Noam Lupu is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Center for Global Democracy and LAPOP Lab.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
The irony of democratic backsliding is a lot of these things are pitched to people and understood by people as actually pro-democratic.
Noam Lupu
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- Is Democracy Delivering? – 2:36
- The Illiberal Bargain – 9:56
- The Outliers: Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay – 19:56
- Whose Democracy Is It? – 29:31
Introduction
Today’s guest is Noam Lupu. He is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University and Director of the Center for Global Democracy and LAPOP Lab. Recently, the Center for Global Democracy and its LAPOP Lab released new data from the AmericasBarometer. Along with the findings they published a report called Pulse of Democracy produced in partnership with the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame.
The AmericasBarometer is one of the major regional surveys of democracy. If you’re unfamiliar with it, it’s difficult to overstate its importance. It’s conducted surveys since 2004 across 35 countries, so it’s a rich source of information on how people feel now but also how opinions have changed.
What I like most about these surveys is it gives us a reality check about how people feel about concepts we talk about like democracy and representation. One of my concerns about democracy is we’ve lost touch with ordinary citizens. I worry that when we talk about democracy, it’s about what people who listen to this podcast want from democracy.
One of the concepts explored in this survey was developed by Abby Cordova. It’s called illiberal majoritarianism. I found its support in the region both interesting and terrifying. But it makes me realize how much of the support for democracy is for something illiberal rather than liberal. This is one of many insights I discuss with Noam in this conversation.
My question for you while you listen is what do you get wrong about public support. What is your blind spot about democracy?
If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send me your ideas to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. There is a link to the complete transcript in the show notes.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. But for now… here is my conversation with Noam Lupu…
Podcast Interview
jmk: Noam Lupu, welcome to The Democracy Paradox.
Noam Lupu: Thanks for having me.
jmk: Well, Noam, I was very impressed with the report. It’s very thorough. It was much more impressive than a lot of the reports that I see because it didn’t just touch on the statistics and the findings. I mean, it really explored some different ideas that even touch on different concepts of political theory, I think, in some ways, in terms of tying together what you guys are finding in the field and connecting it back to ways that we think about governance.
And one of those big-picture ideas is something that the report opens with. The opening words were: “Democratic commitment rests on two foundations. The first is good governance, government that is effective, responsive, and free of corruption. The second is inclusive growth, economic development that reaches ordinary households.”
So through the surveys that you’ve reached out to people throughout the Americas, how stable are these foundations? Is democracy delivering?
Noam Lupu: Well, in some ways it is. What’s interesting about this year’s report is that for a long time, democracy wasn’t delivering, and we were getting results that showed, at least since 2012, declining support for democracy, declining trust in democratic institutions, and all of that was tied to a sense that democracy wasn’t delivering.
Economies in Latin America were not doing well. Crime was rising, or at least perceptions of crime and security were rising. So for a long time, we were seeing a decline and a real challenge to democracy, and in the last couple of years, what we’ve seen is a bit of an upturn, and that’s, in some ways, good news.
So economies have turned around since the pandemic, and that’s having an effect on people. There’s definitely a sense that some of the issues with crime have gotten better, although there’s a lot of heterogeneity in the region on that, so there’s some countries that have not gotten better. And people are responding to that with deeper commitments to democracy than they had when they felt that it wasn’t delivering.
jmk: I find that the question of whether democracy is delivering to be difficult to answer because we can think about it in two different ways. One is, is democracy delivering the outcomes that people want? But the other sense is, is democracy being responsive to the way people want to get to those outcomes?
And something that I’m noticing within the report is it feels like people are more focused on get to the outcomes we want, regardless of how we say we want to get there, as opposed to being more focused on the exact policies or the exact approach. Like, they’re more focused on the outcomes than having policies that they necessarily asked for.
I mean, is that fair, or am I being a little bit too harsh?
Noam Lupu: I think that’s mostly fair. I think people want to see good outcomes, and I think most people don’t have a deep sense of policy or what kinds of policies would generate those outcomes necessarily. I think a lot of that information they take from political leaders and opinion leaders. But I do think people want to see a process that they feel is responsive to them and represents them.
So you could imagine a way of thinking about politics or an evaluation of political systems today that says most people are not included, and we see some good outcomes, so we’re happy with that, but we still feel like the system is mostly benefiting an elite. And I think that’s probably how most Latin Americans view it.
