a professor of political science and economic um pearson institute for the stadium resolution of global conflicts complexity latina in colombia thank you i i thank you very much thank you very much for inviting me i'm very happy to be here uh i've heard a lot about the festival of economics but the first time i've come so it's it's very exciting and it's obviously an exciting event and a very unique event i'm i i don't have a watch i don't i hadn't brought my phone is somebody gonna tell me when to shut up and could you tell me five minutes before i'm supposed to shut up okay great okay so so so what i'm going to do today is to try to talk about something i've never actually given a presentation about in my entire life which is populism uh since i've hung out a lot in latin america i've perhaps experienced populism sort of first hand but i never talked about it and i'm going to try to talk about it through the lens of a new book that darron asamogla and i uh have just finished which is coming out in september i'm not quite sure when the italian translation is coming out but it's coming out in english in september and it's called the narrow corridor state society and the fate of liberty so you'll by the end of the lecture you'll see why it's called the narrow corridor okay so so let me let me let me start by trying to say what i think populism is the populism is a very heterogeneous phenomenon so so it's difficult to get your hands on so i just tried to distill a couple of key characteristics that populist experiences seem to have okay so here's my go at doing it i think what's complicated about populism is it's it's both an ideology and a political strategy a kind of a positive interpretation of what's going on in society at the same time the ideological part of it is a notion that there's the people there's some concept of the people and it's the people's preferences that ought to be deciding what happens in a country who if you look at the way people speak it's very common after brexit nigel farage talks about brexit as a victory for the real people president trump talks about the other people who don't mean anything okay from colombia you mentioned colombia president uribe which has a former president uribe he talks of the gente de bien the good people let me give you a little sample from president uibe's twitter account the good people legente de bien have begun to arm themselves to protect themselves against the guerrillas who santos former president santos the elites president uribe is fighting against have given the country to okay so the good people the gente de bien are arming themselves to protect themselves from president santos and the other sinister elites running colombia so that brings in i think the other part of this which seems to be very common which is there's a sort of normative idea or an ideological idea that there's some concept of the people okay and the people should be governing and their preferences should be determining what happens but they're not because there's an elite that's captured the society in that case president santos and his clique so so it seems that in most of these populist experiences that's more like a sort of positive what i'd call a positive claim it's a kind of empirical statement that policy is actually being determined by this elite therefore it doesn't reflect the will or the preferences of the people okay so i think there's a few things to think about in that definition so to me that's the key aspect some notion of the people and i'll come back to that and the notion that the system is captured by some elite so the people is that's a very i call that a sort of very non-pluralistic notion of society okay so the people as opposed to who well as opposed to the elite obviously and probably as opposed to other people in the society who are not the real people so so i call that it's about a very non-pluralistic notion of society and it's also a rather exclusionary notion you know because implicitly it elevates the interests of these people whoever the people are el pueblo you know president chavez used to talk about president perron talked about los des camisados you know the shirtless ones so that case the people are they're marginalized they're not represented they're not that's part of this narrative too they're excluded it's the elites who are running things so populism is very heterogeneous but this is my sense of what's common to all these experiences so what's bad about that you know well i think there's some obvious things that are bad about it many people say you know populism is bad because it's very there's an individual who dominates everything well that's true in the united states at the moment but it's not always true you know perron president perron left a party you know which has lasted a long time there's a real political party in bolivia at the moment you could say president morales in many ways was a populist he talks about the problems of the elite about the people indigenous people who've been not represented in bolivia you know uh so that you know it has many elements of what i'm calling populism but there's a party you know the national front in france is a party it even tried to kick you know le pen its founder out of the party and there were rules that stopped him stopped it doing so so so so there so that's maybe something we're worried about very personalization of power but i think the most clear thing we're worried about is that this this this anti-pluralistic kind of exclusionary aspect of defining who the people are is somehow very inconsistent with our notion of dem liberal democratic ideas and rights okay so that's a very contrary to the typical conception of liberal democracy okay i think empirically populism also