This article was originally published in Stanford News 

By Melissa DeWitte

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released March 11.

When populist leaders discredit formal institutions and functions, democracy is being undermined and hollowed out, warns Stanford political scientist and paper co-author Anna Grzymala-Busse.

Here, Grzymala-Busse discusses what is at stake for democracies worldwide if populist rhetoric continues to take hold. As Grzymala-Busse points out, populists’ grievances about government failures are not entirely baseless. That’s why Grzymala-Busse and the paper’s co-authors – who include director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, and political scientists Francis Fukuyama and Didi Kuo – argue that populism is a political problem that requires political solutions.

Their paper, Global Populisms and Their Challenges, released Mar. 11 through the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), outlines what mainstream political parties must do to protect democracies from populists, including strategies such as reclaiming the rule of law and upholding democratic norms and values.

Why do some politicians find populist arguments so appealing?

Populism argues that elites are corrupt and the people need better representation, but makes very few policy commitments beyond this criticism. There’s been increasing distrust regarding political parties and politicians, especially given various funding and election scandals. And so people readily believe that these actors are corrupt and not to be trusted.

It is a message that is credible these days. It is also a message that doesn’t tie politicians down to any other ideological or policy commitment.

Why is populism on the rise?

The immediate causes are the failures of mainstream political parties – parties of the center-left and center-right – to meet voter concerns and respond with distinct policies. In both Europe and in the United States, many voters who support populists want a change from politics as usual, which they view as unresponsive and unaccountable, and who fear losing cultural and economic status. They perceive that politicians have failed to respond to immigration, free trade, international cooperation, and technological advances and the threats they pose to many voters.

According to your research, what makes populist rhetoric detrimental to democratic governance?

Populist politicians and governments view the formal institutions of liberal democracy as corrupt creations spawned by crooked establishment elites – and so they systematically hollow out and undermine these institutions, such as the courts, regulatory agencies, intelligence services, the press, and so on. They justify these attacks as replacing discredited and corrupt institutions with ones that serves “the people” – or, in other words, populist parties and politicians. Moreover, precisely because populists claim to represent “the people,” they have to define the people first and that often means excluding vulnerable and marginalized populations, such as religious or ethnic minorities and immigrants.

For example, in Hungary, the governing populist party brought the courts under political control, abolished regulatory agencies, and funneled funding to allied newspapers and media. In Poland, the chair of the governing populist party refers to his opponents as a “worse sort of Poles.”

In the short term, what can be done to counter the effects of populism?

Vote! Vote for politicians and parties who make credible promises, who do not simply want to shut down criticism or who view their opponents as their enemies, and who are committed to the democratic rules of the game. At the same time, we need to understand, not just condemn, why so many voters find populist politicians appealing.

And in the long term?

Mainstream political parties need to credibly differentiate themselves, become far more responsive to their voters and consistently articulate and uphold the democratic rules of the game. Our research finds that where mainstream political parties are strong, populists stand far less of a chance of making inroads. Such parties would also be far more responsive to voter concerns about economic and cultural status, which also motivate populist support.

Some of the paper’s findings are from Global Populisms, a project sponsored by the Hewlett Foundation at FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CCDRL).

The rise of populism – a political argument that pits ordinary people against a corrupt, government elite – is putting democracy at risk, said Stanford scholars in a new white paper released today.

Once associated with Latin American and post-communist democracies, populist parties and politicians have now gained support and power in established democracies. Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) experts Anna Grzymala-Busse, Didi Kuo, and Francis Fukuyama — co-authors of a new white paper, “Global Populisms and Their Challenges” — joined FSI Director Michael McFaul on the World Class podcast to discuss how to spot a populist, how populism threatens democracy, and whether the movement can be stopped. 

Populists and populist parties are a threat to liberal democracy, and they generally make two claims: first, that the elites are corrupt and self-serving, and that the will of the people has to be better represented; and second, that those who disagree with the populist representation of “the people” are not the “real” nation, Grzymala-Busse said.

[Read the full report “Global Populisms and Their Challenges”]

“It’s very much a criticism of democracy,” she told McFaul, who is also a co-author of the report. “It doesn’t call for specific sets of solutions for institutions — it can be anti- or pro-democractic, but fundamentally it’s a criticism of how liberal democracy functions.” 

A common practice among right-wing populists is to define the “people” as a dominant ethnic group, and to exclude groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, immigrants, or marginalized economic groups, Fukuyama pointed out, and added that populists on the left tend to not make that kind of distinction. 

Populist leaders have typically used democratic institutions as a means to come to power, Kuo said.

“It’s a two-step process,” Kuo explained. “Once [populist leaders] are in power, they go after the liberal foundations of democracy and potentially the democratic institutions themselves.”

For example, a leader like Russia’s Vladimir Putin — who does not criticize the elite and who is not functioning in a democracy — would not be considered a populist, said Grzymala-Busse. However, people like U.S. President Donald Trump, French politician Marine Le Pen, and Italy’s Matteo Salvini would be.

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Immigration and globalization have contributed to the rise of populism, said Fukuyama, who pointed to the 2014 Syrian migrant crisis as a trigger in Europe.

“All of a sudden a million non-white, non-European people show up in a part of the world that’s not used to this sort of thing,” Fukuyama said. “It produced what the right calls ‘cultural replacement.’ This is language that you hear in the U.S. from Donald Trump and his supporters — I think it’s something that binds a lot of these groups together.”