So there is this upturn and things have gotten better, but it’s still pretty bleak set of evaluations, right? A bare majority of Latin Americans think that democracy is the best system of government. So there is still a lot of skepticism about what’s going on, and it is the most unequal region in the world.
So I think a lot of people view those different things as equally important, or probably different people weight them differently. But I do think a lot of Latin Americans, and we see this in a lot of the other questions that we ask, don’t feel represented by the current democratic systems that they have.
jmk: Yeah, I don’t know that anybody’s ever weighing policy decisions the way that policy wonks are going to weigh those decisions. But I do think that at a very, very high level, people do engage in the debates where people might be thinking in terms of, “Hey, we need more aggressive policing to be able to bring down crime.”
And then other people are going to say, “No, we don’t need more aggressive policing. That’s not going to result in lowering crime. We need to have different types of policing that respect human rights and do different stuff.” I guess what I’m noticing within the report is that the outcomes of those policies seem to be more important than the debates that happen before the policies go into effect.
Like, you might have a division between people who are saying harsher policing, other people saying, “Hey, I don’t know that that’s the right approach.” But if you actually bring down crime, it seems that that’s really what people are asking for, is actually deliver the results. And in terms of economics, it seems like you might have different people saying different things about what’s going to improve the economy.
People on the right might say, “Hey, more deregulation, different policies.” People on the left say, “Hey, we need to create more redistributive programs. We need to do more engagement with the government to be able to lift up different industries.” But at the end of the day, people are going to look at their checkbook and say, “Am I actually doing better?”
And if they’re doing better, they’re going to think, “Hey, the government’s actually doing what it’s supposed to do.” They’re going to literally be looking at the outcomes rather than the debates that happen before those policies go into effect.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, I think that’s mostly right. I think there are trade-offs with these outcomes.
So I think different people are going to value different things. And so you might get people who view punitive crime policies as working because they’re reducing crime, and you might get other people saying, “Well, the outcome I care about is the degree to which the police respect human rights.”
And I think that’s often even more so with the economy, where people care about economic growth and they care about their checkbook and being able to afford things, but they also care about the level of inequality and the degree to which the economic system seems to provide opportunities to people.
And that changes, I think, over time, too. I think El Salvador is obviously the case for punitive policies leading to declining crime rates, and people seem to be responding to that positively. But I suspect there will be a time, once the sense of emergency about the security situation recedes a little bit, that a larger proportion of Salvadorans will start to say, “Hey, what about ensuring that we don’t put in indefinite detention people who are actually not guilty of crimes?”
jmk: Yeah. The three countries that really caught my attention was El Salvador, Uruguay, and Argentina. They seem to be outliers on different questions that you have in different ways. El Salvador is one that people continue to say that they value democracy and yet at the same time are incredibly supportive of a president who is acting in an increasingly illiberal way and anti-democratic way as well.
And there is widespread support for the policies that Bukele has done in terms of crime, but I do think it’s important to note that there is opposition to some of those policies still. So whenever we’re saying, “Hey, there’s support for these,” there’s always going to be a vocal opposition, a vocal minority that’s speaking out, no matter how widespread that support is.
So I don’t want to make it sound like everybody believes one thing or another. There’s always going to be gradations whenever we’re looking at public opinion data. Now, within this, though, you’re noting that governance seems to be doing better now. Like, we’ve seen a rebound in terms of how people feel that they’re actually doing, and that seems to have increased support for governance.
I mean, it’s not a dramatic increase, but there is an uptick. Why has it rebounded? And what’s really important to note is that the decline happened before the pandemic, I noticed. The survey was in 2019, so that means that this wasn’t something that people got frustrated because the pandemic was frustrating and it was just a situation.
This is a situation that had been happening over some time, and now that we’re post-pandemic, things are rebounding closer to where they had been previously in previous iterations of the earlier versions of the survey, it seems like.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, I think we’ve seen a decline since the end of the commodity boom.
So around 2012, 2013, things started to decline. I think El Salvador is a really interesting case, as you say. Obviously, the crime and personal security situation has improved dramatically. I mean, I was there a few years ago, and for the first time in a long time, people felt safe going out at night.
So it’s a dramatic turnaround. I do think one thing that often gets missed is that the economic effects have also been quite positive, and we’ve seen real change in the economy under Bukele as well. And my guess is those things are not unrelated. Something else that we show in the report is a variety of questions that tried to tap what do people mean by democracy.
