Laura Gamboa is an Associate Professor of Democracy and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a faculty fellow at the Kellogg Institute. She is the author of Resisting Backsliding: Opposition Strategies Against the Erosion of Democracy and most recently, “How to Break an Autocrat’s Coalition” in the Journal of Democracy.
The Democracy Paradox is made in partnership with the Kellogg Institute of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
People don’t get points for fighting for their country. The reward you get is your country.
Laura Gamboa
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- Nothing Ever Happens… – 4:04
- Defection – 16:41
- Accountability – 28:31
- Fight the Fight – 39:03
Introduction
Today’s guest is Laura Gamboa. She’s an Associate Professor of Democracy and Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a scholar at the Kellogg Institute. Her book Resisting Backsliding: Opposition Strategies Against the Erosion of Democracy is already a classic of political science.
What set her book apart was it considered ways opposition strategies affected democratic erosion. Because most scholars focus on the behavior of those in power, very little was written about opposition strategies within backsliding democracies before Laura’s work. She has a new article in the Journal of Democracy titled “How to Break an Autocrat’s Coalition.”
I’ve wanted to bring Laura back to the show for a long time now. I found her article speaks to some of the questions many of us are asking about democracy. I interviewed Laura on October 26th. When we talked Lula had just won reelection in Brazil, Vučić had lost power in Serbia, but the midterm elections in the United States were still a week away.
What we’ve witnessed over the course of 2026 is the disintegration of coalitions of autocratic leaders. It’s unexpected because what makes it so difficult to dislodge leaders like Viktor Orban or Narendra Modi is their coalitions are remarkably cohesive. Meanwhile, oppositions are highly fragmented. Far too often the only issue that brings these diverse coalitions together is support for democracy.
But Laura doesn’t see it that way. She says autocratic coalitions are not as cohesive as they appear. And after recent election results, her analysis sounds almost prophetic. Her paper focused on the recent election in Hungary and a case where legislators in Indiana stood up to Donald Trump. However, we also talk about more recent events like the election in Brazil, protests in France, and the improving climate for global democracy.
For those familiar with Laura’s work, one of her most intriguing themes is patience. She suggests a political opposition must show patience during a backsliding episode to maximize opportunities that deliver meaningful results. But patience can become an excuse for inaction.
My challenge for you is to consider the role of patience within a backsliding democracy. How long should an opposition show patience? Should members of an autocratic coalition break early or stick around so they can shape the future of the party after the aspiring autocrat is finally gone?
Tell me your thoughts. If you listen to Spotify, you can leave them as a comment on the episode. You can also send 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 Laura Gamboa…
Podcast Transcript
jmk: Laura Gamboa, welcome back to The Democracy Paradox.
Laura Gamboa: Thank you for having me, Justin.
jmk: Well, Laura, I was excited to see you had another article in the Journal of Democracy. It was titled How to Break an Autocrat’s Coalition, and I was really excited because I’ve viewed you to be one of the people now that’s writing incredibly interesting articles, having incredibly interesting ideas.
So to see you have another perspective on political science, on democracy is always exciting, and I like that this is related to your book, but slightly different. It expands on it. This is now talking about how to break an autocrat’s coalition. And so why don’t we start here? When does a movement know that an opportunity has arisen that you can break an autocrat’s coalition?
When has that moment arrived?
Laura Gamboa: I think that’s a crucial question. It’s a question that is hard to answer. And so the answer for that is you really don’t know, so you have to be ready for it. So a lot of what I build or I say in the article is you have to function as if it will be possible to get some kind of rupture, so you cannot just close the doors on some of the peripheral members of the authoritarian coalition.
And so a lot of the examples I put forward are cases like, for instance, Hungary, where I say, look, pressure from the press that was publishing constantly about corruption scandals and bringing forward information seems useless because, you know, you see all this information coming out and nothing happens.
The problem is nothing happens until something does, and it’s the buildup, it’s accumulation of all of this news or of these events that eventually creates this opportunity. Or Colombia, for example, where I say, look, the opposition uses tactics that are not necessarily polarizing. And so what you do is you figure it out how to give certain members of the authoritarian coalition an off-ramp if and when they want to take it.
And then, of course, there’s the case of Indiana, which I really love studying ’cause it’s my first systematic attempt to try to understand the U.S. And it was absolutely fascinating to talk to activists from Indiana. And part of what they were saying is, ‘For us, this is all about strategic alliances, and we don’t see this as a long-term marriage.
