SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina – Though democracies have demonstrated surprising resilience in recent decades, populism has emerged as a major threat, Harvard government professor Steven Levitsky warned fact-checkers Friday.

Populist candidates are winning elections today much more frequently than at any other time in history, Levitsky told attendees at GlobalFact 11, an annual fact-checking conference by Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network held this year in Sarajevo. One of the reasons populism is on the rise is because political establishments — which include political parties, large interest groups and major traditional media outlets — are weakening. Populists no longer need the resources provided by political establishments to run for office.

Establishments do not act as a single entity, Levitsky said. “But collectively, political establishments do tend to impose certain parameters on politics, both in terms of political style and in terms of policy substance.”

The weakening of political establishments is “unquestionably” democratized as it opens up the political system to a wider array of people, said Levitsky. But it also means that democratic institutions are left vulnerable to anti-system forces. Though populism is not inherently anti-democratic, recently elected populists such as former U.S. President Donald Trump have been more likely to threaten democratic institutions. 

Reasons for hope

Still, Levitsky said, there is hope. There are as many democracies today as there were in the early 2000s despite an overall deterioration in the conditions for such institutions.

In the 1990s, democratic governing systems seemed to be on the verge of becoming ubiquitous. Between 1975 and 2000, the number of democratic countries nearly tripled. But in recent decades, the rise of China and Russia have threatened a geopolitical balance of power dominated by Western democracies.

“Western democracies… face growing illiberal threats from within,” Levitsky said. “Western governments across the West — Europe, the United States — have lost both the will and the capacity to effectively promote democracy abroad.”

And yet the overall number of democracies in the world remains relatively steady, Levitsky said. Democratic declines and “backsliding” in some countries have been offset by democratic advances in others.

“The world is still considerably more democratic than it was in the 1990s despite the rise of China, despite (Russian President Vladimir) Putin, despite Trump, despite social media, despite AI, despite COVID,” Levitsky said. “To me, that suggests a fair amount of democratic resilience.”

One reason for this resilience is that many new autocracies are fragile and prone to failure. They often inherit weak states and thus fail to deliver public services to their citizens. That then breeds dissent, which they struggle to repress, Levitsky said.

The other reason democracies have generally been resilient is economic development. When resources are dispersed among the people instead of being controlled by the government, it is easier for people to support opposition movements. They no longer have to depend on the government for their livelihood.

“Democracy absolutely requires opposition,” Levitsky said. “If there’s one thing that sustains democracy, it’s opposition, and sustainable opposition requires two things: It requires autonomous citizens, and it requires an independent private sector.”

An independent press also plays a critical role in sustaining opposition, Levitsky said. People cannot oppose a government without information. 

“We’ve yet in any Western society to discover a means of providing independent sources of information to citizens without independent media,” Levitsky said. “So without an independent, self-sustaining media, it is impossible to guarantee citizens the information they need to oppose the government.”