And when Salvadorans say they’re really happy with their democracy, and at the same time the president is dismantling democratic institutions — what’s going on? And Abby Cordova has a piece in the report where she and Jessica, her co-author, talk about this idea of illiberal majoritarianism.
And I think it’s one we’ve seen in the barometer for quite some time, is people are responding to the fact that they view these democratic institutions, political parties, Congress, the judiciary, as fundamentally unrepresentative or anti-majoritarian. In a sense, they are anti-majoritarian. They’re supposed to check the power of the executive.
But I think, particularly in Latin America, the perception for quite some time, I think at least since the ’90s, is that these are elite institutions that protect some people and don’t protect others. I mean, the judiciary, I think is a classic example. But you think about how people think about the police, how people think about the courts, and increasingly political parties.
So they see this president who, for the first time in a long time, is doing what they’ve been asking their political system to do and addressing the things that they want their political system to solve. And he is dismantling these other institutions that they view as anti-democratic. So, in a sense, they view everything he’s doing as democratic.
The irony of democratic backsliding is a lot of these things are pitched to people and understood by people as actually pro-democratic, even though they’re illiberal in the sense of liberal democracy.
jmk: I think something that gets overlooked that we’re seeing happening in El Salvador, but we also see throughout Latin America, is that crime is often viewed on an individual level as a human rights issue.
Where if you’re a victim of crime and you’re a victim of gangs that are just overtaking your community, that this is actually viewed as an attack on civil liberties, an attack on human rights themselves. And so if you step in and the state takes a more active role and actually controls the crime and reduces it, I think people are actually seeing this as an improvement in human rights, even if the government is acting illiberally and actually violating constitutional rights.
And I think that’s a little bit of a paradox, a little bit of a contradiction that we’re having to try to resolve — is there a balance between these two? Because we also see a country like Ecuador that’s now facing increasing levels of gang violence. And so those people are seeing themselves as suffering a loss of human rights as they undergo this, even though the state isn’t necessarily becoming more oppressive.
It’s non-state actors that are being oppressive to those individuals. I mean, that’s something that I felt came through within the survey data, although it wasn’t necessarily expressed in those terms.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, I think that’s right. And another way that we see that is, we do see that people are not willing to give up civil rights in exchange for things like guaranteed income.
So a China model, you don’t have necessarily the freedom of expression or freedom to choose your political leaders, but you do get some basic guaranteed income and services. And Latin Americans are not willing to take that trade. So there is a real commitment to democracy. But as you say, I think people view some of the shortcomings of their current democratic systems as inconsistent with their human rights or their political rights or their constitutional rights.
jmk: The survey question you’re talking about where people were asked, “Would you trade away certain political rights for economic security?” was fascinating to me because it was the countries that are the most liberal democratic that actually scored the worst, in particular the United States. And many people will think, “Well, of course the United States did bad.
We’re suffering from all of this polarization, and people on the far right are becoming anti-democratic.” But it surprised me that Democrats actually had an even higher score for people that were willing to trade away political rights for economic security, and Canadians actually did even worse on this question than Americans.
And at the same time, the country that did the best was Haiti, that you would think would be begging for economic security, and they said that they would rather have free and fair elections than guarantee economic security at a rate that was near unanimous. I think it was 88%.
I mean, did that surprise you? ‘Cause that surprised me.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, it did surprise me. Upon reflection, not entirely paradoxical. Haitians also, by a much larger proportion, we have a question about what democracy means to you, and it’s, I think, the only country where elections was the plurality answer. In the rest of the region, most people say rule of law or liberty or equality.
But Haitians really, in the current climate, view holding new elections as the key to success. So there’s something about what you don’t have and maybe taking for granted what you do have in the Canadian and the American cases.
jmk: I felt that it was very much the idea that people who live under liberal democracies take it for granted because they really actually believe that the choice is binary, that you really could have a choice, that somebody would offer you economic security without political freedom, or you can have political freedom without economic security.
And they’re just happy that right now they don’t have to make the choice ’cause they more or less have both. It’s a strong economy within the countries. We can complain about parts, but compared to the rest of the world, its economic gains have been incredibly strong through the 20th and 21st century historically.
But you look at a country like Haiti that’s had plenty of people step in and tell them that they were going to get all of these economic gains if they just give up elections, and they didn’t get either. Probably don’t take it seriously when you offer them the choice. They’re like, “No, we’ll take the elections ’cause we don’t trust you’re going to be able to deliver.”