We see this as an opportunity that we just clasp on. And if it works, it works, and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t, but we just try to grab it.’
jmk: So I saw two different ways to break an autocrat’s coalition from your article. One is where you approach it purely from elites, like you break elites in a moment where they’re uncomfortable with things.
And those moments worry me because I feel like those are fleeting, where you can get elites to act against the interests of their constituents but in a way that protects democracy. The other is more sustainable, where you’re carrying voters and mass movements with you. Do you see it that way?
Because I felt like in Indiana, you broke elites, but you didn’t carry their voters, their constituents with them, and I worry that that’s not a sustainable success.
Laura Gamboa: So that’s a very interesting way to frame the question. So my work usually is geared towards elites. I’m constantly focusing on elites. That doesn’t mean that voters do not matter.
It’s just I pay more attention to elites. So when I talk about breaking the authoritarian coalition, I usually mean breaking the authoritarian coalition at the elite level. The way I frame your question in the article is what is the cost of breaking? Because what happens in Indiana is that all of these legislators get primaried out.
They don’t get to run for election. And I would agree that that is unsustainable unless we can figure out a way to decrease the cost of defection. It’s really hard to sustain this over time. There’s a couple ways to do this. It’s really hard to build this up. So one of the ways to do this is to get voters to vote for these candidates.
I’ve seen this in Utah, for example. Utah is a very red state, and so there is a group of Democrats that has advocated over time to get Democrats to register as Republicans so that they can vote for the more moderate Democratic candidate. That was incredibly, incredibly successful in 2024, where the party put forward several MAGA Republicans, even against their own incumbents, and a coalition of Democrats and moderate Republicans was able to protect the more moderate Republicans, people like Governor Cox, which I would say is conservative.
I would say he is very conservative. But in most, if not all, of the more polarizing and stigmatizing issues put forward by MAGA, he has been kind of moderate. He has toed the line against Donald Trump to a certain extent. This is not perfect. There are some things that I’m like, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ but that’s one way.
It’s just incredibly costly in partisan terms, because by doing that, you pretty much break the opportunity to build a strong Democratic Party. So I think this is incredibly costly. It’s a way to do it. It’s what we observe to a certain extent in Hungary. A lot of the parties and the movements that end up supporting Magyar are partisan movements that are far on the left or farther on the left than Magyar.
So they made a tactical decision, ‘We’re going to support this guy, and we’re going to go with this guy, and everything else can wait until next election.’ And we’re yet to see what happens once politics in Hungary moves away from these pro-democratic reforms into more policy matters. And there’s a part of me that thinks policy will get a chance if you have a democratic system.
If you don’t protect the democratic system, policy will never get a chance.
jmk: Yeah, and protecting formal institutions where you can create negotiations, be able to create policy, be able to form coalitions formally rather than informally. For instance, doing things through legislation and through the legislature and through the court system is going to be more effective than doing things on the streets.
Laura Gamboa: Right. And the article that appeared in The Journal of Democracy is part of a special issue, and Rachel Kleinfeld has a piece on how to build coalitions. And one of the things that is important about coalitions is it’s not like you adopt the defector as your own. There’s variation on how close you are to this person.
And so, for example, in the case of Colombia today, Abelardo de la Espriella, who is our new president, he’s one of these far-right populists with several authoritarian tendencies. He tried to put a president of Congress that he wanted, and he failed when the Uribista Party, right-wing, very right-wing, joined forces with the left-wing party of Gustavo Petro to pick a different member of Congress.
Does that mean that the left and the right are now the same party? No. They pretty much oppose each other in a bunch of other things. But on this particular instance, they joined forces. There’s a fantastic picture of some of the most conservative and left-wing leaders of these parties in Congress celebrating together the defeat of the appointment of this particular very Abelardista, which is the term we’re using today, candidate.
And this is important because a president of Congress that is not co-opted by the president creates some friction, even if he’s ideologically close or aligned.
jmk: I find it interesting that in the countries that are suffering the most democratic backsliding, that it’s oftentimes people who are very, very closely ideologically aligned to that leader who are the strongest candidates to build those democratic coalitions.
Like in Hungary, it’s Peter Magyar, who was a member of Fidesz. In Israel right now, it looks like Eisenkot is going to win the prime ministership, and he’s described very much as a center-right politician who was part of Netanyahu’s wartime coalition. So we’ve got these leaders who are oftentimes on the center right that are best positioned to be able to form these coalitions.
Now, that’s assuming that it’s a far-right leader that they’re rebelling against, but it seems like the closer we are to being ideologically aligned to that leader, the more likely you are to build that democratic coalition and be able to overtake them in elections. That’s difficult to do because you’re asking voters to be able to vote for somebody who they might disagree with on 90% of the issues, and vote for them purely based on the idea that they’re going to not be corrupt, that they’re going to allow for democratic rights.
