When Democracies Start to Self-Destruct: Rachel Myrick on how Polarization Becomes a Geopolitical Threat

In our podcast, Rachel Myrick, the Douglas & Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, discusses with us how extreme partisan polarization threatens not only domestic governance but also global stability. Drawing on her new book, Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability (Princeton University Press, 2025), Myrick argues that polarization in democracies affects foreign policymaking.The conversation begins with a striking example:each year, the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group publishes a list of the world’s top geopolitical risks. The 2024 report placed as the highest risk not the Russian aggression, Middle Eastern conflict, but ‘the United States versus itself’. This diagnosis, Myrick suggests, encapsulates the central claim of her book: extreme party polarization erodes the institutional foundations that once made democracies stable and credible actors abroad. Throughout the podcast, the author unfolds how polarization affects the three pillars that democracies used to have in international relations: the ability to keep foreign policystable over time, to credibly signal information to adversaries and the reliability with partners in international politics. Then, the discussion moves to the ways in which polarization affects foreign policies. In a healthy democracy, leaders are incentivized to provide public goods and act in the national interest.Instead, in extremely polarized environments, politicians do not „target messaging at the median voter and instead work to mobilize their political base”. Voters increasingly view politics as a contest between moral enemies rather than legitimate rivals, caring more about their side’s victorythan about performance or accountability. While the United States provides her primary example, Myrick points to similar patterns across Europe. In younger democracies such as Hungary or Poland, polarisation fuels “executive aggrandizement,” as ruling parties rewrite rules to secure permanent advantage.In established democracies, it simply makes governments less predictable partners internationally. Rachel Myrick ends the conversation with a warning: the greatest threat to international order may no longer come from authoritarian powers, but from democracies unable to govern themselves and to be effective partners.

The end of the last century brought about what scholars have called a “unipolar moment.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, liberalism lost its enemy on the global stage, which led the United States to try to establish an international liberal order by promoting liberalism transnationally. This latter approach has not only been harshly criticized for often being executed hypocritically and sometimes causing disastrous wars, but also ultimately seems to have failed. While Cold War restorationism might be dangerous and mistaken, today’s world again features different authoritarian global powers, with the U.S. seemingly on the path to becoming one itself. Moreover, while democracy promotion by Westernliberal states is deteriorating, scholars have argued that authoritarian powers are increasing their collaboration on theglobal stage to extend authoritarian rule across space and time. In this conversation, Professors Alexander Dukalskisand Alexander Cooley argue that the project to spread liberalism around the world has caused a snapback, in which authoritarian regimes aim to capture and repurpose the actors, tools, and norms once created by liberal democracies for their own ends. Their book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, was published byOxford University Press in September 2025.

Anna Dobrowolska's new book Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain, published at the Oxford University Press this year, reveals fresh perspectives in the scholarship about the socialist states. In our podcast, she explains how Poland and Eastern Europe developed their own distinct approaches to sexual modernity under state socialism.While Western observers assumed sexual liberation was incompatible with communist rule, Poland was quietly developing its own sophisticated approach to sexual modernity. In her book, Anna Dobrowolska aimed to map these differences and nuances. Throughout the conversation, we learn that the conventional narrative of state oppression versus societal resistance proves to be inadequate when examining Poland’s sexual revolution. Dobrowolska’s archival research reveals a complex ecosystem of actors: sexologists, journalists, cultural institutions, who negotiated sexual discourse largely independent of central party directives. These middle-level negotiations created unexpected spaces for sexual expression within the socialist framework, as the book shows. Perhaps most surprisingly, censorship archives reveal that sexual content often received official approval precisely because it served broader state modernisation goals. Conservative citizens frequently petitioned authorities for stricter moral oversight, only to find officials defending more liberal positions.