Noam Lupu: Yeah. And I think there’s a fair amount of cynicism in the US, maybe also in Canada, about our current political moment that’s probably playing a role here, and the degree to which people feel economic insecurity at the moment. And that’s, I think, a little bit different in North America, Mexico, the US, and Canada, than it is in South and Central America, which, with the exception of Brazil — which is actually an interesting exception on this — people are mostly feeling good about the economic moment.
But I think the US, because of tariffs and the war in Iran, people are really feeling a little bit economically insecure.
jmk: So you mentioned Brazil. Brazil’s a country that’s actually having an election soon, and it sounds like Lula is likely to get reelected, but we don’t really know that for sure. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen within the Brazilian election, and it’s difficult to predict some of these things even this far out.
One of the things the report noted, though, was that incumbency has become an increasing disadvantage. It kind of shocked me that Brazilians feel less happy about their current status, and yet it looks like Lula continues to be a frontrunner for that. I would expect him to be looking much more insecure as a candidate with those findings within the survey.
And I was also surprised because I expected that incumbency would become more of an advantage around the region if we were seeing people increasingly happy with their circumstances. I mean, do you feel that incumbency is still a very big disadvantage within these countries, or do you think that in future surveys, we’re going to see that change as economic prospects continue to improve?
Noam Lupu: It’s possible that we’ll see it change. I mean, a lot of the anti-incumbency, at least over the last five years, this has been true around the world, post-pandemic — every incumbent at least lost votes, if not lost their seats. But Brazil is an interesting case because prices have gone up, and people are really feeling inflationary pressure on their pocketbooks.
So I would be concerned if I were Lula or running Lula’s campaign. It’s not a pro-incumbent context. I think what he has going for him is exactly the sort of trade-off that we were just talking about. The frontrunner on the other side is associated with somebody who tried to overthrow democracy, and so they’re really facing that trade-off.
Do you go to the opposition, to the Bolsonaro camp because, maybe they deliver on the economy, but at the expense of undermining hard-fought democracy, right?
jmk: Yeah, it definitely feels like Brazil is ground zero right now for the debate between liberal democracy and illiberal democracy. Another country that I thought was interesting according to that axis was Argentina.
I mentioned before that that was a country that stood out to me, and the reason why was because it scored remarkably low for the illiberal democracy scores, and that surprised me because of the legacy of Perón within the country. I mean, it feels to me that if any country was going to be receptive to illiberal democracy and populism, it would have been Argentina because we see populist politicians on the left, and now with Javier Milei, we see it on the right. They seem to be a country that gravitates towards populism.
But they were one of the countries that seemed to reject the idea of this majoritarian democracy idea that Abby kind of brings up. How do you read that? Why is it that Argentines would be rejecting that and yet based on their election results? I mean, I don’t get that impression that that’s how they’re actually behaving.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, I mean, Argentina’s always an interesting case in the region.
Yeah, in some ways unique, in some ways always kind of a forerunner of things to come. Argentina’s interesting because when we started the surveys, or when Mitch Seligson started the surveys in 2004, support for democracy in Argentina was the highest in the region, and it’s still one of the highest in the region.
So I think this partly has to do with the nature of the dictatorship in Argentina, the brutality, the real terror associated with it, but also the real reckoning that happened in Argentina and the transition that didn’t happen quite so much in other places. There’s still a real commitment to liberal democracy and how important those institutions really are.
It’s true that, at the same time, there’s a party that has historically been prone to these populist leaders. But what’s interesting is that unlike in other places, they come to power, and then they don’t really dismantle the democratic institutions. And in fact, Milei has not really done those things despite people’s alarm when he was elected, and neither have the left populists on the Peronist side.
And there were real efforts in the ’90s, by Menem, to do some of those things, and they were resisted. So there’s a real public commitment to those institutions, the liberal institutions of democracy, and a real concern about giving too much power to executives, and that’s sort of an interesting institutional legacy that Argentina has.
jmk: Do you think that it could also be related to the perpetual financial crises that they have, that right now there seems to be an effort to try to roll back some of the state and stabilize the financing within the country? That seems to be Milei’s strongest appeal, to be honest, is the fact that he can bring together people who are on the cultural right that we see throughout the world, but also just people who are frustrated with the fact that the country hasn’t stabilized its economic position.
