Index#: 03741
Will Count Towards Political Science MAJOR
Will Count Towards Political Science MINOR
Winston Churchill once famously quipped: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time” (November 11, 1947). Recently, however, there have been many debates about democracy’s weaknesses and its peculiar tendency towards “exhaustion,” both in the well-established democratic states and the newly democratizing ones. Trust in democratic institutions is declining in many countries and there is also a lot of talk about democratic deficit, both at the level of states and in the international arena.
Churchill’s formulation has been challenged from several directions, as people in many countries express their disappointment with the performance of democracy, doubt its effectiveness, and challenge its legitimacy. Moreover, the number of people ready to accept authoritarian leaders has gone up considerably over the last twenty years, even in the countries with long democratic traditions. Yet, there is something new in the present situation. While several years ago competitive authoritarianism (a system we will briefly analyze) was commonly seen as the main rival of democracy, today everybody seems to be talking about populism. Employing an interdisciplinary approach and relying on the literature in several disciplines (political science, anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies), we will work to answer several key questions about this phenomenon: What is the meaning of this term and what are the phenomena it refers to? Is right-wing populism akin to fascism? Is populism a positive “correction” of the democratic system, as it aims to return power to the people, or a destructive force that undermines the democratic architecture? Or perhaps it is ambiguous, having both positive and negative features, depending on the circumstances? What are the different forms or types of populism? How much does it vary from one country to another? Is the current rise of populism just a political phenomenon or a more complex political-economic-cultural process?
About Professor Kubik
Jan Kubik is Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University and Professor of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London (UCL). He studied sociology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków before earning a PhD in anthropology at Columbia. Since the early 1990s he has worked in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers, studying the relationship between culture and politics, politics of memory, civil society, protest politics, social movements, and communist and post-communist politics. He currently leads a large international and multi-disciplinary team working on the rise of right-wing populism in Europe (https://populism-europe.com/poprebel/). Among his publications are: The Power of Symbols against the Symbols of Power; Anthropology and Political Science, with Myron Aronoff; and Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, with Michael Bernhard. He is the incoming President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and the recipient of the 2018 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America (PIASA).