seems to go along with an enormous amount of concentration of political power and i think the reason for that is that in many ways populism is kind of anti-institutional so the attack on the elite and the institute comes along with an attack on the institutions that are captured by the elite so if you want to change that you have to demolish these institutions if you look at populist experiences in most parts of latin america where they've really taken over the state in ecuador in peru in venezuela constitutions are rewritten checks and balances are demolished the power of executives becomes much larger president chavez was able to rule basically without the legislature for years right at the moment in mexico president lopez obrador even though he has a majority in congress he bypasses congress and just rules through these kind of assemblies and clever sites that he sort of spontaneously brings together so this concentration of and centralization of power uh seems to be worrying from a democratic point of view but it also seems to be associated with very poor economic performance okay so i'm trying to define populism in a way which encompasses both left and right populism president uribe is in favor of free markets and property rights and a small state he's a very you know he's a very conservative man with a small sea but of course the chavistas in venezuela are very left-wing so this is not left or under the guise of the people the people could have many different sorts of preferences and they could want different things in different contexts so i think the specifics of economic policy that comes out of this formation of populism differ depending on the context okay so that's what populism is that's what some of the things we're worried about you know what what why we're concerned when does it emerge that's probably the most interesting thing well you need a theory in some sense of to to think about when populism emerges and what you might do to stop it emerging and though since i'm in italy let me start with machiavelli's theory okay so here's what machiavelli proposed as a theory of okay i'll get to his theory of populism but before i get to his theory of populism let me let me give you his theory of what populism sort of overthrows okay and he sort of says think of society as the nobles and the people the nobles against the people and the nobles would like to command and oppress the people but the people don't want that okay so machiavelli says that's a simple out of that simple thing you can imagine three things happening you can imagine the nobles dominating the people and that leads to what he called a principality or you could imagine the people dominating the nobles he calls that leads to a situation of license and in the middle there's a sort of balance between the people and the nobles and that's what leads to liberty okay there's machiavelli's theory there's a sort of dichotomy the nobles i'm going to call that the elite there's people citizens and they're fighting each other they're struggling the nobles are trying to oppress the citizens the citizens are fighting back they're trying to control the nobles and either one side could win or there's a sort of stalemate and that according to the machiavellia is when liberty emerges so let me start by asking and in some sense that's what we're worried about we're worried that populism will overthrow liberty okay so so let me start by asking was machiavelli right okay is that is that where liberty comes from and it turns out that that's uh very closely related to uh the new book that darwin and i have okay so so let me start by asking if machiavelli was right and where liberty where does liberty come from to the extent we have it liberty is always imperfect like everything but to the extent that we have it and other parts of the world don't have it why is that okay and here's the argument in our book what's the origin of european liberty so our argument is you know if you go back in history and you think about what is it that sets europe on this on a particular trajectory compared to other parts of the world i'm not going to be able to talk about all the world in half an hour i'll talk a little bit about china as a contrast in five minutes but let me start thinking about the history of european political institutions and why they relate to machiavelli's claim about this balance between the nobles and the people leading to liberty where could such a balance have come from and what did it look like well if you go back to one and a half thousand years to the collapse of the western roman empire something very interesting happened a gentleman called clovis mostly king of the franks think of him as a political entrepreneur took the traditional accountable institutions of the germanic tribes the franks and he merged them with late roman state institutions uh the church territorial organization uh bureaucracy writing lawyers clovis took those things those state institutions and he merged them with these very participatory institutions of the franks okay that was the start of the merovingian dynasty which led to the carolingians which led to the home and holy roman empire but what's interesting about that well what's interesting is this balance between centralized authority and participation what do we know about the participation of the germanic tribes well the earliest description we have is by tacitus 98 a.d tacitus the roman historian and scholar he presented an almost ethnographic account of the way these germanic tribes very participatory very democratic the way they make decisions he talks about two assemblies okay one is a kind of smaller assembly more elite dominated another is a big assembly in which many people come and the assembly is