Authoritarianism, Populism, and Democracy

Authoritarianism, Populism, and Democracy

escrito por Dini Harmita

Abstract 

Facilitating a home with authoritarianism, populism, and democracy is truly a challenge. This essay is aimed at seeing how it has been and what needs to be done to prevent many other democratic tsunamis. Don’t let the lion go out the cage cause when she is having fun no one would be able to resist the flame indeed. Using party (system) institutionalization this brief paper emphasized on a little bit more of comprehensive study. 

Keywords: Democracy, authoritarianism, populism, institutionalization 

Introduction 

As many scholars do, Giacché (2022) called wars as attacks to democracy. Küçüker (2022) and Papanikos (2022) mentioned the importance of education in combating the attacks. 

Political parties and democracy have become the concerns in many essential political education platforms, with the Late Peter Mair being one of the main true teachers. During his presence, he at least recognised the democracy classification as populist and party democracy (Mair, 2002), and popular democracy (Mair, 2005). He analyzed the current popular democracy characterized by the electoral systems in comparison with constitutional democracy where good governance matters more than the election itself. When it comes to practice then he mentioned a term of real democracy by constructing the European Union Polity as hardly anti-democratic. 

Casal Bértoa (2017) studies political parties and the systems by seeing closely the institutionalization of both. With cases of Europe and Asia (Lee and Casal Bértoa, 2022) he found that most scholars concluded that  a democracy tends to collapse without any stability. To create such stability, Mudde (2017) discussed how social sciences need to interact to define democracy, populism, and authoritarianism. 

Van Biezen (2000) discussed the internal balance of political parties as part of new democracy with public office as one of the main institutions in political science term or association and organization in sociology. Constituted by their monarchs, Great Britain, Spain, and Denmark are among kingdoms in Europe that could survive democracy. Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean there is no authoritarianism and populism inside those countries. The United Kingdom is very well known with their ways of Torism to fix political deviations in their own definition and with their own methods. One of the proofs is when Boris Johnson was attacked vigorously by his colleagues in a debate to pull him out of the leadership. Liz Truss didn’t survive long either. Luckily, Rishi Sunak recently made progress by also being involved in the European cases even after Brexit. 

The only thing that’s wrong with such ways of handling politics is that it tends to discriminate soft-fully certain people who are actually rightfully to get their needs met. I remember in one of the scenes of the Crown series of Netflix, even Queen Elizabeth was concerned if someone was baptized or not, including the Prime Ministers. Thus the offices who run the country tend to do everything to make the anomalies stay outside the box if they don’t want to change, including and especially the Tori. When actually it doesn’t need to be that way. 

Spain on the other hand is more pluralist because the country consists of regions and communities with varying ideologies. Denmark is actually in between that’s why their happiness index is higher, though it doesn’t judge qualitatively. 

Intimately, Barrio and Rodríguez-Teruel (2016) discussed the gaps between leaders and voters in Catalonia by also including the possibility of ideological shifting in parties as a symptom of political spectrum movement. How natural sciences could take their places is de facto perfect when it’s discussed with this point of view: the interaction between sciences through the people's participation. How the United Kingdom is building homes for people from unused houses, how Finland is trying to secure their existing reindeers not only for Christmas but also for their daily life, how Sweden lies next to Finland and Denmark but don’t follow their relationship with democracy and happiness but still manage to have an election that results a winning of a candidate from non government, how Pakistani politicians surviving patriarchy, how Polish fight for their LGBTQ rights, how France, Spain, and Germany could actually complete each other in providing and facilitating the better energy, how Sri Lanka’s public finance could actually be also enacted as a law, how post communist countries could actually use their strengths for better purposes, how Estonians should be proud of their homemade jams and pickles as Italy’s grandmothers with their pizza and gelato, how and why vaccines are needed in Asia more, how citizens rarely get what they expect from the governments did not only falling in Serbia, how Ukrainians need to survive another winter with perhaps savory snows because of Russia, how Spaniards are struggling with themselves in accepting the 2023 general election results, how Hungary copes the EU leaderships with Spain and Belgium, are indeed not only require both natural and social sciences, but the involvement of those leaders and voters. So when we vote, we do not only cast our ballots, fund the political parties, but also fulfill our needs from the very basic till the utmost esteemed.

Oligarchy and Democracy 

As an internationalist living currently in Indonesia and hoping to move soon, it’s difficult not to know Jokowi. Nonetheless, it’s very surprising to acknowledge that many scholars use Indonesia as one of the samples of oligarchy and democracy. Nevertheless, it’s even more surprising to know that parliamentary system is often analyzed opposedly with polity including by Bengtsson (2023) when he discussed the growing democracy of Sweden. Luckily, according to him, Sweden is moving from oligarchy to democracy.

