, is this new form of late-stage neoliberal extractive capitalism, of this concentrated wealth at the transnational level that makes those domestic regimes more incapable of that representative function.

And so if we go back to Robert Dahl's theory of democracy — full inclusive suffrage and participation in the public square, participation of voice and of association and competition — the third key dimension is that our preferences are translated and weighted equally in the conduct of government.

And that weighting of citizens' preferences is what has been so diminished in this extreme concentration of inequality. I know you spoke recently with Sue Stokes about her new book, Backsliding. She really looks at the concentration of resources as well, and the structural condition of this kind of massive inequality in a similar vein that suggests that this is really at the root of democratic erosion and backsliding that we see today.

And in particular, it's because this late-stage neoliberalism concentrates capital, and simultaneously it weakens the state's ability to regulate free market economic competition and organize domestic taxation, things like redistribution or public service distribution. But it also focuses on individual incentives and behavior rather than structural interventions.

So this is another kind of feature of our current late-stage capitalism, is that policy interventions will say, "You as an individual should recycle," or, "You as an individual should eat healthy, and that will help climate or that will help our public health crisis. And so here are your individual incentive structures to do that," rather than overseeing some kind of structural intervention that could shape the very nature of addressing the climate crisis or the public health crisis that we face.

So this kind of focus on individualism and individual behavioral incentives is another component of the way in which late-stage neoliberal capitalism is affecting our social, economic, and therefore political systems.

jmk: So there are two different aspects to this, and I want to peel those off from one another. One is the sociological impact in terms of how it affects everyday citizens, in terms of how they think about the world around them, that then impacts the way that they think about politics as well. So that's one aspect, and you kind of just touched on that there. The other aspect is the actual influence of individual people and the way that that's going to impact democracy and the idea that some people have not a little bit more influence, but tremendous influence compared to the rest of the people.

And the key part of that that you mentioned is you keep saying transnational elites because so many of the billionaires that exist live in the United States. And so we think of people who are American citizens having lots of influence within the United States, which doesn't feel quite as wrong as somebody from the United States who's an American citizen having influence in somebody else's country.

And I'm bringing this up in particular because I know that you study Africa, which is a part of the world that is very neglected within current events. It gets overlooked even within scholarship. We seem to be very focused on the United States, Europe, and to a lesser extent, Asia. So let me ask you more about that.

When we're thinking about transnational elites, are we talking about citizens within their own countries, or are we talking about the fact that Elon Musk has influence in pretty much every country throughout the globe?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Absolutely, the latter. When we think about even, for example, our long-standing theories of the natural resource curse, that countries that produce or extract natural resources are less likely to be held accountable by their publics.

We are living in a period of a global natural resource curse. We're extracting natural resources, and those individuals that have concentrated capital at a transnational level are going to make sure they continue to extract resources wherever territorially they may be, and then have great interest in controlling political systems so that they can continue that extraction.

So it's really a breakdown not only of domestic economic to political regime logics, as we were talking about in the redistribution sense, but also a breakdown of sovereign states' ability to regulate and contribute to a free market economic competition, as well as the breakdown of sovereign states' ability to control their own information marketplaces and ensure the purity of the public square for debate, as well as the sovereign state's ability to control its own satellite systems or security systems.

So removing such important key functions from the state — contributing to economic free and fair competition, ensuring an economically competitive marketplace rather than allowing and fostering monopolies, and ensuring rule of law and democratic order as a basic provision — we see all different kinds of transnational actors, what we could call authoritarian actors, working to undermine that domestic regime type for their own material and security benefit.

jmk: So it sounds like you're making the case that neoliberalism, particularly in smaller, less economically developed countries, transferred political power from the state to specific individuals. And the reason why I say specific individuals is neoliberalism was supposed to transfer power of the state to individuals, meaning that you had the ability to make the decisions within the market, that you could decide what products to buy, you had more freedom, there was more diversity within the economy.