responsible for all sorts of things including electing magistrates who deliver justice okay so clovis was a king but there were huge elements of participation which came from the franks and were built into the merovingian and carolingian state this is 98 a.d the earliest there's his king clovis his king clovis being uh converting to christianity that's his that's his tomb uh the earliest account we have of how this might have worked in the carolingian period is rather striking it's in 8 82 it's 800 years after tacitus unfortunately but what's interesting about this description by hinkmar is it looks so similar to what tacitus describes so there were two assemblies one was more elite based one was much broader based okay so you get state institutions centralized institutions you have elites but you also have this element of participation built in okay so i think this is the balance that machiavelli was thinking of now one aspect of clovis's state building project was legal so he promulgated what's known as the salic law the select law is a very interesting thing and i'll contrast it in a minute with chinese law this is too much too many too many words here but but hopefully we can post the slide somewhere and you have more leisure to read them but just let me point something out about this this is from a preface the surviving preface of the salic law that clove has promulgated and how was the salic law written okay not by clovis it turns out okay four lawmakers wieselgast aragast salagast and widow garcia it sounds like lord of the rings lord of the rings doesn't it they were chosen from beyond the rhine they came together in three legal assemblies okay so this what was the select law was an extremely bottom-up participatory process of taking customary law social norms and codifying it okay it was not some sort of top-down constitutional design or whatever it was an attempt to like systematize the way society worked and kind of incorporate it into this new state but again very participatory of course you know this model spreads and it spreads where german tribes spread i'm coming to italy england you know i'm english so i couldn't we'll have to we'll come to brexit so so but it spreads to england the anglo-saxons you know the saxons that they were a germanic tribe okay here's you know famous moment in english history uh in 1215 the magna carta the great charter was signed between king john and the barons at runnymede just west of london it's a meadow next to the thames river now i don't know if you ever asked yourself every english schoolboy asked themselves why runnymede you know why did why did he sign it in runnymede like it's what what's the well it turns out to have been very significant because runnymede was a place where the anglo-saxon version of the germanic assembly known as the witton used to meet okay this was a place traditionally where there'd been anglo-saxon assemblies all right they signed it it's england so everything is a bit overdone you know the birthplace of modern democracy what what is it when will these english people like you know get their act together anyway the birthplace of non-democracy and then they went and had a drink at the pub okay so so the model spreads the model spreads you know think about it northern italy okay the lombards who are the lombards germanic tribe where do all these italian republican communes come from same thing fusion of late roman state institutions with this all this participation and accountability okay there's probably too much detail to see here but one of the things like the greatest kind of depiction of this how this worked or the consequences of this of course is in the palazzo publico in siena in the middle of siena this is the famous allegory of good government painted in 1338 and over here you have i'm not sure ah that didn't work did it okay over here you have the ruler the representation of the commune over here you have justice and what's particularly nice here is concord is giving a rope and at the bottom here these are the 24 consoles this is in the salon of the nine so at the time it was painted there were nine consoles in siena but previously there'd been 24 here's the 24 they're holding concorde is giving them a rope and the rope comes up and is wrapped around the wrists of the ruler so the consoles are constraining or shackling is the word we use in our book they're shackling the ruler you know there's a lot of the other imagery you've got romulus and remus and the wolf and stuff at the bottom but the allegory of good government is a sort of depiction of a communal government there's justice there's a rule of law there's accountability what's the economic consequences of this well you know i'm not going to talk too much about the economic consequences of populism or non-populism i alluded to it they this is also depicted in the frescoes here's the consequence of good government in the city there's trade there's markets there's exchange there's prosperity construction there's also there's also dancing uh populism may be consistent with dancing i don't really have a theorem on that but anyway so prosperity okay republican government liberty prosperity okay uh you'll see why i'm emphasizing italy apart from the fact that i'm in italy in a minute okay so so shackling shackling so so so i think machiavelli was right that if you go deep back into history and of course we could talk about how this thing reproduces itself over time the roots of this balance between elites and the state and citizens of the people that is very connected to the emergence of liberty and economic development and prosperity at the same time as depicted in the frescoes okay but that's not an easy thing to create it's not an easy thing to get that balance