For people like me or just your ordinary Joes who speak of democracy, I thought it meant freedom. I thought it meant a free press. I thought it meant that people would not die on the streets. Patricia Evangelista Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Patricia Evangelista is a trauma journalist and former investigative reporter for the Philippine news company Rappler. She has received the...

You could take that populism and turn it negative, which often happens... But populism could also be a wonderful thing where you're actually appealing to what the voters want instead of what the powerful want. Cenk Uygur Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Cenk Uygur is a host of the show The Young Turks and the founder, president, and CEO of its parent company TYT. He is a Democratic...

Autocracy as we understand it today is a modern creation. I think there we see very few successful examples of modern autocracies that are able to sustain themselves. Shadi Hamid Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Shadi Hamid is a columnist and member of the Editorial Board at The Washington Post. He is also a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary and the co-host of...

Writing a book like that makes you really think brutally about the past. It makes you really think about the current time and also how the future would look at you. Branko Milanovic Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Branko Milanovic is a Research Professor at the City University of New York and a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality. He served as the lead...

I really do think that what we've witnessed over the last decades is the emergence of a new ideology that is meaningfully distinct... I think it really is meaningfully distinct from other forms of what is meant to be left wing in the past from other ideological traditions. Yascha Mounk Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Yascha Mounk is a Professor of the Practice of International...

It would be a lovely thing if before I die, I get to see a younger generation reclaim democracy and rebuild it in a new, more expansive way. Heather Cox Richardson Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Heather Cox Richardson is a Professor of History at Boston College. Her daily newsletter Letters from an American is read by millions. She has a new book out as of today called Democracy...

I think one of the greatest barriers to reform is thinking that reform is impossible. Daniel Ziblatt Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Daniel Ziblatt is the Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and director of the Transformations of Democracy group at Berlin's Social Science Center. He is the coauthor with Steven Levitsky of How Democracies Dieand a new book The Tyranny...

North Korea is stable up until the day it's not... The day that it collapses, there'll be a lot of people out there who will say this was inevitable. Victor Cha Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Victor Cha is a professor of government at Georgetown University and holds the Korea Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He is a former director for...

People still think of Chinese history as this two-line struggle because that's the story the Chinese tell. But everything from Mao Zedong's relationship to Liu Shaoqi to anything that happened during the 1980s, it was not a problem of competing policy platforms. It was a problem of getting the politics of your relationship with the top leader right when it was hard to guess what they were thinking and they were changing their mind and they were suspicious of you. Joseph Torigian Access Bonus...

Great developments by nature are not linear. Things just don't always continue as they have been. That's why this idea that the Arab Spring came, it went, it happened, it didn't work, therefore the Middle East will always remain an autocracy - that's linear thinking. Great events are great precisely because they're not linear. Robert Kaplan Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Robert...

India should be understood as a test case of democracy outside the Western world. Rahul Verma Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Rahul Verma is a fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. He is also Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science, Ashoka University. Recently, he wrote “The Exaggerated Death of Indian Democracy” in the recent Journal of...

It would be a miracle if the original understanding of the Constitution just landed time and time again with the views in 2023 of the right-wing of the Republican Party. That would be too amazing a coincidence. That's more than troublesome. Cass Sunstein Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. During Obama’s...

I think we have a more complex notion of what democracy is.  - Marc Plattner Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Marc Plattner is the founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and the founding codirector of the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies. Until 2016, he also served as NED’s vice president for research and studies, and from 1984 to...

It's too simplistic to call it an evil company. There are certainly a lot of very good people that work there. It's just the system itself and the corporation itself and the system that it's embedded in is what causes the problems. Michael Forsythe Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Michael Forsythe is a reporter on the investigations team at The New York Times. Until February 2017 he...

Spin dictators have fewer political prisoners, fewer political killings. This is good. This is really good. On the other hand, we want to tell everybody that they are still dictators. Sergei Guriev Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Sergei Guriev is a professor of Economics at Sciences Po in Paris. He was a former chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development...

Elections are not free or fair, but they matter greatly because this is how Erdoğan comes to power and stays in power and in this case he was almost about to lose that power. Sebnem Gumuscu Support Democracy Paradox on Podurama. Listen here. Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Berk Esen is an assistant professor of political science at Sabancı University. Sebnem Gumuscu is an associate...

The most dangerous states in the international system aren't necessarily revisionist powers that think that their trajectory points continually upward. It's those countries that have been growing, rising for a long time, and then fear that they are peaking and are about to decline. Those are the countries that are inclined to take the biggest risks to try to improve their position in the the here and now before things get worse for them in the future. Hal Brands Access Bonus Episodes on...

My book is in some ways trying to help us see not only the kind of deep intermingling of pre-modern and modern ideas of sovereignty, but how we repeat some of those more fantastical attributes of sovereignty that we might otherwise presume to be long gone remnants of a more superstitious or religious age. Natasha Wheatley Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Natasha Wheatley is an...

I think that the most important reform is openness. Once the country is open, really open to the rest of the world, the rest follows. Sebastian Edwards Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Sebastian Edwards is the Henry Ford II Professor of International Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was the former Chief Economist for Latin America at the World Bank where...

Democracy is Eastern as well as Western. Dan Slater Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Dan Slater is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science, the Ronald and Eileen Weiser Professor of Emerging Democracies, and director of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies at the University of Michigan. His most recent book (coauthored with Joseph Wong) is From Development to...

If you have grown up in a household which had decent quality of life and now you are struggling, you cannot even match the degree of wellbeing that your parents achieved, this is very obvious and makes people feel completely dissatisfied with the system that we have now. Peter Turchin Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Peter is a complexity scientist who has established a new field of...

It's very hard to understand what's happening today without looking at the roots of all these divisions and at the interests of the different communities and their long-held resentments against the establishment of the country. Isabel Kershner Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Isabel Kershner is a reporter at The New York Times and the author of a new book called The Land of Hope and...

The Jihadis today root themselves theologically and ideologically in a particular movement that is exclusivist, that is militant, that is activist, and that is the movement known as Wahhābism. Cole Bunzel Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Cole Bunzel is a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the editor of the blog Jihadica. He is the author of the book...

If you have this model of AI, which is geniuses design machines and those machines or algorithms are going to scoop up all the data and they're going to make better decisions for you. That's fundamentally anti-democratic. Daron Acemoglu Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Daron Acemoglu is the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics at MIT. He is coauthor (with James A....

The fact that Ukraine can be a democracy.... presents a threat to the authoritarian regimes in Moscow and Minsk of the sort that NATO would never actually present. Serhii Plokhy Access Bonus Episodes on Patreon Make a one-time Donation to Democracy Paradox. A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com. Serhii Plokhy is a Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and the Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He’s written many books including The...