And if we think about it that way, a lot of the countries, they might be thinking of unrestrained majorities as putting in place policies that they’ve seen as disastrous to Argentina financially and maybe want to be able to constrain majorities for that reason. Even though I think Milei’s always flirting with the idea of, “Hey, how can we act a little bit more unconstrained to be able to roll back stuff?”
The same way the Kirchners were flirting with ways to be more unconstrained to be able to put in new programs, particularly during the commodities boom. I mean, I think it goes both ways in terms of the left and the right, but maybe the citizens are feeling that having more constraints is actually good, whereas a lot of people in the region think that they should be removing constraints.
Noam Lupu: I think that’s right. Argentina also has this very strong sense of federalism, and that has really had an impact on the economic ability of the federal government to dictate economic policy. It’s also regionally hugely unequal, and there’s a lot of differences politically also across regions. I think all of that constrains the presidents in a way that you don’t get in a lot of other parts of the region.
And that’s good and bad. In some ways, this is why Argentina continues to have these boom and bust cycles. But at the same time, I think there’s a real commitment among Argentines to this idea that there should be this federal structure. Buenos Aires should not be dictating policy to the rest of the country, and that’s historically the way that Argentina developed.
Similar to the US, there’s this real resistance. Of course, it’s also kind of a legacy of the US or a kind of learning from the US, but there’s a real commitment to this federal idea that you don’t have… Even in the federal systems in other parts of the region, like Brazil, you just don’t get the same kind of autonomy that you have in the provinces in Argentina, and the real public sense of subnational identity, this kind of provincial identity.
jmk: I think it’s easy to always find similarities between Latin American countries and the way that they’re influenced by American democracy. I mean, clearly most of the countries have presidential rather than parliamentary systems. We see a lot of similarities, but we also see significant differences that are oftentimes underrated within the region, and one of those real outliers, in my opinion, is Uruguay.
It’s a country that doesn’t get talked about quite enough, and part of the reason why it doesn’t get talked about is because politics there is pretty boring. Right. Why is it Uruguay seems to get things right?
Noam Lupu: I’m not sure that I have a strong theory of how Uruguay got to where it is, but it’s certainly today a place that, unlike the rest of the region, is much more economically equal.
Unlike the rest of the region, it has a state that functions pretty well. Unlike the rest of the region, it has a party system that functions pretty well, a set of parties that still mobilize people at a very local level, are still engaged with people, people feel committed to. It has a very active civil society that’s linked to these political parties.
So how did it get there, I think is a different question. But it is an outlier in all of those ways, and I think that’s why the politics in Uruguay is boring, let’s say, or stable. Maybe that’s the nicer way to put it. Yeah, we have a Uruguayan on our team at the center working on the barometer, and I was making fun of her a couple of months ago when there was a big scandal in Uruguay that involved the president involved with possible corruption to the tune of $50,000.
And I just thought this was like the most Uruguay thing you’d ever heard. $50,000. It’s nothing compared to things we see in the rest of the region, right? But this was a big deal in Uruguay. I think it’s exceptional in all these ways that sort of all feed into each other.
jmk: One of the things that people are still dissatisfied about democracy is in terms of inclusiveness of the representation and oftentimes we talk about inclusiveness and we’re thinking racial or ethnic inclusivity, but we’re also talking about gender, age.
Age was a very big one where people want to see younger people elected into positions much more frequently. We see that talked about all of the time in the United States, but it’s something that’s happening throughout the Americas, both in terms of South Central and North America. People are asking for younger people to be more involved.
We see a number of different dimensions where people would like to see different types of people included within government more, but it’s not happening at the level that people are happy with. Why not? Is it really just that it’s not that much of a priority for voters, or are parties actually just not offering voters those types of candidates and it’s the parties that are responsible?
Noam Lupu: I want to say age is the characteristic that, as you say, people cared about the most. I think that’s really striking and something that we haven’t maybe paid enough attention to. Latin America is no longer the place it was 30, 40 years ago. Fairly poor, fairly low levels of education, with heterogeneity and some exceptions.
Again, Argentina was an exception to these things historically. The region has really become wealthier, so it has wealthy country problems. It has high middle income country problems, including changing the kinds of health issues that affect people in the region. So we’re not talking about infectious diseases as much anymore.