it can be very productive but it's conflict machiavelli emphasized conflict the nobles want to oppress people people want to fight back that's the story you know after kim jong-un and the ma and the barons signed the magna carta they had a civil war and king john said i'm not going to stick with that you know and they fought so this is not a consensual it's a conflicting situation it's a race it's a it's a contest and it's difficult to attain okay uh think about china china is very different from that european history with its parliaments and its republics and very different if you go far enough back it's not so different okay there's a famous uh philosophical treatise the hunty it's written about the third century bc and here's you know here's a translation not i don't know chinese but by one of my chinese students and it's quite fun so let me go through it these are the translations of the characters king boat common people water water holds up boat water sinks boat it's a statement about accountability you know the king is in the boat the people of the water the water can hold up the boat or the water can sink the boat so you go far enough back in chinese history you have the same sorts of things you have accountability you have but then a new model emerges about a hundred years before the founding of the first dynasty the qin dynasty there's a this gentleman chiang yang or lord shang one of the he was one of the great kind of political entrepreneurs or intellectual entrepreneurs of chinese despotism you could say he becomes the advisor to the then king of chin before qin had eliminated the other warring states and he wrote a treatise on statecraft you know he was a sort of budding machiavellian thousands of years ahead of his time and here's one of the statements you know which kind of captures his view when the people are weak the state is strong hence the state strives to weaken the people okay and that was a philosophy that got embedded into the ideology of chin state building the way after the qin dynasty started the empire was organized and constructed it was a victory in machiavelli's terms of the nobles over the people okay that's a long time ago but that's how china has always been china veered off this path of balance almost two and a half thousand years ago and it never got close to it again all right if you've been in china recently you know you'll know that if you've ever read george orwell back in the 1940s when orwell was writing he said you know big brother is watching you well of course you know you couldn't really in the 1940s it wasn't technologically feasible but now it is and in fact now the chinese are putting up millions of these cameras everywhere so big brother can watch you and they're promulgating their social credit system to monitor everybody's activities and behavior this is a despotic and it's deep there's a deep history of that okay so so now we talked about two of the options the sort of the balance thing there's when like in china when in machiavelli's terms you know the nobles dominate i guess they did have nobles back in the qin dynasty now it's the communist party the nobles dominate the people what about the third option okay well i'm not going to talk too much about that you know where in the world is it the case that the people dominate the nobles or the people dominate the state well africa for example that's the story about african history the story about african history is a story of incredible participation and controls over elite at the local level and that worked just fine until colonialism messed everything up but that's the what machiavelli called license that's not a word i use in my african development class but but but license so let me not go into that in detail just i want to just talk about this trichotomy and i want to tell you about this diagram okay so so there's this there's a you know you might imagine you know if i was going to tell you the story of when society vanquishes the nobles in more detail you might have thought that the concern for what happened in china or the concern for the emergence of despotism would be quite an incentive to avoid it and that's also a big theme in african political history okay so here's the diagram i want to use to talk about populism how long do i have left okay so so so this is i said we need a theory to talk about populism okay and and here's the theory okay so and here's why the book is called the narrow corridor on the horizontal axis we have the you know this the power of society society think about that the ability of society to organize collectively to use norms to control elites on the vertical axis we have the power of the state so you have the three machiavelli's three outcomes here you know you have this despotic we use this terminology from thomas hobbes famous book leviathan okay despotic leviathan where the nobles defeat the people you have in africa what we call the absent leviathan you know lebanon is a bit like this too you know the lebanese state doesn't have authority society has authority where the people dominate the nobles and in the middle you have this balance between people between the nobles and the people which is when liberty emerges in this narrow corridor okay so i think there's a lot of persistence here and if i start talking about king clovis then there must be a lot of persistence because that was a long time ago and i think this path that europe's taken is sort of deeply rooted in that history and that's good news that's good that's good news to everyone worried about populism because it means that there's a structure of norms and expectations and blueprints for how things work that's radically different from in other parts of the world that's radically different from