That was the bargain that was made with the Hungarian left and Peter Magyar, wasn’t it?
Laura Gamboa: Yes, that’s the ask. At some point, however, I think that a lot of your issues become impossible unless you put somebody… Like, in the case of Hungary, you restore democracy, or unless you protect democracy, everything else becomes muted because there is no point forward.
I think this is true, and this has been true for transitions to democracy as well. I remember, I want to say it was in Ricardo Lagos’ book, telling the story of the transition to democracy in Chile. Lagos has received a lot of criticism saying that in the transition to democracy to Chile, they gave a lot to Pinochet.
And one of the things he said, I want to say it was in the book, he says, ‘Maybe yes, but there was no moving forward without that kind of concession.’ There was no moving forward, and at some point this becomes clear to voters. It became clear to voters in Chile, like, 30 years ago.
It became clear to voters in Hungary. And to a certain extent, this is the only example I use in the article, it became clear to voters in Guatemala, right? You have these indigenous and peasant, not only voters, but people that mobilize in the streets to support Arévalo, even though Arévalo did not quite represent their interests, right?
Arévalo was not running on an agrarian platform. He was running on an anti-corruption platform, very urban-based. As a movement, Semilla was very urban, college-educated, class-based movement. And yet these movements, these peasant and indigenous movements figured out, ‘Look, this is the opportunity. We can stick in our corner, or we can support this guy.’
And do I think Arévalo has given these movements everything? No. Do I think these movements are better off today with Arévalo than they would have been with Sandra Torres? Yes. So this is all relative. It’s really hard. We don’t talk a lot about leadership, but I think there’s something to be said about leadership.
If you can get some form of articulation of this agenda, somebody that tells you, ‘Look, this is a bargain we’re doing,’ you can mobilize enough people in support of these more transactional candidates. The other thing that I would say is my sense of far-right politicians, especially in Latin America, talking about Bukele, Milei, Abelardo, Chaves in Costa Rica, is that these candidates are not that ideologically entrenched.
They figured out a way to mobilize emotions and stay in power, and that’s what they’re doing. And in many ways, they’re building these coalitions that allow them to retain power, to deal in all sorts of corruption, keep their immunities, or avoid going to prison. I don’t think they’re that ideologically entrenched, which is why people who are ideologically entrenched, who truly believe in these things, are usually the ones that tend to flip because they are there.
They’re in Congress, or they are part of the government for a particular cause, and eventually the autocrat will betray that cause. So we’re seeing it right now with Abelardo. Abelardo won with the support of the Democratic Center, Álvaro Uribe’s party. And some of the most vocal members of this party have opposed Abelardo’s policies because they believe in being fiscally conservative, in having a technocratic government, free markets, strong security, and Abelardo’s not delivering these things.
jmk: So what I find is that democratic coalitions are oftentimes very fractious when they’re trying to break an entrenched autocrat or aspiring autocrat. It’s usually a hodgepodge of different groups that are trying to align with each other, whereas the autocrat or the aspiring autocrat, or however you want to describe this person, seems to have a much more concrete coalition, where the people who support them understand what they’re getting.
They’re much more aligned in terms of who they are, in terms of their interests. Erdogan’s coalition over in Turkey seems to be very consistent, or Orbán’s coalition in Hungary for a long time was very consistent. Even Chávez’s coalition in Venezuela was very consistent, whereas the people that were trying to work against them to be able to become a majority, it feels like those groups have to put together people that are from different perspectives, different groups, and it becomes difficult to hold those coalitions together if they win office.
Why is it that the democratic coalitions are always so fragmented compared to the autocratic coalitions?
Laura Gamboa: Well, that’s a good question. So first of all, I would contest how fragmented or unitarian the authoritarian coalitions are. Rachel Schwartz and I have another book on this. I think this depends a lot on the form of democratic backslide.
When the movement is led by a highly charismatic person, then the ties become very personalistic. You’re tied to this particular character. That would be the case with Bukele. Maybe it would be the case of MORENA in Mexico, though I think that one is a little bit more partisan, right? The ties are with the party, even though MORENA is very tightly controlled by Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Now, I think that when you’re dealing with a form of democratic backsliding that happens in a coalitional form, say Peru through Congress or Guatemala through the courts, then you have more flexibility because what you have is a very loose coalition of people who have very personal interest in power, right?