Borders are rarely born in conference halls. As thenewly edited book The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I, published this yearby Bergahn Books shows that the borders are created by wars and conflicts and then changed by clerks, soldiers, smugglers and villagers trying to make sense of a new world order. By focusing on one of the seemingly post-1918 quieter frontiers, the line separating Austria from Hungary, the bookchallenges the narrative that the Treaty of Trianon neatly decided everything with a stroke of the pen. As two of the editors, Hannes Grandits and Katharina Tyran underline throughout our podcast, the creation of Burgenlandwas a complicated process stretching over several years, entangling ideology, class and everyday survival. The volume’s nine chapters, written by Ibolya Murber, Michael Burri, Ferenc Jankó, Sabine Schmitner-Laszakovits, Gábor Egry, Melinda Harlov-Csortán, Katharina Tyran, Hannes Grandits and Ursula K. Mindler-Steiner, explore this border-making through a tangle of sources from international commission reports, localtestimonies to administrative records. Hannes Grandits notes that although the decision to transfer parts of western Hungary to Austria was made in 1919, it remained unimplemented for nearly two years. In the meantime, loyalties shifted, black markets thrived, and even a brief Bolshevik experiment in Hungary complicated the decision-making process.Throughout this period, identities shifted. Katharina Tyran provides the example of Ivan Dobrović, a Croatian culturalactivist who changed the spelling of his name depending on context. As she emphasizes, this small act captures the fluid identities the new nation-states tried to erase. Other contributors trace the social consequences. The Esterházyfamily saw their estates shrink; local bureaucrats slipped down the social ladder; peasants and artisans, newly politicised, wavered between social democracy and nationalism. Minority communities, Croats, Jews, Roma, foundthemselves suddenly reclassified by powers that barely understood them. This book reads the border negotiation as an anatomy of transition. The conclusion of our conversation is that borders are not only documents, but lived experiences, shaped by people who rarely appear in diplomatic archives. The lesson ofBurgenland is that borders are performed, contested and reimagined every day.

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Mohammad Ali Kadivar to explore the urgent and timely question of popular protests amid global democratic backsliding. Drawing from his acclaimed monograph, Popular Politics and thePath to Durable Democracy, Kadivar poses the following questions: What role does dissent play in sustaining democracies? Do protests reinforce or underminedemocratic institutions? The book offers a compelling and often counterintuitive analysis of how mass mobilizations shape democratic trajectories. Through a rich comparative lens—examining cases from Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Poland—Kadivar argues that prolonged prodemocratic mobilizations can in fact fortify democracies. Rather than destabilizing political systems, these extended collective protest movements build the organizational infrastructure and civic capacity necessary for democratic consolidation.Kadivar emphasizes that sustained mobilization fosters stable leadership, cultivates diverse civic participation, and compels states to engage meaningfully with popular demands. By revisiting pivotal uprisings, such as the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, this conversation reveals underexploreddynamics at the heart of democratic transitions—and challenges conventional assumptions about the disruptive role of protest.

In our latest episode of the special series producedin partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we discuss the recent article co-authored by Jennifer Cyr, Nic Cheeseman and Matías Bianchi, entitled “The Myth of Democratic Resilience” (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No.3, July 2025)In recent years, populist political actors with authoritarian ambitions have been on the rise worldwide, challenging democratic systems from within. This has fueled debate about how resilient such systems are when anti-democratic actors hold power. The question of whether a secondTrump presidency would mark the end of U.S. democracy as we know it remains contested, while it is still uncertain whether Polish democracy can fully recover from the eight years of authoritarian rule under the PiS party. In thisconversation, Jennifer Cyr and Nic Cheeseman reflect on why projects of re-democratization after periods of authoritarian rule often fail in the long term. Drawing on data from the past thirty years, they argue that although democratic coalitions may return to power following autocratization, the vastmajority of these “democratic recoveries” have ultimately failed.