what you see in africa or radically different from what you have in china so that's good news but the bad news is that we can all think of instances in european history where societies have been thrown out of the corridor okay and i think in some sense one way of thinking about uh populism is exactly like that okay uh so i emphasize this contest between state and society and really when you're thinking about this corridor it's a very it's a productive context it's a success it's a contest where the state gets stronger and that forces society to organize and society gets and that the state pushes back and so it's that struggle is very productive we call that struggle this red queen this is from alice i won't go into alice you know alice in wonderland alice through the looking glass but if you've read lewis carroll it's it's a it's a it's it's a it's from lewis carroll's writing but the the red queen is this idea that this is this productive interaction but it's a conflictual thing and that means it can get out of control and an obvious way can get out of control historically is that elites actually managed to win and they throw a society out of the corridor but that's not the story with populism populism is more like the citizens themselves get disillusioned with what's going on in along this path to a shackled leviathan okay so how could the citizens get disillusioned well here's an example that perhaps machiavelli had in mind from ferrara as a tribute to my to my host here who's been showing me around there's other examples but this is a nice one i fished out what happened in ferrara in 1264. well the republican government voted itself out of existence in an assembly they decided to create hereditary ruler machiavelli had a theory about this he comments seeing that they cannot resist the nobility in this struggle the people give their support to one man so as to be defended by his authority okay so machiavelli is sort of describing you had a situation of balance sort of but then it gets captured by elites and people decide to overthrow the institutions and create this lord obiso as a hereditary ruler of ferrara so he'd he knew about the overthrow of liberty which suggests you know and to me reading this history of medieval italy this is an awful lot like many things that people discuss in populism okay which makes me think that you know there's some sort of deep history there's a deep historical connection between the creation of liberal democracy or republican institutions and the threat latent sort of shadow of uh populism okay so so why would why would this red screen get out of control why would people get so disillusioned why are people seemingly so disillusioned today well here's what i think it has to be plausible as it was in ferrara in the 13th century that there really is elite capture okay so so to come up with a for populism to happen remember go back to the way i thought about populism populism is both about it's a it's a kind of positive claim that in political institutions are captured by the elite along with a normative claim about the people should be deciding things okay that's the essence of it so how could that ever happen in this world well first of all it would have to be plausible that society really was captured by the elite okay secondly as i emphasized before populism is a sort of anti-institutional in many ways because the institutions are controlled by the elite so you have to get rid of them okay so it has to be the case that people are disillusioned with institutions i think institutions have lost their legitimacy they lost their trust in institutions institutions can't deal with the challenges they face and finally i think a non-pluralistic political identity has to be kind of potential it has to be latent okay and i think that's complicated because i think people as i if i have time i can talk about it people have many identities and the idea of defining the people is not an obvious thing and it's obviously it's also not obviously good politics you know go back to president trump's statement about the people who don't matter you know like that doesn't sound like good politics i'm not a politician but that doesn't sound like good politics to me politics is about you want everyone to love you you want you don't want to say no no no those people don't matter so it's only going to be in very specific circumstances that such an exclusionary strategy becomes attractive to politicians okay so i think that's something we have to understand why that moment could why that could happen and i think to me these last two things the first two things are i think pretty easy to understand you know if i go through them in in sequence you know uh i'm not going to talk about inequality you know uh you everyone in this room knows about what's been happening with inequality uh you know this idea of elite dominance well one way it shows up is potentially is through massive increasing inequality let me instead emphasize something which i see a lot you know when i in doing research in latin america you see this and now it's emerged in united states and britain and i which i find very surprising which i call elite like social distance like enormous increase in social distance between elites and non-elites you know so you know you know this data on inequality i won't talk about that okay here's a cartoon famous cartoon by saul steinberg it's called the view of the world from 9th avenue new york city okay so here's new york city bustling skyscrapers and there's the rest of the world you know chicago just about got on the map there i was happy to say uh uh you know san francisco didn't make it here's the you know here's the now one that's the view of colombia from bogota that's the view of