They want to make money. They want to protect themselves from prosecution. They want to continue their corrupt deals. That’s it. And I think those forms of backsliding offer more opportunities to break the authoritarian coalition. They create these loosey-goosey elites that once they feel their interests are threatened in the slightest, they’ll defect.
That’s the case of the electoral authorities in Guatemala. They stuck by the pact of Los Corruptos up until the point in which they figured out that their basic interest, particularly in terms of US sanctions and stuff like that, could potentially be threatened, and at that point, they defect.
I think that the reason why democratic coalitions tend to be harder to keep together is because democrats are less likely to use repression to keep them together, right? Autocrats are willing and able to keep their coalitions together based on charisma or based on patronage to a certain extent, but there’s a very credible threat of repression that if you’re democratic does not exist.
That allows these authoritarian coalitions to either scare people into sticking with the autocrat or purging the coalition from any potential defector, like removing them from the coalition before this defector becomes a danger for the autocrat.
jmk: So one of the things that you have argued is that democratic coalitions should bide their time to hold together institutions and wait for the right moment to break autocratic coalitions.
If you are part of that autocratic coalition, like you’re in office, you thought you were fighting for the right things, but then things have changed on you, and you have a series of decisions where you have to decide whether or not your party, your coalition, has gone too far. It feels like people in those positions might decide that they should also bide their time and wait for the right moment that they can get not just themselves to do the right thing and then become a sacrificial lamb, but to do the right thing at a moment that can have some measure of consequence.
Do you think that people within those coalitions should break the moment that they decide that the line is crossed, or do you think that they should also bide their time and wait for a coalition within their own coalition to form that can have some consequence when they break?
Laura Gamboa: I think it depends on which kind of regime we’re talking about.
Defecting from a regime that is still democratic is significantly less costly than defecting from a competitive authoritarian regime. Again, there’s this threat of repression. And so I would argue that defecting today from Bukele’s coalition is significantly more costly than it would have been in twenty twenty.
So I think there is a cost on waiting because it will be harder down the road. I also think if you’re just self-interested and you’re the traditional politician that political science envisions when they do their game theory, just interested in attaining or keeping public office, there’s a cost of never attaining that public office.
So the claim I also make in the article is we tend to think about these coalitions as either ideologically driven or only corruption-driven, but these coalitions also have people who have their interests within the coalition. They want to become members of Congress. They want to rise to the presidency.
They want to become cabinet members, you name it. And I think the more power the autocrat has, the harder it is to attain these kinds of positions. So Vargas Lleras in Colombia, for example, defected when he realized that contrary to his expectation, after supporting Álvaro Uribe for eight years, he was not going to be able to run for president.
So that’s when he says, ‘Well, that’s enough, ’cause I really want to be president, and I want to run for president, and I’m going to run for president.’ So I think how the autocrats behave depends a lot on their calculations. I do think that waiting is a really bad calculation in general because the more entrenched the regime is, the harder it is to break out without significant consequences.
Now, you also make a second question tied to it, which is, well, should you wait to have momentum? And this is really hard to tell because it’s a chicken and an egg question. We don’t know what comes first. My sense is that Magyar had the window of opportunity. His ex-wife was under attack in Hungary, and he had this window of opportunity, so he launched the first interview.
It was just an interview. And then that interview had a massive response, and so he read that correctly as an opportunity to break free and to run a campaign, and the rest is history. I think it’s a job of the opposition to send that second signal when they see somebody trying to defect, to support that.
Which is what Common Cause and other civil society movements did in Indiana. They’re like, ‘We have these legislators that are on the fence about this gerrymandering. We’re going to seize that, and we’re going to leverage that, and we’re going to send a strong message that this is something that the electorate would actually endorse.’
jmk: I think Indiana’s a little bit of a special case for a couple reasons. One is it can be a negative case because just about all the legislators lost re-election, so they are not there in office to be able to do the right thing the next time that that’s necessary. The other side to it is I don’t know that there’s as much cost for losing your seat as state senator as there is for other positions.
For instance, if you’re on the verge of becoming president or if you’re close to being a major figure within the United States Senate. Being a state senator is small enough that if you lost the office, some people think that the trade-off of doing the right thing is worth it versus an office that’s nice to say that you did and you served your state, but not so big that you think that it’s something that was significant that you lost.
When I look at Peter Magyar, I think that’s a much more precise example where you have somebody who was within Fidesz, and because he was in longer, he had enough street credibility within that group that when he ran for office, he could reach out to people on the center right and say, ‘I understand your issues.
I can appeal to you,’ while at the same time building a Democratic coalition that was ready to fight corruption and the negative things that they saw about Fidesz. At the same time, though, I will admit that in my heart of hearts, I would rather see people just stand up and do the right thing the first time than to try to be strategic and wait for a moment that may never happen.