It was supposed to empower the individual. But it sounds like what you're saying is that the concentration of power did not change. It just shifted from being something that was state power to private power, and individuals as a whole did not actually increase the amount of freedom or power that they had within the society.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Yeah, I think that's a great distinction between specific individuals and the theory of individual empowerment. And I would say that there has been an arc from, again, the kind of early stage neoliberal transitions that we were talking about in Africa and across Eastern Europe in the early 1990s that were really a remaking of the economic marketplace.

And then to the stage that we're at today — we see this economic concentration has taken place over time. There have been these different successive periods and the way in which the structural transition and relationship between the distribution of resources allowed for different types of relationship to political competition and rights.

jmk: So would you say that neoliberalism is inherently anti-democratic, or is that going too far?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: I think that's going too far because it depends upon the nature of this concentrated capital. As Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way's recent piece shows us, of course, there's inherent benefits from a distribution of resources across individuals, just like you were saying.

You know, when we have the ability for many individuals to have enough resources that they can be politically and economically engaged as stakeholders in the system, that they can try to hold the government to account, those are conditions that are ripe for real democratic and civic engagement. And so the core of the argument is that where political competition is flourishing, it can foster the conditions that allow for economic competition to stay vibrant.

That political competition can choose that as a policy outcome to maintain a healthy, economically competitive environment and allow for that redistribution. But the reverse is not true. Where economic power rules, it doesn't necessarily foster political competition and rights. So if you have the kind of unfettered economic control, it doesn't create the conditions for a type of neoliberalism that could be self-sustaining and synergistic.

jmk: So the proliferation of democracy happened at the same time that we were having a loosening of state controls that we look back on and describe as neoliberalism. You're saying that as neoliberalism developed and moved forward, that democratization then shifted and began to backslide.

What was the primary cause of that shift? When was it that we actually saw these two converge, that neoliberalism had gone too far, and it caused democracy to go from an upward trajectory to a downward one? I mean, are those two directly linked, or is it more of an indirect connection between the two?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: I do think that these are large, gigantic, and transnational, slow-moving structural changes that accumulate over time.

So we start to see in the United States and Europe, the UK in particular, the era of deregulation and extreme privatization, even in the '80s, that preceded the kinds of transitions we're talking about in Africa around ending state-controlled marketing boards, but helped to drive the mentality and models around economic privatization and competition.

So the slow move in that direction has been accumulating, and then we see a real move away from political opportunities to increase democratic citizens' voices. So, for example, in the United States, one of the landmark Supreme Court cases is Citizens United, that determined that corporations could have unlimited voice, and it really reduced the power of the individual.

And so that goes back to that kind of third pillar of Dahl around, are our preferences weighted equally in the conduct of government, or are some preferences weighted so much more heavily based on political strategic decisions among those select few? So this concentration of political and economic power and its fusion at the very top is something that has been accumulating slowly.

But when we look at things like the World Inequality Lab data, this new report out by Piketty et al., a whole bunch of authors, the real thing that they look at in terms of the driving contributions to this economic inequality are the political shifts and backing away from the distributive politics that could contain it.

jmk: So when I think about Reagan and Reagan's case for linking democratization and economic liberalization, I mean, he saw it as — if you put economic power within the state, concentrated all economic power within a single actor, it meant that if the state didn't like you, you were struggling economically at the same time.

And so one of the cases that Reagan and Thatcher and people that we think of as really the originators of neoliberal policies — who saw this as being something that was more democratic — was that if you decentralize that, if you had multiple sources of economic power rather than a single one, it meant that just because you were outside the political sphere didn't mean that you were punished economically at the same time. And so even the globalization of these global elites, according to Reagan and Thatcher, would have meant that you have a plurality of people with economic resources within every country.

Whereas a small country might normally only have maybe one person who has significant wealth against the state, now you have all of these people from around the world that you can rely on for positions, for jobs, for economic opportunities. And so the question I've got for you is, are you saying that that idea was fundamentally wrong because all of these economic elites have the same interests at heart? Or is there something to that argument because these different economic elites do compete, just maybe not as much as we would have liked?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: That's a good question, and I would look at two factors of this key moment of transition from state-led economies to competitive economies, and in particular across Africa and across Eastern Europe as these parallel moments in the early nineties.