argentina from buenos aires that's the view of peru from that's the view from that's the view of the philippines from manila you know this is what very unequal developing countries look like there's an elite who live in this kind of modern society and then there's the desert you know and that's a very unusual thing to be happening in the united states you know uh i always think like you know what's the difference between colombia and the united states well in colombia in the united states the wilderness is glamorous cowboys are glamorous you know in colombia the wilderness is like sinister and cowboys are evil you know you could never have invented the sierra club in colombia americans go camping colombians don't go camping you don't go camping in colombia you know so that sounds silly but actually i think it's indicative of a very different attitude towards the periphery you know the corps loves the periphery it feels the periphery is part of the same country but now it's the flyover country it's what they call the flyover country you know you fly over it on the way to san francisco okay england has its own flyover country and i know that because it's where my mother was born okay here's where my mother was born look at that you see all the prosperity imagine you were living there and you know david cameron was telling you don't leave the european union you know because it's going to be economically disastrous how how much more disastrous could it be okay this is a place called south bank it's near middlesbrough on t side 66 percent of people in south bank voted for brexit it's a flyover country david cameron has no idea what goes on in a place like south bank okay it's the same thing london the rest of the country the social distance okay massive problems of accountability also okay so so remember the part of the this elite capture narrative is the political system doesn't isn't the council doesn't take part of our preferences here's a local example from chicago joel knows this this is the fourth congressional district of illinois this red thing that's the district okay look at it it's absolutely crazy why does it look like that it's gerrymanders so that all these minorities get pushed into one congressional district so they only get to elect one hispanic congress person and the white people get to elect everybody else okay so this is blatantly undemocratic uh but it's it's there you know this is what goes on in the us okay so so here's an example of elite capture or a political class serving its own interests at the expense of accountability and what people want okay so if you want evidence to back up an elite capture narrative there's buckets of it okay what about the rate you know challenges towards institutions i think that's there too you know if you want evidence on the fact that institutions have done a very bad job at dealing with challenges it's there you know failures regulation failure to deal with the financial crisis you know the u.s banking system is more concentrated now than it was before the financial crisis nothing has happened you know problems of the china shock like the work of david alter and his co-authors looking at the local labor market consequences while economists just tell everybody oh free trade benefits everybody you know it's just a great thing uh meantime you know uh everyone's neglecting these problems associated with it okay and of course migration how long do i have okay so let me not talk about i i you got the point all right so elite capture deteriorating trust and belief that institutions can cope what about this last bit what about this exclusionary non-pluralistic well first of all you know it has to be plausible and i'm not going to talk i was going to talk about sierra leone but i don't have time to talk about sierra leone i like talking about sierra leone you know because western western academics have this notion that in africa there's like ethnic groups and it's like one everyone has this solid identity and it's total nonsense okay everyone in africa has way more identities than i do or anyone in this room people speak multiple languages there's multiple axes of association and identity and so i was going to talk about that but i don't have time let me just say my view is that you know as i alluded to earlier this notion of the people it's very you know in sierra leone the people what does the people mean doesn't mean anything like you could never build a political campaign based on the people who are the people you know there's so many all of us have so many different identities that can be emphasized or switched on and off so i think it must be a pretty specific context in which one identity becomes sort of latent or salient enough that it can really mobilize political support okay uh so so i think even if there is such a circumstance it's still not obvious how it becomes good politics as i said earlier you know president trump's other people don't mean anything doesn't sound like good politics and that's for that's for the obvious reason which is that's not how you in politics you want everyone to love you you need to build coalitions you need to build so let me not talk about that either okay so i would say that this exclusion what i don't want you to come so you can okay but that's that's all right i'll still cut it okay so so so so so you know i always think what like what darren and i call the nemo principle you know the famous statement by martin niemoller which is you know first who was this uh pastor in germany uh during the holocaust uh theologian when they came for the socialists i didn't speak out because i wasn't a socialist and when they came for the trade unions i didn't speak out because i wasn't a trade unionist then they came for