Laura Gamboa: So I think the case of Magyar is interesting because while he was part of Fidesz, he was not the next circle around Viktor Orbán, right?
He was part of Fidesz, but he was never his right hand. In terms of the legislatures, I would say yes, risking a Senate seat is significantly harder than risking a seat in the Legislative Senate or the Legislative Assembly. But I would also say there’s zero guarantee with the autocrat that you’re going to win.
Look what has happened with all sorts of Senate races in the US, right? Look what happened in Texas. Cornyn was like, ‘Yes, Donald Trump. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.’ And all of the sudden, Paxton is the candidate, and that’s that. I think once you delegate your political future to a single person, then you’re tied to the whims of that person.
And it so happens that these right-wingers are very whimsical because what they want is loyalty, right? They don’t want anybody who could potentially be disloyal to them. I’ve seen this time and time and time again with Álvaro Uribe and his political party, which now has over a decade, and he has been very whimsical about who he appoints as a candidate of the party.
And usually it’s not the person that has done the hardest work or the most visibility. Usually it is the person that he knows he can control. We’re seeing it right now with Abelardo de la Espriella. A lot of politicians risk their more conservative, less far-right reputation, and they align themselves with de la Espriella, and all of the sudden, the minister of interior was fired a couple days ago.
Fired just because there was a mistake inside the legislative agenda. So I think there is also a risk in tying yourself to an autocrat that you don’t know how it’s going to wake up. I also think this is all a cost-benefit analysis, right? How costly it is to defect vis-à-vis how costly it is to stay.
And when you stay, you sacrifice your soul, to put it that way. Unless you are a fully convinced MAGA, you’re sacrificing your soul. If you leave, however, you sacrifice your political future. And I guess the whole argument in the entire article, and this is the argument I’ve been making every time anybody asks me about this, is you need to make it costly.
You need to make sure that staying in is costly. ‘Cause if it is costly, then leaving is an easier decision. And if you can, you should make it easier to leave. You can do that by depolarizing. You can do that by using institutional strategies. Or if you have the means and the capacity, you can do that by running campaigns like the one I just mentioned in Utah in which you get Democrats to vote for these candidates in primaries.
jmk: Let me ask you about a case that might fit outside of your theory but is recent in the news.
That’s the recent election in Brazil, where Lula has just won re-election. He won the second round. He was behind Bolsonaro, the younger Bolsonaro, and people had largely predicted that Lula would lose because nobody had come back to be able to win in the second round after being behind in the first round of the Brazilian presidential election.
And not only that, but if you ran the math, it didn’t make sense. The votes weren’t there from the people who voted in the first round. So a lot of people either voted in the second round who didn’t vote in the first round, or you had people changing their vote in the second round, and probably a combination of the two.
But my question is: how do you interpret a case like Brazil where they were very hard on Jair Bolsonaro when they came to power? They prosecuted him, and they not only won the first election, but they were able to win a second election. That was unexpected, and that really goes against the tide of the direction that politics has been going in Latin America.
Do you see anything that connects back to your theory, or is this a case that sits outside of it?
Laura Gamboa: I think it’s a case of something else. So let me be really clear. I understand that PT is a left-wing party in Brazil, but by several metrics, Lula is quite centrist in many ways. His first government and his second government have been pretty standard in terms of markets, in terms of security.
He’s very centrist in many ways. I’m going to push back against this idea that they, meaning Lula and his government, were really hard on Bolsonaro. I think the institutions, some of which may have been elected or selected or nominated by Petistas, were hard on Bolsonaro. But it was the institutions, like the court is an independent entity, and it was pretty much the courts that sanctioned Bolsonaro for electoral crimes, and then they uncovered the coup, and that’s what happened.
jmk: That was probably unfair of me, but at the same time, the institutions were harder on Bolsonaro, and people draw a parallel to the United States, and they ask themselves, should the United States have been more aggressive towards Trump, or were the institutions too aggressive towards Trump and effectively played into his hand?
Laura Gamboa: I think it’s all about how you can sell this. So I’m currently working on a paper, it’s still in the works, we’re still trying to figure out how to gather the data, with Alejandro González-Ruiz, one of my students, and Juan Albarracín, a professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. And we’re trying to analyze what kind of popular support this punishment had in Brazil and how this influenced the lack of this kind of response in the US.
And our intuition is that in Brazil, there is a clear understanding that Brazil can turn authoritarian, that this is a possibility, that this has happened in the past, that people know what this looks like. In the United States, this recognition doesn’t exist, not because the United States does not have an authoritarian past.
