Ultimate Failure Via Major Accomplishments – Julian E. Zelizer on the Paradoxes of Joe Biden’s Presidency

In this episode of our podcast series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Andrés Mejía Acosta and Javier Pérez Sandoval about their new article, “Why Populists Hollow Out Their States.” They discuss how, why, and when elected leaders seek to undermine the state; what libertarians and leftists share when it comes to practices of state erosion and where they might differ; how the pertinent examples from Latin America they present in the article may be placed in a global context; and in what ways the connections between low-capacity states and flawed democracy may be conceptualized.Andrés Mejía Acosta is associate professor at theUniversity of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs.Javier Pérez Sandoval is a postdoctoral research associatein democracy at Notre Dame.Alina Young edited the audio file.

In this conversation, Julian E. Zelizer – editor of the new volume The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden. A First Historical Assessment – discusses the key accomplishments of Joe Biden’s presidency as well as the sources of his ultimate failure to fulfil his promise. He explores the historical origins of the Biden presidency, reflects on its foreign policy record, and considers the questions future historians will be debating.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recent crises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force is not new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism.Our focus throughout this series will fall on the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments ofepidemic disease, religious fracture and institutional weakness. They explained crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collective anxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a fine barometer ofthe how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our third podcast, we host Ádám Mézes, with whom we discuss the fascinating topic of vampire contagion in the Habsburg Empire and its broader impact on the history of science. As in the earlier conversation with Kateryna Dysa on witchcraft trials, the discussion begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a vampire, and who has the authority to define it? The first clear definition of vampires in the Habsburg lands comes from a medical report written in 1732. It describes the vampire as “a returning dead, a revenant, a physical corpse that (…) it is also to spread its condition to its victims”, asour guest emphasizes. Because Ádám Mézes focuses on the Habsburg case, most of the written sources he uses come from medical personnel and members of the clergy. These reports were mediated through translators and shaped by theconceptual frameworks of imperial officials. Many of them interpreted the unfamiliar beliefs through the categories of Catholic demonology. Thus, religious confessions played an essential role in defining vampires. The conversation then moves to the specific political and epidemiological context of the Habsburg military frontier, which strongly influenced the perception about vampires. Officials stationed along the frontier were trained to watch for signs of contagious disease. When several unexplained deaths occurred in the same village, suspicion quickly spread. As John Blair emphasized in our first podcast of this series, reports of vampires often emerged as a possible explanation for the sudden wave of deaths.In an ironic twist, the focus on vampires had an important effect on scientific investigation. Mézes brings the examples of two physicians who exhumed and dissected bodies suspected of being vampires. At that time, systematic research on human bodies was morally and legally constrained. However, by observing cases of suspected vampirism, such physicians could produce empirical insightsabout the human body and the process of decay. Our discussion concludes with possible avenues for future research. Our guest emphasizes that primary sources in Orthodox and Catholic monastic archives, as well as administrative records, still require investigation. In turn, thehistorians should move away from the literary stereotypes created in the 18th and 19th centuries and focus instead on reconstructing the complex social worlds in which the figure of the vampire first took shape.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Gabriela Lotta about Democracy on a Tightrope: Politics and Bureaucracy in Brazil,co-authored with Pedro Abramovay and recently published by Central European University Press .Drawing on the Brazilian case, the conversation explores the risks that emerge when the relationship between politics and bureaucracy breaks down: on the one hand, therise of technocratic governance and the “fetishization of meritocracy”; on the other, the erosion of bureaucratic institutions by political leaders.Through a series of concrete policy cases, Lotta reflects on how these tensions shape democratic governance and what a more productive relationship between politicalleadership, expertise, and citizen participation might look like—both in Brazil and beyond.

What happens when democracy faces violence as a recurring feature of political life? In this episode, we discuss the DANGER – Democracy, Anger, and Elite Response European Research Council (ERC) project with PrincipalInvestigator, Nils-Christian Bormann. This EU-funded research project examines how European democracies responded to political violence, economic crisis, and rising extremism in the interwar period.The conversation explores the project’s core questions, including how violence interacts with democratic stability and what role political elites play in moments of crisis. We also discuss the project’s mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale data collection with in-depth historical casestudies, as well as innovative open-source datasets and visualisations. The episode highlights key early findings, most notably the relationship between local violence and support for extremist parties and reflects on what these historical patterns might tell us about the vulnerabilities of contemporary democracies.