This episode, part of the series When the Far Right and the FarLeft Converge, features Francesco Trupia and Marina Simakova discussing the ideological co-optation of Antonio Gramsci’s ideas by the contemporary (far-)right. They examine when and how right-wing actors adopted his political language, and how political conjunctures in and beyond Europe have shaped this process. The conversation also considers differing interpretations of Gramsciamong the traditional left and liberal authors, both within global academia and beyond. Finally, Trupia and Simakova reflect on the roles of Gramsci’s concepts of “hegemony” and “subaltern” in debates around some of today’s most urgentconflicts, including Russia’s war against Ukraine.

In the second part of our special two-part episode ofthe Review of Democracy podcast, we continue our conversation with André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro, editors of The Recasting of the Latin American Right, published by Cambridge University Press.Building on our first discussion of parties, movements, and leaders, this episode turns to the demand side of the region’s political transformation. We explore how voters’ attitudes, cultural conflicts, and deepening polarization are reshaping right-wing politics across Latin America.We also examine the societal forces driving the rise of conservative and radical right actors — from debates over gender and security to the dynamics ofpolarization. Finally, we connect these regional trends to developments in other parts of the world, reflecting on Latin America’s place within the broader global surge of right-wing politics.

In this special two-part episode of the Review of Democracypodcast, we speak with André Borges, Ryan Lloyd, and Gabriel Vommaro, editors of the book The Recasting of the Latin American Right, recently published by Cambridge University Press.The conversation explores how Latin America’s right has been reshaped since the early 2000s — from the rise of new political parties and movements to the growing role of voters and cultural conflicts.In part 1, we focus on the supply side: parties, movements, and leaders redefining right-wing politics in the region. In part two, we turn to the demand side, examining voters, polarization, and the societal forces driving this transformation.Join us as we map out the new generations of conservative and radical right-wing actors that are changing the political landscape across Latin America — and consider what this means for the future of democracy.

Migration is one of the most salient issues in European politics today. While its importance for voting decisions is widely acknowledged, many of its key characteristics remain the subject of vivid debate. Opinions about migration often diverge sharply: Does migration pose a threat to European societies, or is it essential for economic survival? Arepublic attitudes becoming more hostile, or more welcoming? Should European countries restrict migration, or embrace it? Competing narratives seem to strongly shape migration policy and the laws through which it is implemented.In this conversation, Prof. Andrew Geddes analyzes different narratives on migration and the role they play in policymaking, as well as the rise of right-wing populist actors across Europe. The discussion starts with the question of what narratives are and how they emerge. Prof. Geddes explains that narratives help people make sense of complexities through storytelling, in which plausibility might often matter more than accuracy.However, narratives are also a deeper expression of people’s worldviews and values, through which facts, evidence, and information are filtered. Since worldviews and values are very important to people and often formed early in life, Prof.Geddes points out that narratives tend to be resistant. The frequently made demand that narratives should simply be changed or replaced therefore seems more difficult to realize than is often suggested. The conversation then focuses on the 1990s, a period in which the overall discourse on migration grew more hostile and the narrative of migration as a security threat emerged. At that time, the Austrianpolitician Jörg Haider—often seen as a precursor to today’s right-wing populists—was heavily criticized in European politics. Today, however, his successors exert strong influence on European policymaking, and positions that would have been deemed unacceptable not long ago have entered the mainstream political debate. This shift indicates what many observers describe as the mainstreaming of the far right. However, contrary to what one might discern from public discourse, research by Prof. Geddes and his colleague Prof. James Dennison suggests that European attitudes towardmigration have likely grown more positive over the last thirty years. Their explanation for the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Europe is the sharp increase in the salience of immigration among some voters. While attitudes toward migration may have been more negative decades ago, they were lesselectorally decisive at the time. The constant increase in the salience of migration has thus allowed anti-immigrant parties to win by activating pre-existing opposition to immigration amongst a shrinking segment of the populations of western European states. Prof. Geddes warns that simply tellingpeople who have concerns about immigration—whether legitimate or not—that they are mistaken can harden these positions. Nevertheless, there remains room to shape narratives on migration differently by highlighting the many positive aspects.