Anybody who understands the South knows that they did. But to a certain extent, that’s not the story as is told in the US. We don’t tell the story of subnational authoritarianism in the US unless you get a PhD in political science, right? The story you get is one about segregation and racism, but the word democracy does not fit into this story, and this story is a very linear story in how the United States has always gone forward and never backwards, never.
And so what I think is that a sanction against Bolsonaro can be easily sold to the public as this was a true danger to democracy, more so than in the United States. It’s harder to convince the public in the United States that Donald Trump was actually a threat to democracy. And this is the other part of the story, that I also believe, and I know there’s other people working on this, it has to do with the institutional infrastructure.
Brazil has an institutional infrastructure that penalizes coups. These exist, and the US doesn’t. We have walked this walk in Latin America. A lot of the things that I see in the US, I’m like, ‘How is this possible that this is legal?’ Because every single country in Latin America has seen a dictatorship, has seen coups.
We have seen it, so we have designed and redesigned our institutions accordingly, and we have created institutional provisions that respond to these things. The latest one that is a mind twister for me is how voting rights in the US is framed in terms of race, because that’s how voting rights were protected, in terms of race.
And so if gerrymandering does not undermine Black voters, then it is not illegal, even though it is partisan. And for me, this makes no sense. How is it possible that we have rulings that say, ‘This is okay because Black voters or minorities are not affected by it’? We need a new framework to rethink these questions in the US, and that framework, flawed as it may be, already exists in other Latin American and European, Eastern European countries.
jmk: Now, the article is about breaking an autocrat’s coalition, but it’s about breaking an autocrat’s coalition within a competitive authoritarian or a backsliding democratic regime. Because I get the impression, even from this conversation, that you’ve alluded to it, that these strategies wouldn’t necessarily work in a country like Russia or China.
Laura Gamboa: No, they wouldn’t. I don’t think they would. I’ve been working on a couple of book chapters in which I’ve tried to walk back a lot of the conversation on backsliding, ’cause I think the conversation on backsliding has become incredibly rich because we have a lot of people working and a lot of people thinking about it, and a lot of people writing about it, but in many ways it has also become really convoluted.
And I think this has to do a lot with the quantitative turn of how we think about democratic backsliding. We have these fantastic indices. This is not a criticism of the index by any means, like V-Dem or even Freedom House or whatever, and people are trying to quantify these things. And so what they do is that they measure declines in democracy.
The term is autocratization, and what they say is, ‘Well, we’re going to calculate declines.’ Why? Because numerically, when you’re trying to figure it out, 150 countries across, I don’t know, 50 years, you cannot do this qualitatively for each country. So what you do is you measure declines, and I think there is not enough qualitative distinction between these declines.
And so we are lumping together a bunch of phenomena that is related, but it’s not entirely the same.
jmk: I think that we dismiss the idea of regime logic, where there is a story that regimes tell themselves about who they are, and autocracies tell a very different type of story than democracies do, and different types of autocracies tell different stories than each other, and different types of democracies can tell different stories than one another.
And to be fair, every country tells its own story, but we can categorize and lump them together to say, ‘These countries are going to behave more like each other because they act this way.’ And it’s closely correlated to the way that we measure democracy, but I don’t know that when we’re on the margins, when we’re talking about a one or two-point difference, that that really explains the difference between a country that behaves democratically or autocratically.
Laura Gamboa: So in this book chapter, they asked me to write about opposition strategies against autocratization, broadly speaking, right? And so what I try to do is talk about how do we protect democracies in countries that are still democratic, and they’re not facing an authoritarian threat. And this is where I think we need to have a conversation about representation and political parties and equality, and does the state deliver?
That’s where the conversation happens. Then you have the group of countries with which I built my career and my book, which is countries that are facing an authoritarian leader that has attained power, but the country is still democratic. The institutions somehow work. The elections are still somehow free and fair.
Then you have your competitive authoritarian regimes. That would be Hungary. It would be El Salvador, although El Salvador is quickly moving forward to a lower stage, but it would be El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, and that’s the countries in which there’s some relative freedom of the press. There is some basic-ish protection of human rights, which is why I’m saying El Salvador is quickly leaving that category.
There is the ability of opposition parties to compete in elections, but the elections are not fair. They may be free in the sense that people can vote however they want, but they’re not fair. And then you have your countries like Russia or China, which are closed autocracies, and I think opposition in those spaces has a different logic, has different goals, and has different strategies.
