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    Trump's First Year: How Resilient is Liberal Democracy?
    John Shattuck. 2/15/2018. Trump's First Year: How Resilient is Liberal Democracy?. Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. 2018001st ed. Cambridge, MA: Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School. See full text. Abstract
    In his recent discussion paper, Shattuck examines the Trump administration’s attacks on liberal democratic institutions during its first year, and assesses their institutional resilience.

    In its 2016 “Democracy Index” report, the Economist Intelligence Unit downgraded the United States from a “full” to a “flawed democracy”. The report cited “an erosion of trust in political institutions” as the primary reason for the downgrade.1 In January 2018 Freedom House made a more dire assessment: “democratic institutions in the US have suffered erosion, as reflected in partisan manipulation of the electoral process, bias and dysfunction in the criminal justice system, and growing disparities in wealth, economic opportunity and political influence.”2

    Declining levels of political participation and public confidence in government in the US are not new, but the populist forces that propelled the election of Donald Trump in 2016 signaled a new level of public disillusionment with democratic politics as usual. There has been a sharp increase in democratic discontent over the last fifteen years. An October 2017 Washington Post/University of Maryland poll found that 71% of Americans believe that political polarization and democratic dysfunction have reached “a dangerous low point”. Three years earlier, in 2014, a Gallup Poll showed that 65% of Americans were “dissatisfied with their system of government and how it works,” a dramatic reversal from 68% satisfaction twelve years earlier in 2002.

    How resilient is liberal democracy, and how broad is its base of support? On a global level there is evidence of both erosion and resilience. A November 2017 report of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, an intergovernmental organization that assesses the state of democracy worldwide, put it this way: “The current situation is more positive than suggested by an increasingly gloomy view that democracy has been in decline for the last ten years or more. This period appears to be one of trendless fluctuations in which gains and downturns in individual countries

    tend to balance each other out at the global level.”3 From this vantage point, democracy in the US may be resilient when compared to some other democracies where neo-authoritarian leaders -- such as Orban in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, and Erdoğan in Turkey -- have recently undermined the independence and functioning of pluralist institutions.

    But the health of American democracy has been called into question. Experts are divided on whether the illness reflects an ongoing struggle in the US by the proponents of liberal democracy to fend off anti-democratic tendencies ,4 or a long-term trend toward democratic deconsolidation.5 This paper considers a sampling of evidence about attacks on key institutions and elements of democracy in the US during the first year of the Trump administration, and potential sources of democratic resilience in the media, the judiciary, law enforcement, democratic norms and principles, the electoral process, civil society, state and local government, the federal civil service, and the Congress. The stakes are high. A central question, posed by a provocative new book, How Democracies Die, by Harvard scholars Stephen Levitsky and Daniel Zieblatt, is whether these institutions will withstand anti-democratic pressure, or “become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not?”6

    Following is a summary of the Trump administration’s challenges to democratic institutions during its first year and an assessment of institutional resilience compiled in this report.

    Elections Under Oppression in Cambodia: A Predictable Outcome?
    Sreang Heng. 9/4/2018. “Elections Under Oppression in Cambodia: A Predictable Outcome?” Yale Macmillan Center. See full text.Abstract
    Read more on the Cambodian elections by by Sreang Heng, Carr Center fellow.
     
    "On July 29, 2018, another parliamentary election was held in Cambodia. When the commune elections had been held on June 4, 2017, they were followed by complaints and recounts, but the official results showed that the two major rival parties had won the majority of votes: the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) received 1,156 communes (out of 1,646) while its opposition party, the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) won 489. The Khmer National United Party received only one."

    Full publication.

    Hungary’s Attack on Academic Freedom
    John Shattuck. 4/3/2017. “Hungary’s Attack on Academic Freedom”.Abstract
    See the op-ed in The Boston Globe by Carr Senior Fellow John Shattuck.

    An authoritarian nationalist regime in Hungary is threatening a renowned international university in Budapest. Legislation introduced last week by the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban would fundamentally alter the legal status of Central European University and could force it to shut down or leave the country.

    What’s going on in Hungary is not a local political dispute, but a frontal assault on liberal values essential to democracy and academic freedom.

    Full Op-Ed here.

    This Is What Will Happen If Trump Brings Back Secret Prisons
    Kathryn Sikkink and Avery Schmitt. 2/10/2017. “This Is What Will Happen If Trump Brings Back Secret Prisons.” The Washington Post .Abstract
    An analysis, in The Washington Post, from Carr Center's Kathryn Sikkink and research fellow Avery Schmitt.

    "Amid the flurry of executive orders issued by President Trump during his first week in office, one remains a work in progress. A draft version of the executive order on the “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” has been leaked. It is a complex document with many provisions — all appeared designed to make it possible for the Trump administration to return to Bush policy of secret kidnapping, detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

    Although the Trump administration has publicly backed away from some aspects of the order, Trump’s decision to appoint Gina Haspel — who has been accused of running one of the Bush era secret prisons that tortured inmates — as deputy head of the CIA suggests that Trump continues to be interested in returning to past practices. The mixed signals coming from the administration mean that it is still important to explain what a return of the secret prison system might mean."

    Full article at The Washington Post. 

    Resisting Trumpism in Europe and the United States
    John Shattuck. 12/2/2016. “Resisting Trumpism in Europe and the United States.” The American Prospect.Abstract
    Read the article by Senior Fellow John Shattuck: 

    Authoritarian democracy is on the march on both sides of the Atlantic. Despite alarming parallels, the U.S. remains better positioned to preserve and rebuild true democracy. 

    The election of Donald Trump shows what happens when democracy misfires. It echoes recent developments in Europe, most notably in Hungary and Poland, where elected leaders are attacking democratic pluralism, minority rights, and civil liberties, keeping the forms of democracy without the substance. The same trends are proceeding in France, the Netherlands, the U.K., and other European democracies where far-right parties under the banner of populist nationalism are pursuing racist and xenophobic objectives.

    Having returned to the United States this fall after seven years in Hungary, I am struck by the shocking parallel between what is happening in Europe and here at home. The Trump election signals a sharp turn toward the populist far right. The presidential campaign was marked by the denigration of women and minorities and the rhetoric of racial extremism. The president-elect’s early appointments include people with these views. Civil liberties are threatened. Foreign alliances are in jeopardy. The risk of war is heightened.

    How to Defend Human Rights in the Trump Era
    John Shattuck. 1/25/2017. “How to Defend Human Rights in the Trump Era.” The Boston Globe.Abstract
    Carr Center's Senior Fellow John Shattuck's latest Op-Ed in the Boston Globe.

    Recent presidents who threatened rights have been reined in. Richard Nixon used the power of the presidency to attack the Constitution and his political enemies, but the House of Representatives voted to impeach him. Ronald Reagan tried to overturn hard-won legislation on the rights of women and minorities, but civil society groups and a bipartisan congressional coalition beat back the attack. George W. Bush introduced the use of torture in violation of domestic and international law, but resistance inside the federal government led to reinstatement of the torture ban.

    Following these examples, a new citizen movement must mobilize the assets of American democracy to protect basic rights and freedoms in the Trump era."

    Read the full Op-Ed in the Boston Globe.

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