And one of the things that we saw was that the transition itself was based on these theories of distribution, just as you were saying. We'll be able to distribute to many different sources and move away from state central control. But what we saw is that politics never leaves us. So who was able to capture the benefit of that privatization period?

Who was able to buy off parts of state-owned enterprises and make it privately held? It was often politically linked individuals, loyalists, cronies, who then made up a new class of the capitalist elite, who continue to share interests in then controlling the political system to a certain degree to benefit from that shift in where resources are held.

So here, one of the famous articles — it's the J curve and the kind of stagnation that happens — rather than the costs of the transition that are harsh in terms of the public, we're supposed to get to this distribution and growth that comes out of the cost of the transition and the shock therapy. But what often happens is if some crony elites capture that privatization process, then the full benefits to society are never actually realized.

And then they have enough concentrated resources to really be able to control the political game going forward. So I'm thinking here, for example, if we look at the case of Benin, such an important and exciting case for us to look at in terms of its political dynamism, its transition in the third wave, its economic transitions — so both this kind of political and economic liberalization in the nineties.

And you have the recent president, Talon, who benefited enormously from his economic control, both over the agricultural sector — so he's called the King of Cotton — but even more importantly, his control over the port. So he controlled basically the import-export licensing business for the economy of Benin.

And that economic power actually made him the decider of who he was putting his weight behind materially for prior presidents. And then when a prior president threatened his economic control of the port, he decided, well, he better be president because it's easier to make sure you economically continue to win if there's no middleman.

So this is just to say that the process of privatization, in theory, allows that kind of distribution. But the way that it often happens in practice continues to concentrate resources amongst an economic and political elite. And so more democracy and better democracy is really the recourse. Allowing people to hold politically and economically powerful elites accountable is really the only way forward.

jmk: I don't think anybody would ever argue that you shouldn't hold elites accountable. I guess what I'm still trying to work through is that in the case of Benin, you mentioned Patrice Talon, who was the former president and, as you said, an economic elite in his own right. And that follows the process that we think of in our brain in terms of how economic liberalization worked, is that you have elites that rise up within the country that are now homegrown economic elites.

We think of oligarchs within the former Soviet Union, like in Russia, in Ukraine, and these other countries. But it feels like where it went wrong is oftentimes when the country had not democratized far enough. So for example, in Russia, there were economic elites that wanted to challenge Putin at different moments, and they were both economically as well as criminally punished as a result of that.

Putin clamped down on those elites, and that's part of the reason why you don't have a more vibrant politics within the country — even though there are a lot of different people with economic resources, they can't always translate that into independent political power. Where I'm pushing back a little bit is that the idea is supposed to be that if there's more than one elite, that eventually they're going to butt heads and there's going to be political conflict that then gives ordinary citizens an opportunity to rise up and be able to pick sides and shape public policy.

It sounds like you're saying that the economic elites are so aligned that there isn't an opportunity for that type of competition to happen, and as a result, democracy tends to shift towards something that's much more autocratic in practice, if not on paper.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: I don't think that the economic elites — especially at the transnational level — are so strategically coordinated nor instrumentally aligned that they don't have conflict. They do. And that is in large part the function of democracy, to let these kinds of competitions and conflicts play out within bounded sets of rules. So rather than violence, we have the ability for elites to compete and, as you said, for citizens to have the opportunity to shape the direction of that competition.

But what is striking is what is causing the inability of citizen voices to cut through and be heard within that competition of elite interests, and this is what the Journal of Democracy piece highlights, is that the structural conditions of this concentrated capital are limiting democracy in both third wave — more newly institutionalized, more recent, sometimes less economically developed democracies like Benin, Senegal, Zambia, et cetera.