The culture of currencies somehow has made countries with rich resources including nature the pillows of oligarchs. Tragically, most of them don’t know that they’re oligarchs. Like the canon events themselves. When our brain is too rich with memories, we couldn’t even remember which ones are the events, not to mention that we don’t actually want to memorize any yet again people always push and squish us to; like the hug of an authoritarian bear called Putin indeed. 

Radicalism happens everywhere in any shape and it doesn’t see any religions, beliefs nor political spectrum. Tumurkhuu and Dashzevge (2022) explained about it in the forms of the beauty and weaknesses of populism at the same time, by using the cases of Mongolia. Saha (2022) wrote about it in the forms of partisan traps in Bangladesh. Fernando (2022) mentioned it as a clear radicalism in Sri Lanka. VU (2022) stated it as a feminism limitation in Vietnam and Siriwardhana (2023) explained it beautifully with the case of Sri Lanka. Jati (2023) mentioned the character differences between big cities and small towns as part of such limitations that influence the political gaps. All occurred simply because of the competition towards the accumulation of capitals. 

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Poland, and Latin America 

Armenia and Azerbaijan are like Indonesia and Malaysia, Spain and Morocco or Algeria, and sometimes France and Germany, in different levels. Kiyak (2019) explained not only the Armenian context of democracy but also Caucasus and Eurasian, including its cultural capital in the forms of education. Armenian democracy was said to be easy to build because of the homogeneous community. Big possibility because of their main income from crude oil. No doubt, that’s Russian interest but it’s actually a little bit more than that. It’s in the richness of the Black Sea that’s also contested by Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan people are more heterogeneous especially in terms of livelihood nonetheless V-Dem (2022) classified them as the country with electoral autocracy and Armenia as electoral democracy.

Studying democracy as the only game in town, started as the rule of law to be consolidated seems to be a political culture built by Linz in the areas and contexts attached to both Armenia and Azerbaijan. Isn’t it interesting to know that homogeneous communities tend to have electoral democracy and heterogeneous communities tend to develop electoral autocracy with populism growing in between. 

Rivers connect human civilisations and their livelihood because we need water. Siblings who live next to each other tend to either contest their livelihood sources or complete each other, nonetheless the second case rarely happens or is sustained without stability. Armenia’s dominant livelihood has made it easy for them to build democracy and go back to autocracy at the same time. Thus for those who are advantaged by Putin’s war such as oligarchs and corrupters, it’s very easy for them to start the fire to maintain their power and status quo. 

Learning from Ukraine, the danger for people is no longer being labeled democracy or not but being alive or not. The tendency is also the same with African countries. Putin and his allies have been after Nigeria mainly because of their oil. 

Siblings tend to fight each other sometimes; most of the time in this chapter context it’s because of the vicinity. For example, Indonesia tends to develop any innovation then Malaysia tends to claim it as theirs. Spain and Morocco tend to have border problems all the time because of the immigrant issues. Not to mention, the issue tends to be more complicated in the presence of challenges with Algeria and Western Sahara. France and Germany are like croissants and Miele. The croissants will be perfectly cooked with the £ 80,000 kitchen utilities but of course those who saved up £ 60,000 for buying their entire house would prefer to buy the croissants from Starbucks than to buy the stove etc. I think that’s why Italians like to cook pizza with the utilities. 

V-Dem (2022) also mentioned Brazil and Poland as the countries struggling with both democracy and authoritarianism. Both countries have significant scholars as their stars. Not to mention, Latin America is a continent where agrarian reform was born. To couple it with Poland would be like asking which one comes first: the eggs or the chicken. Nonetheless, problems in Azerbaijan and Armenia are more than that. 

Conclusion 

Casal Bértoa and Musial-Karg (2023) analyzed the stupid activities of Polish politicians in stabbing their own people through their current and upcoming elections. No wonder its agrarian party is not as sustained as green parties in Germany and Sweden. Why would people need to turn off electricity only to stop a referendum? What kind of home is that? 

Even Spanish politics that had four times amnesty trials for Catalans with the same kingdom is not that extravagantly and obviously stupid. If we want to change how politics should be treated it should be started from home. Like the mother of the Queen used to say, “the constituency represents God”. None of the Gods would want us to have only homogeneous communities. The challenge is that authoritarianism tends to threaten life both physically and mentally, heavily by the radicals from any ideologies including Islam. Populism is not a devil indeed but it eats all of us from inside by making us believe that they’re kind and we are bad. That’s why they love their enemies. They tend to use the criticism they get from their enemies as one of their weapons to be funded. Therefore institutionalization indeed is necessary not only for those who are converted into democracy already, but mainly for those who are still learning to be less authoritarian and populist. Consequently its comprehensive study will help.