While all three experts were not optimistic that the populist wave will be stopped in America in the near future, voters in European countries such as Slovakia and Croatia have been pushing for anti-corruption, anti-populist candidates, they said.

“Parties of the left have to figure out how to capture the symbolism around the nation — people want to belong to a community, and over the last 30 years, the left has fractured into a lot of different, partial identities,” said Fukuyama. “The idea that you have a broader democratic civic identity that all Americans share is important culturally to give people the idea that they’re actually living in the same community.” 

Related: Learn more about FSI’s Global Populisms Project

Taiwan is only 81 miles off the coast of mainland China and was expected to be hard hit by the coronavirus, due to its proximity and the number of flights between the island nation and its massive neighbor to the west.

Yet it has so far managed to prevent the coronavirus from heavily impacting its 23 million citizens, despite hundreds of thousands of them working and residing in China.

According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases map, as of Tuesday there were only 42 cases and one death in Taiwan, far behind China, with more than 80,000 cases and more than 2,900 deaths. The country also lags far behind its other Asian neighbors and ranks 17^th in the world for the number of global cases. As of this writing, South Korea was second, with 5,186 cases; followed by Iran with 2,336 and Italy with 2,036 people infected with the virus.

The United States currently stands at 107 known cases and six deaths.

The viral outbreak in China occurred just before the Lunar New Year, during which time millions of Chinese and Taiwanese were expected to travel for the holidays.

So what steps did Taiwan take to protect its people? And could those steps be replicated here at home?

Stanford Health Policy’s Jason Wang, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Medicine who also has a PhD in policy analysis, credits his native Taiwan with using new technology and a robust pandemic prevention plan put into place at the 2003 SARS outbreak.

“The Taiwan government established the National Health Command Center (NHCC) after SARS and it’s become part of a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak responses and acts as the operational command point for direct communications,” said Wang, a pediatrician and the director of the Center for Policy, Outcomes, and Prevention at Stanford. The NHCC also established the Central Epidemic Command Center, which was activated in early January.

“And Taiwan rapidly produced and implemented a list of at least 124 action items in the past five weeks to protect public health,” Wang said. “The policies and actions go beyond border control because they recognized that that wasn’t enough.”

Wang outlines the measures Taiwan took in the last six weeks in an article published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Given the continual spread of COVID-19 around the world, understanding the action items that were implemented quickly in Taiwan, and the effectiveness of these actions in preventing a large-scale epidemic, may be instructive for other countries,” Wang and his co-authors wrote.

Within the last five weeks, Wang said, the Taiwan epidemic command center rapidly implemented those 124 action items, including border control from the air and sea, case identification using new data and technology, quarantine of suspicious cases, educating the public while fighting misinformation, negotiating with other countries — and formulating policies for schools and businesses to follow.

Big Data Analytics

The authors note that Taiwan integrated its national health insurance database with its immigration and customs database to begin the creation of big data for analytics. That allowed them case identification by generating real-time alerts during a clinical visit based on travel history and clinical symptoms.

Taipei also used Quick Response (QR) code scanning and online reporting of travel history and health symptoms to classify travelers’ infectious risks based on flight origin and travel history in the last 14 days. People who had not traveled to high-risk areas were sent a health declaration border pass via SMS for faster immigration clearance; those who had traveled to high-risk areas were quarantined at home and tracked through their mobile phones to ensure that they stayed home during the incubation period.

The country also instituted a toll-free hotline for citizens to report suspicious symptoms in themselves or others. As the disease progressed, the government called on major cities to establish their own hotlines so that the main hotline would not become jammed.

Some might say that because Taiwan is such a small country — about 19 times smaller than Texas — it is easier to mobilize during emergencies. Yet Taiwan is particularly challenged by its proximity to China and the fact that 850,000 of its citizens reside on the mainland; another 400,000 work there. Taiwan had 2.71 million visitors from China last year.

So when the WHO was notified on Dec. 31, 2019, of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, Taiwanese officials began to board planes and assess passengers on direct flights from Wuhan for fever and pneumonia symptoms before passengers could deplane.

As early as Jan. 5, notification was expanded to include any individual who had traveled to Wuhan in the past 14 days and had a fever or symptoms of upper respiratory tract infection at the point of entry. Suspected cases were screened for 26 viruses, including SARS and MERS. Passengers displaying symptoms were quarantined at home and assessed whether medical attention at a hospital was necessary.

What the U.S. Could Learn

One of Wang’s co-authors, Robert H. Brook, M.D., ScD., of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said Washington could learn a great deal from Taiwan’s so-far successful management of the virus.

“In Taiwan, diverse political parties were willing to work together to produce an immediate response to the danger,” said Brook, also of the nonprofit RAND Corporation. “Transparency was critical and frequent communication to the public from a trusted official was paramount to reducing public panic.”

The other co-author of their study is Chun Y. Ng, MBA, MPH, of The New School for Leadership in Health Care, Koo Foundation Sun Yat-Sen Cancer Center, Taipei, Taiwan.

Brook said Taiwan got out ahead of the epidemic by setting up a physical command center to facilitate rapid communications. The command center set the price of masks and used government funds and military personnel to increase mask production. By Jan. 20, the Taiwan CDC announced that it had a stockpile of 44 million surgical masks, 1.9 million N95 masks and 1,100 negative pressure isolation rooms.

“In a country as complex as the United States,” Brook said, “there needs to be a sharing of intelligence on a real-time basis among states and the federal government so that action is not delayed by going through formal channels.”

Please contact Beth Duff-Brown for media requests.