the jews but i wasn't a jew then they came for me and there was no one left so so what we call the nemo principle is that you know in a pluralistic society i recognize your rights you know and defend them because you recognize my rights and defend them and so it's not pluralism is a equilibrium in many contexts because we understand that that once it starts eroding you can have something like what nemo described okay so so i think this idea of sort of the i don't think it's easy to create this people okay it's not easy to find an identity which satisfies this condition okay and i think that's a i think that's an optimistic conclusion because i think it's sufficiently nebulous that it's very difficult to actually build an enduring political movement on it but it must emerge in some circumstances and i guess you'd have to say so so you know you'd have to say that you know uh uh what does seem to have made this possible what seems to have made it possible you know in some sense as i say here it's sort of what's odd about this there's two things that are odd about this one is how do you create a people the people in a world with so many different identities and then even if you could construct such a thing or such a thing potentially existed why would it be politically appealing to to base a political strategy around that it's almost as if you know this identity has to be sufficiently large and it's politically attractive to motivate people along that line but threatened also threatened you know which is odd how can you be large and threatened you know so so so you know but i think the obvious explanation for that in the current context at least in the european context i think you know in the u.s context there's many other factors you know i would say for example you know why was president trump why is this strategy attracted to president trump well because it's carefully targeted that's marginal district it's not republicans vote for him and he's happy about that and that occurs why because because of all their polarization in u.s society so now republicans are very averse to switching to democrats so president trump doesn't need to appeal to a wide constituency he can appeal to a narrow constituency in the midwest which this strategy works for so sometimes you know you can target the strategy in ways which make it more feasible but but i think the more difficult thing is is you know satisfying this condition in some sense of you know how can you know even when such a identity exists to be politically attractive it has to be large enough but at the same time threatened and that's a it's almost like a contradictory thing so i think the good news about that is it's very difficult to sustain that situation it's a transitory situation why would that transitory situation have emerged in europe for example at the moment i think the obvious example the obvious thing is is migration no is that many of us many politicians and many academics misunderstood how migration challenges people's notion of citizenship so how do you combat potlin so let me just let me just back up a little bit and say okay so so what did i say i talked about how you get to liberty a little i gave you a little flavor of our book and the theory and using machiavelli's notion of balance okay and machiavelli himself proposed a theory of populism he said it happens when you have elite capture okay and when you have elite capture people are willing to give up republican institutions as they did all over communal italy in the late middle ages okay that's part of populism machiavelli didn't use the word populism but he identified part of what seems to be very common in populist experiences okay this notion of elite capture okay so in terms of the theory i showed you the diagram this is you're going out of the corridor okay you're going out of the corridor because society in some sense pushes you out of the corridor society disrupts this balance okay what would you do about that well i think what i've been trying to emphasize in the discussion of you know elite capture poorly functioning institutions and you know when a kind of populist identity appears and when it can be used as a political strategy i've emphasized i think there's real problems here you know inequality is a real problem you know gerrymandering is a real problem really increasing elite social distance is a re is a real problem okay so so this is not some you know vanity there are real social problems so the first thing to think about it seems to me is figuring out how to address these social problems the problems of inequality and elite social distance and malfunctioning if you go in the united states you go back to the early 1960s there was a famous court case of baker versus carr which made a huge attack on malapportionment between urban and rural areas in the united states okay so somebody needs to address the problem of gerrymandering okay so i think there's obvious things one can do they're not easy to do politically but serious things that have sort of created the potential for this populist strategy to appear that make it credible when president trump talks about draining the swamp and let me point out there's nothing new about that you know ross perot a failed populist talked about cleaning out the stables you know richard nixon talked about the silent majority who was he talking about the people he was talking about the same people that trump were talking about and the definition of the silent majority wasn't so different so that's always been there it's just suddenly become politically successful why is that well i think that has to do with you know the world changed and these things changed okay i think this contested visions of citizenship that's something that