In many democracies today, elected leaders challenge institutions, undermine electoral rules, and test the limits of constitutional order. Yet legal accountability for suchactions remains rare. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, produced in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Luciano Da Ros and Manoel Gehrke about their article “How toBring Authoritarians to Justice.” Focusing on Brazil’s response to Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to overturn the 2022 election results, they examine how courts can confront authoritarian behavior by elected leaders—and why judicial action sometimes succeeds where political opposition alone does not. The conversation explores the strategic role of Brazil’s high courts, the tensions between judicial intervention and democratic legitimacy, and what Brazil’s experience reveals about the broader challenge of defending democracy in thetwenty-first century.

In this latest conversation, we speak with Minxin Peiabout his latest book, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2025),which challenges the enduring assumption that economic development naturally leads to democracy. Pei argues that China’s post-Mao reforms produced not political liberalization but a resilient, adaptive form of authoritarianism.Focusing on the Deng Xiaoping time, he shows how these changes also reinforced centralized authority, fostered corruption, and sidelined reformist actors—laying the groundwork for neo-authoritarian rule. The conversation turns to nationalism and the Patriotic Education Campaign, probing how nationalism in contemporary China has been mobilized to legitimize Xi Jinping’s totalizing control. We ask whether the features once seen as China’s strengths—partydominance and controlled markets—are now sources of fragility under Xi Jinping.Dwelling on the significance of the title of the book, we explore how the rise of China, counterintuitive to many in the West, is ultimately an example of contradictions inherent in modern as well as Chinese politics.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recentcrises framed as almost  magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinaryaccountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force isnot new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fallon the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture andinstitutional weakness. They offered an explanation for crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collectiveanxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a finebarometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our second podcast of this series, we have as guest Kateryna Dysa, with whom we will discuss her extremely fascinating book Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th and 18th Centuries, published by the CEU Press in 2023. In this research, she reconstructs the history of witchcraft in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the three so-called “Ruthenian” palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Podolia, Ruthenia, and Volhynia. Our conversation begins with a conceptual question: what counts as a witch and who defines one? Kateryna Dysa reveals that geographical nuances need to be taken into account. In a region situated at the nexus between Catholicism andOrthodoxy, the definitions were less fixed as they emerged from the local community rather from theologians. The nature of primary sources also differs from thetraditional scholarship on this field. Drawing on 198 primary sources, most of them court books, Dysa reveals a judicial culture markedly different from the better-known Western European persecutions. In most cases, accusations did notculminate in execution. Often, only complaints were recorded; investigations were limited, and verdicts tended to be mild. Death sentences were rare and typically entangled withstark social hierarchies, where accusations flowed upward from elites against socially vulnerable individuals.The episode then turns to gender. Rather than endorsing a monolithic narrative of patriarchal persecution, Dysa emphasizes the social logic of witchcraft accusations as embedded in everyday tensions, including fears surrounding love magic, food, and bodily vulnerability. Finally, the discussion moves to the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the eighteenth century, state centralization and rationalist reform curtailed formal prosecutions, but popular belief persisted, sometimes leading to extrajudicial violence. In thenineteenth century, Romanticism transformed the witch into a literary and folkloric figure, reshaping her image and symbolic function.

In our new podcast, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul about their Journalof Democracy article, “Why Gen-Z Is Rising.” Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul discuss the politicalprofile of Gen-Z protesters, what ignited their recent protests across the globe, and how those protests unfolded invarious places. They reflect on the promises and perils of those protests – and how the related question of violence and non-violence has played out. In closing, Erica and Matthew consider what kind of political transformations weare likely to see as members of Gen-Z will take on ever greater roles in the coming years.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, political theorist Shuk Ying Chan (UCL) discusses her new book Postcolonial Global Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026), which develops an account of postcolonial global justice as social equality by thinking with anticolonial leaders Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and JawaharlalNehru. Chan explains her method of “historically inflected normative theorising”, which treats specific historical actors as interlocutors in developing normative principles for the present. The discussion also explores how the nation-state was often an instrument used by these thinkers to pursue abroader ideal of relational equality, and Chan’s conceptualisation of postcolonial global justice as a matter of social equality, focusing on the ability of individuals and groups to “stand as equals”. Finally, the conversation turns to contemporary problems of undemocratic global governanceand Chan’s proposal to rethink global democracy in terms of horizontal inequalities of power between groups, rather than only a vertical gap between individuals and global institutions.