As well as in long-standing established advanced industrial democracies like the United States. And those are the places where our theories would have suggested that we had sufficient levels of economic distribution across different competing powers that we would be able to sustain democracy. And so I think that is really the question that we are facing today in the United States and across many advanced industrial democracies — Poland, Hungary, et cetera.

The extent to which resources are sufficiently distributed or whether elites can collude sufficiently to maintain their economic power even though they have varying interests. And here the logic of collective action doesn't bode well for the public. The extent to which the global crises that need governance responses feel kind of very beyond our reach in terms of addressing the climate crisis and addressing this extreme inequality, addressing concerns about education or public health or infrastructure, et cetera.

Whereas the very few actors who have so much to gain from one slight change — that makes it difficult to break even if economic elites do vary in their preferences.

jmk: Now, a lot of these conversations are shaped by the experiences that we have in the United States and Europe. And we can be talking about growth of inequality within the United States, within Europe, within developed parts of Asia as well, like Japan, South Korea, places like that.

However, I think it just takes on a completely different level when we think of Africa, particularly smaller African countries. Like I'd imagine a country like Lesotho that is entirely surrounded by South Africa, has a very small population, I would imagine has a very small economy, has very few homegrown economic elites, and so it's very easy for people from outside of it to control its economy.

And to the extent that there are homegrown economic elites, I would imagine that there are very few. I would imagine that other countries that are even mid-size — I mean, Africa is a great example because the continent is so large and has so many different countries that have varying levels of democratization within those countries.

Many are very autocratic, but some have varied levels of democratization. Ghana would be another good example. It's not a very large country in the grand scheme of things, and yet at the same time it's fairly democratic, doesn't have an extraordinarily developed economy, although it's doing fairly well compared to African countries, and yet this would be a country that I would think would be very easy for large billionaires to have tremendous influence in without even having citizenship within those countries.

Is the solution to close those countries off from the global economy?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: So you are absolutely correct in the sense that the desire of either economic elites as corporations or states — so for example, China in particular — to invest in an extractive capacity in Africa has been growing along with this kind of technological revolution that is powered by many of the natural resources, the minerals that are located across the continent.

So we see an immense geopolitical and economic competition for the ability to extract in this late stage neoliberal extractive capitalism. What does that mean for African democracy? Again, here I return to the idea that closing off is not the answer, but more and better democracy is really the answer in terms of meeting the need of the people.

So a government that is responsive to the well-being and thriving of its own citizens will best be able to negotiate and protect the land, the water, and use the resources of the country responsibly to generate wealth for other types of thriving investment in education and health and infrastructure and other types of industries.

So escaping the transnational resource curse is possible, but it requires the demands of citizens to be channeled through those relationships to transnational actors who have a great need for the very valuable resources across the continent. And so I think this is really an incredibly important time in Africa when we look at the domestic to international interactions and these feedback loops between transnational capital and what it means for regime type and for public-serving governance.

jmk: I'm always gonna be on the side of saying that we should have more democracy. I mean, I'm not gonna be opposed to that. I think that's a great idea. The challenge I think that we have is you are saying that the economic conditions that exist today are causing democracy to erode, are causing our institutions to erode, that are necessary for democracy to thrive.

And the answer to that is just rebuild our institutions and double down on democracy. But all of the conditions that usually make it easier to build democracy are slipping away from our grasp. And so how do we fix that? I mean, having better democracy, having more complete democracy would be great. But if all of the conditions are the reason why democracy is decaying, how is it that we reverse that?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: So democracy has all of these headwinds. It has a lot of structural constraints. That's what we've just been talking about, and that is why we see the erosion and backsliding around the world in all different democracies and economies. So how do we get out of that? Well, one of the interesting things about these really challenging moments — economic crises, social crises, questions of how the country advances, these high levels of tension and contestation and feeling that democracy needs reform or it's not delivering — it's not guaranteed that it goes in a unilineal direction of democratic improvements.