It’s first world problems, quote unquote. It’s obesity and heart disease and cancer. People are living longer. So we do have, in a way that we didn’t before, a larger, older population, and that looks in the region the way that it looks in the United States. Politicians are older than they used to be, and there are real generational distributional political questions.
A lot of countries in the region provide some sort of retirement support or at least public-private. Some of them are privatized. There’s real redistribution that happens from younger people to older people through the state, and that’s a political issue that I think younger people are really feeling.
There’s, particularly in urban areas, the same kinds of issues that we have in cities in the United States and in Canada with housing prices, the cost of housing and whether young people can afford the things that older generations did. So, as observers of the region, many of us need to update how we think about the issues that are going to be the big political questions going forward.
To get back to your question about representation, when you look, for instance, at class, which is another one of the dimensions that people care about, voters just don’t have a choice. So it’s not that voters are getting a choice between a man and a woman and they’re choosing the man, or they’re getting a choice between a lighter skinned candidate and a darker skinned candidate and they choose the lighter skinned, or that they’re getting a choice between a lawyer and a plumber and they’re choosing the lawyer.
They’re just not getting those choices. The kinds of people who run for office are able to run for office, are allowed to run for office, are men. They’re older, they’re lighter skinned, they’re more affluent. And that has to do with what it means to run for office. It’s not something that everybody can just do.
And poor people in Latin America are very involved in local politics, particularly within their communities. But running for office is different than holding office. Most local office is part-time, it’s unpaid, so it’s just a hard thing to do. And then to work your way up to something national, something more visible, requires that time and that commitment.
It’s just not something that everybody can do. So people are seeing this. People like them are not included, and I think we have to think about ways to address that.
jmk: I was surprised to see two different things come out in the survey that contradicted each other in terms of inclusiveness. On the one hand, we saw people say that having more women elected to public office would actually be good, like that they want to see that.
But at the same time, there were other survey results showing an increase in the number of people that say men are better leaders than women. The fact that things are going in opposite directions didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I mean, I would expect it more if people said that they didn’t want more women and they thought men were better leaders or vice versa.
But to see both of those outcomes in the survey was a bit of a surprise.
Noam Lupu: Yeah, and I think there’s real contradictions or real ambivalence in how people think about this. They’re slightly different questions. So who’s a better leader in terms of who you want to be the president or the leader of the armed forces?
This kind of thing could be very gendered and certainly seems to skew towards men. But at the same time, people want women in the room. People want women in the legislature having a seat at the table or something like that. So there’s some tension in those, but I think I can see how the same person might be asking for both things.
And particularly with gender, there are obviously lots of biases that we’re all sort of socialized into that come out in the surveys, but also a demand for democratic institutions that look like the country, that look like the electorate.
jmk: I get the sense it might be moving in a K-shaped direction where some people want greater diversity, including gender inclusivity, and then other people are moving against that in the opposite direction.
So the people who say no might be taking an even stronger stance to say, “Not only do I not think that having more women would be an improvement, but I actually think men are better leaders.” Like, in a way that’s more aggressive than maybe they would’ve said in the past. It feels like a lot of things are moving that direction, where people are moving to polarized extremes in terms of their views, rather than having people who have extremely nuanced views in the middle.
I mean, there can be some of that, but I got the impression that it was more of an uptick on the extremes.
Noam Lupu: Yeah. I think particularly on these kinds of issues — cultural issues — there’s definitely polarization. People are feeling more intensely about these things in opposite directions. There’s a piece that I wrote in the report about some of the demographic change in the region and the big trends over the last couple of decades are, on the one hand, a larger class of people who have university degrees and they’re going to be more likely to want more inclusion and all of the progressive side of the cultural issues.
And at the same time, a growing evangelical population, which is going to mostly take cultural positions on the right. That’s why we’re seeing these issues become increasingly salient as opposed to economic issues. I mean, again, in the old days it was, well, obviously the economic issues outweigh everything else because people are having such a hard time economically.
It’s a wealthier population now, and so the issues are not always the economy the way that it used to be.
jmk: So touching on the increase in polarization, we’ve seen recently in elections throughout Latin America a shift to the right. We’ve seen conservatives win elections within Chile, within many different countries, almost like a rightward wave of success for the political right within Latin America that’s been reported extensively within mainstream publications like The New York Times, The Economist, and others.
What surprised me in your report was that you didn’t see an underlying ideological shift to the right necessarily. It seemed that ideological support was more or less unchanged, even though we’ve seen the electoral results change. How should we be reading that? I mean, are these rightward-leaning leaders that have been recently elected incredibly vulnerable the way that we’ve seen the last few cycles of elections?