As Latin Americanists, we are quickly learning because now we have Venezuela and we have Nicaragua on top of Cuba as countries that are quickly becoming closed autocracies, or Nicaragua already became, and Venezuela, until something changes for real, still is, and Cuba has been for a long time. In these regimes, what you need to figure out is how to keep the opposition alive, how to create mechanisms to keep some informal network, how to share information with the world about what is happening.
It’s just very basic survival, which is not the task in these other stages of the regime. Now, I think you’re right. I think the legitimizing logic not only varies across regimes, it also varies across specific countries. The legitimizing logic in China is different from the legitimizing logic in Nicaragua.
But if I had to lump them together, I would be more careful in lumping them together based on the regime in which they are, especially the level of repression and the ability to move around. It’s really hard to mount an opposition in Nicaragua.
jmk: Yeah. Just because two countries are different from one another does not mean that you can’t categorize them together to understand things.
Laura Gamboa: Yeah. I’m just opening the option that this could be categorized in a different way, and I don’t disagree with that. But for me at least, I think we need to think more carefully about which type of regime we’re talking about, and I don’t think our quantitative measures quite capture that.
jmk: Now, let me ask you a question about a world event that is related to your research, but I’d like to get your perspective, and that would be what’s happening over in France with the protests over there.
‘Cause that is a country that is very democratic still, lots of channels to be able to make change, and your research would suggest that people in France should use those institutional channels. But people have found the need to go out in the street and protest, and it’s possible that those protests, because they’ve become so violent, because of the images that we’re seeing, because of the issues, could end up bringing to power somebody who’s on the far right or possibly also bringing to power somebody who’s on the very far left, either one of which could further exacerbate democratic backsliding there.
I’d like to get your perspective on whether or not the protests and the degree of protests is damaging, in your mind, to democracy, or if you think that it’s necessary for democratic change.
Laura Gamboa: So I’ll start by saying that I do not want to demonize protesters. I think people have the right to protest peacefully, and they should do so.
I will also say, and I say this in my book, that I think the problem with protests is not that you use them. Protests can actually be really helpful to protect democracy as long as you manage to do them peacefully. And I know people think that they’re always protesting peacefully, but protesting peacefully using nonviolence requires a lot more work than people envision.
It requires actually not responding with violence to repression perpetrated by the police. The minute you respond with violence, then you lose the public narrative. I think in democratic backsliding, and this is a moment in which I wish my book had been published three years later, when I had a lot of the other research that has been coming out, because it gives me the language to say things that I didn’t have the ability to say.
So there is an article coming up by Johannes Gerschewski and Luca Tomini, and they say, ‘Look, in democratic backsliding, there are multiple forms of resources that are being fought over, one of which is narratives.’ We’re telling a narrative of who is and who isn’t democratic, who is and who isn’t violent. And part of what my book says, in a way, is you need to win the narrative, and the way to win the narrative is to use institutional strategies because they are the safest.
And so I think protests, if they’re actually engaging in nonviolence, can win the narrative. Nobody would be against a bunch of students being gassed, right? I’ve been seeing the videos of the orchestra playing La Marseillaise and being gassed. But of course, resisting that requires a lot of training, and I don’t think we have that training. There’s a fantastic article by Erica Chenoweth.
It’s in the Journal of Democracy from six years ago maybe, in which she talks about how we have changed the way we mobilize and give away the organizational infrastructure that we used to have, and that organizational infrastructure is key to training activists and training people in nonviolent resistance.
And so what we end up having is a lot of marginal violence that is not intended, that is not what the movement wanted. That is usually just… It could be even people who were infiltrated, but there’s no mechanism to fight it because we don’t have the organizational infrastructure. So I would say that the problem is not protesting.
The problem is that protesting in a way that wins you the narrative is really, really hard, and I don’t know that we’re doing enough to train people to do this the right way. Rachel Schwartz and Anita Isaacs have a fantastic piece in the Journal of Democracy about how Bernardo Arévalo won the election, and one of the things that they say is, look, one of the things that the protesters in Guatemala did really well in twenty twenty-three and a little bit of twenty twenty-four, is that they had mechanisms to protect themselves from fringe violence.
They had a set of rules that they had set to avoid being tagged with any fringe violence. So that’s the first thing I will say. The second thing I will say is, I think what we’re seeing in France is evidence of a phenomena that is incredibly more dangerous than the particular demands of the students, which are valid.
And it’s the fact that more and more what we see in societies advanced and less advanced, is people giving up on politics as a mechanism to achieve change. And by politics, I don’t mean a political party. I mean politics, like running for office, voting, using negotiation to channel conflict. And the more I see this phenomena unfold, the more I think that’s incredibly, incredibly dangerous.
