December 2, 2020
James Hollyer (Minnesota), Marko Klašnja (Georgetown) and Rocío Titiunik (Princeton).
Political Outsiders and Democratic Backsliding
Additional background paper: Parties as Disciplinarians: Charisma and Commitment Problems in Programmatic Campaigning
Abstract
Throughout the democratic world, political parties sometimes turn to candidates for higher office with little experience in government — political outsiders. Parties are most likely to select such candidates when these politicians possess a charismatic authority that appeals to the electorate. However, parties pay a cost for relying on such candidates — reliance on a given candidate’s charismatic authority for electoral success lessens the ability of the party to control the candidate when, and if, she is elected. In this paper, we model the interaction between a chief executive and her party. When parties become highly reliant on a leader’s charisma, they grow less able to sanction the behavior of these leaders in office. This is particularly true in settings characterized by high levels of ideological polarization. For a variety of parameter values, this inversion of the power dynamic between parties and politicians increases the likelihood that demagogic politicians are able to enact anti-democratic policies, and everywhere it increases the likelihood that politicians who enact such policies get away with it. We argue that these dynamics are particularly likely to arise when political outsiders take high office, and seek to test the proposition that the rise of political outsiders is associated autocratic reversions and a decline in the quality of democracy.