Or could it be that maybe we’re missing something because people don’t think of themselves as being on the right, but maybe that they’re a little bit more ideological than they realize?
Noam Lupu: I mean, it’s certainly true that at least in terms of left, right, we’re not seeing a big shift to the right in terms of how people position themselves.
It’s still possible that within that, people have positions on issues that are more right-leaning. It’s also possible, and I think maybe suggested by what I just said before, that these issues on which people have a more right-leaning position have become more politically salient than they used to be.
And so for some people, they’re outweighing the issues where they would find themselves more on the left. And again, I think that’s partly the demographic change, partly the wave of immigration and things like that that have really put the migration issues and cultural issues on the political agenda.
Mostly, I think this is not a kind of ideological shift or a big change in what matters to people that benefits the right. I think it’s a lot like the left turn that we saw at the beginning of the 2000s, which was mostly driven by waves of anti-incumbency. And it happened that the right was in office in the 1990s, and that gave way to a turn to left-wing governments in the early 2000s.
And then now there’s a kind of wave in the other direction. I think that’s what we’re seeing. I think it’s what people are seeing in a lot of election polls and when these shifts happen. And most of these elections are not landslides either, so it’s not like there’s a huge upswell in one ideological direction.
And I think the mistake of these governments would be to interpret their electoral wins as sort of a mandate to pursue a bunch of hard right-wing policies on these issues because that doesn’t seem to be where the public is.
jmk: So one of the most positive findings within the report was that support for democracy has actually increased.
That’s possibly the most positive finding that we actually came across. However, there is some skepticism about what exactly that means, what kind of democracy do they support, which comes back to what you already mentioned about Abby’s questions about the idea of illiberal democracy or majoritarian democracy and her questions that are finding about that.
Something that is on my mind that we don’t know yet is that since this is the first iteration of really asking those types of questions, we don’t completely know whether or not that’s a new trend, that people think of democracy that way now, or if that’s something that we’re only now recognizing and putting together.
So I guess the question is, what does this all mean for the future of democracy? Are we likely to see democracies become increasingly illiberal in your view? Or do you find that this really is positive and that we’re going to see reinforced institutions in the future, that we might see a wave that actually strengthens democracy within the region in the coming years?
Noam Lupu: I mean, I think your diagnosis is probably right. We didn’t ask these questions in the past, but we certainly asked questions about trust in institutions, and trust in institutions has declined. Judicial systems used to be more popular, more trusted. Political parties used to be more trusted. Even media used to be more trusted.
So it’s certainly the case that trust in these institutions has declined, and I think that gives way to a kind of illiberalism that Abby is also diagnosing with her questions, that these institutions, which were trusted more in the past, are no longer serving a democratic function. And, by the way, I’m not sure that Latin Americans are wrong about that.
So there is a lot of elite capture of institutions. Now, the question I think going forward is, will democrats reform those institutions in a way that will make them more responsive to the demands of people, even if they continue to check the power of the executive, but in a way that makes people feel like their voice is included, that they can count on these institutions in the same way that other people can provide it to them in the way that they are for other people?
So I think that’s the ask. I think it’s something that people haven’t paid enough attention to. I think there’s a future in which that has been, over the last five to 10 years, recognized more and that this is something that might be addressed. But I think to the extent that it doesn’t, the appeal of populists will continue and unfortunately may lead to more illiberalism.
And there’s an unfortunate cycle where presidents like Bukele undermine democratic institutions and then do a bunch of things that are responsive, and that feeds a perception that, “Well, see, we didn’t need these other institutions.” That’s obviously unfortunate, but it’s also hard to replicate, so populists often fail.
We have the examples of the successful ones, Venezuela, El Salvador, right, at least at the beginning of the Chávez years. But there are also those who fail, I think. Ecuador is trying the Bukele model and it’s not working. Maybe that’s the source of hope.
jmk: Well, Noam Lupu, thank you so much for joining me today. I was very impressed with the report. As I said before, it’s an outstanding piece, and I recommend everybody to check it out. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for leading this report.
Noam Lupu: Thanks so much, Justin. It’s been fun.
Links
Learn more about Noam Lupu.
Learn more about the AmericasBarometer survey.
Read the Pulse of Democracy 2026 report.
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute.
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Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com
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