That's certainly not a guaranteed outcome. But it is possible that grassroots demand for better governance, for more responsive, inclusive, pluralistic public service provision is one possible outcome from these moments of intense crisis. And the other possibility that we've seen globally, historically, and contemporarily is that these kinds of crisis moments lead people outside of the realm of democratic, systemic rule of law and contestation to anti-system candidates and anti-system processes.

So that could include violence. It can include voting for candidates who are not upholding the rule of law and who weaken the very institutions that are meant to allow for those kinds of rights. So there are choices to be made, and the bet on democracy is that it is a self-correcting mechanism. It's the only system that allows for feedback loops, and when your government's not performing, you're supposed to be able to speak, share information, hold the government accountable, and vote in alternatives.

And so the choices for citizens around the world who are facing these constraints and feeling that their systems are not meeting their preferences equally in the conduct of government is to double down in demanding that democracy deliver. So really, in this sense, the causes of backsliding are both structural and elite. The elites are creating the conditions, but the solutions will also be from the organization of the people towards a more democratic future and to create the governments that can provide for them. It's not an easy road. It's not at all guaranteed, but that's the hope that democracy continues to provide.

jmk: So you mentioned that democracy doesn't always progress in a linear line. Are you suggesting that for democracy to overcome certain plateaus, it does need some setbacks to be able to make progress, to break through certain ceilings?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Yeah. I think the democratic process is continually contested and, as we know, always imperfect. And so democratic progress historically has been made through taking on real constraints. When we look at increasing suffrage around the world, which is gradual but is built on movements, mobilization, building coalitions, demanding rights, and aligning sometimes that expansion of rights with certain sectors of that economic and political elite competition.

So economic and political elite A versus economic and political elite B. If one sector of expanding suffrage and rights can benefit from this expansion, that can be a really key alignment. So thinking about really critical successes of democracy, they certainly come out of moments of contestation, and they often come out of crises.

So again, kind of looking at the third wave lessons, these moments of real political and economic reform came out of the deep economic stagnation and political crises of the prior systems that weren't working. So these expansions can come out of real moments of crisis, and democratic progress can also create its own reactionary pushback.

So some of the concerns that we see today as they're articulated around the world are people reacting to democracy's gains, that we have increased rights over the last fifty years on a global scale, that we have increased protections for those who are vulnerable or marginalized in society, whether it's by gender, race, religion, ethnicity, language, whatever the important social cleavages in society may be, that where there have been democratic gains, that creates a certain type of threat to the status quo.

And so we should expect that democracy's successes also create reactionary pushback. And so then the question is, what direction do they continue to unfold in?

jmk: So on the whole then, thinking about the long term, do you still find yourself optimistic about democracy's trajectory, or do you find yourself pessimistic?

Rachel Beatty Riedl: That's a really difficult one. I'm by nature optimistic, but I am extremely worried because of the structural moments that we live in. I'm extremely worried about the short term. If we think about Dankwart Rustow's hot family feud, that we have to go through these moments of real social contestation and come out of it with a new sense of cohesion or solidarity, and that allows for democratic institutions and functioning around it.

I think because of this kind of technological revolution that we're living through, the way in which it's concentrating capital, but also the ways in which it individualizes and divides us and makes us into an atomized society, we're living through a new period in terms of how our political systems relate to questions around social solidarity and economic distribution.

So for the short term, I think we have a rocky road ahead, but I retain optimism in the ability for citizens to want rights, to demand rights, and ultimately to guarantee rights for ourselves and for each other.

jmk: Well, Rachel Beatty Riedl, thank you so much for joining me today. Want to plug a couple of the articles and book one more time. The article we've kind of been talking about primarily is "Neoliberalism and the Third Wave" in the recent Journal of Democracy, and a great edited volume that you wrote with a number of people from Cornell was Global Challenges to Democracy: Comparative Perspectives on Backsliding Autocracy and Resilience. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing those.

Rachel Beatty Riedl: Thanks for having me, and thanks for this conversation. It's a real pleasure.