And what I feel is that these students really don’t feel represented by anybody, and so what they’re doing is they’re moving to the streets, and that’s really dangerous. I feel very optimistic about other developments like Serbia’s student list, for example, because yes, the list was not attached to any political party, but these students figured out that the best way for them to achieve their means was to participate in elections, and I think that’s important.
jmk: So over the past 20 years now, we’ve been hearing year after year that democracy is under threat, not just in the United States, but throughout the world. It does feel that in the past year we’ve seen a lot of activity demanding greater representation, demanding democratic change, demanding something to happen that feels like maybe we’re seeing a tide turn.
We mentioned protests in France that might have a mixed result, but we’re also seeing protests over in India. We see things happening in, I think it’s Albania. We saw the recent elections within Serbia. We’re seeing a lot of things happen throughout the world. I’d like to get your thoughts. Do you feel like we’re at a moment where democracy might be facing a turning point, that we might see the tide turn, or do you feel that we’re going to be experiencing setbacks for some time before we see a new democratic wave?
Laura Gamboa: That’s a very interesting question, ’cause I was thinking about it yesterday. If you had asked me this question in July, I would have said, ‘No, this is terrible, we’re all doomed.’ And of course, I’m very optimistic because Lula won yesterday’s election, and I tend to be on the optimistic side in general.
But my sense of this is that we are in the struggle. I don’t think it’s a time to think we’re in an autocratic wave, and I don’t think it’s a time to think we’re in a turning tide. I think we are in the struggle right now. I think we’re fighting inch by inch, country by country, movement by movement.
I think– The elections coming up in the US will be absolutely crucial because whether we like it or not, the international community can shape a lot of what happens or how we constrain our autocrats in other countries. So the ability of Nayib Bukele to engage in further authoritarianism is harder if the US Congress does not allow for funding for El Salvador.
And yes, they have a proven record of protection of human rights or something of the sort. I also think we’re not going to leave this moment without fundamental changes, for good and for bad. I think the liberal order, the one I was raised in, is about to disappear or morph into something different.
I also think we’re not living without a pound of flesh, in the sense that, and maybe this is my feeling because I live in the US, when I was in college, the first term of Álvaro Uribe’s presidency, I was gassed. Those men broke into my university multiple times. The dangers and abuses of the regime were felt very, very close.
Of course, you’re young, and so your risk assessment is different, but I was willing to fight the fight. I feel that here, I don’t feel the same urgency in this country to fight the fight. You feel it in certain communities, right? So certainly Minnesota, certainly immigrant communities in certain spaces.
But you don’t feel the fire to fight the fight as widespread, and I think part of this has to do with the fact that I don’t think people want it to be costless. I’m going to give an example. I was at a conference recently, and we were talking about how academics should actually engage in these questions and fight the fight.
And somebody raised their hand and said, ‘Well, I’m in a tenure-track position. I’m a junior scholar, and they don’t give me points for this.’ And my thought was, well, I would be thrilled if universities changed their incentives. But my other thought was, yeah, this has been true forever. People don’t get points for fighting for their country.
The reward you get is your country. I don’t know that we’re going to come out of this without sacrificing a bit. The question is, how are we going to sacrifice it? Are we going to sacrifice it in a way that we see a light at the end of the tunnel, or are we going to sacrifice it when we’ve lost our paychecks because we cannot afford gas?
And then my third thought about this: between the time I published my book and today, backsliding and the phenomenon of backsliding has changed so much. And part of the problem is it’s no longer a story about individual countries backsliding. It’s also a story about how there is this new group of very rich people who control basic state infrastructure, from communications all the way to satellites.
And I don’t know that we have even begun to figure out how we’re going to get out of that particular conundrum, because we all think in terms of nation states. That’s what we know. And it’s really hard to think in terms of how we’re going to take power back in terms of how we communicate, how we campaign, how do we defend our countries?
And I think that discussion is just starting, and I wish I knew more about that conversation ’cause it’s very interesting.
jmk: Well, Laura Gamboa, thank you so much for joining me today. The article, one more time, is How to Break an Autocrat’s Coalition. Thank you so much for talking to me today.
Thank you so much for writing the article.
Laura Gamboa: Thank you so much for having me, Justin. It’s always a pleasure.
Links
Learn more about Laura Gamboa.
Read her article “How to Break an Autocrat’s Coalition” in the Journal of Democracy
Read her book Resisting Backsliding.
Learn more about the Kellogg Institute.
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Email comments or questions to jkempf@democracyparadox.com
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