there just has to be much more discussion about you know if you look at the brexit i'm sure there's lots of discussion of brexit here in this conference but you know what struck me about brexit is that the the the leave p the remain people refused to talk about the issues that most of the leave people wanted to talk about you know like my relatives in middlesbrough you know they wanted to talk about migration they wanted to talk about inequality but no no the the the the the leap the remain people just wanted to talk about how disastrous economically it's be for brexit well you see what south bank looks like you know how much worse can it get so so that's you know what that's there needs to be an honest discussion of the issues okay so so so they're a contested vision of citizenship and and it's clear that you know even in the united states this is an issue now okay and there are these failings of representation okay i gave you this idea of gerrymandering but for me the interpretation of that is we want more democracy not less you know like when perron was talking about los des camisados you know the shirtless ones he meant marginalized people who are not represented who the solution to that is more democracy you know not less democracy like that this idea that somehow the the brexit referendum was a bad idea i don't agree with that at all you know the brexit referendum has revealed enormous fault lines in british society that political elites were previously completely oblivious to it seems to me and that's a good thing because now there's a chance to actually address the problems so so i don't think that's bad at all it looks like a heck of a mess at the moment but democracy is always a heck of a mess you know democracy's a mess that's how it is it's a it's contested it's conflictual you debate you disagree you build coalitions coalitions fall apart that's how democracy is and and and that's a good thing okay so so but i also think we should think hard about you know how to make the political class you know talking about structural changes i don't know anything about italy but if i look at england for example you can see that the political class has become less and less and less representative of society if you look at the labour party i used to be a member of the labour party but then the british government disenfranchised me so i got upset and i quit but the labour party you know when i joined it in 1978 was full of working-class people and trade unionists and now it's all oxbridge people who did politics philosophy and economics like tony blair and all the milibands and those people you know have to put a glove on if they wanted to shake the hand of a working class person it's like president santos you know it's like the colombian latin it's just like a good old latin american elite okay that's a problem you know how did they do that and how did they deal with that problem in other parts of the world well in india they have mandated representation for women and for lower costs also so so that's a you know maybe that's a crazy idea but it's a radical way of saying let's make politics more representative of the of the society and i think that's a that's a problem it's a problem and you know how to get this nemo principle working maybe how to get people understanding that my rights depend on your rights and that that's a mutually sustaining relationship and if i decide i'm the people and you're not the people then the whole thing crashes down okay so so so uh i feel like i've talked too much thank you it was a great lecture thank you so much so more democracy not less um i'm sure there are questions here we don't have that much time unfortunately we had to start a bit late because there was also the other meeting before but i will take two or three questions as usual so who asked the first question well done telegraphic thank you my question is related to emotion how do you deal with when you prescribe potentially how populism could be overcome how do you deal with people's sense of grievance because my sense is that you know from voting to trump to brexit people vote on emotion not necessarily any kind of logic and you picked up on these aspects of um you know these tensions or these paradoxes about how populism takes root but beyond the sense of grievance there is kind of a mass appeal sometimes of populism depending on on on the reason that it came about so people who voted for trump or six or three million of them or whoever aren't all voting for trump for the same reasons that sense of populism cuts across so many different things you know racism uh fears of of you know um inequality etc how do you deal with those those kinds of intersecting issues as well as the emotional aspect that is linked to the grievance which can be harder to deal with in simple policy yeah i can answer that yeah i you know pippa norris who i think you have yes who's going to be presenting later in the conference she has a much more kind of social psychological theory of populism than than we do um i mean i'm you know i i agree with you that you know president trump seems to have this amazing ability to kind of trigger all sorts of reactions and kind of channel it you know in a way that i don't think i really understand as a social scientist or uh social you know i i i think my emotions always involved in politics you know and and i you know and and i think president trump has unleashed all sorts of emotional reactions but i i'm not sure i'm not sure i understand how systematic that is relative to these other features you know like whether that's really the secret of his success is that he's a racist basically and for example uh and there's lots of racist people and maybe it's not a coincidence that the united states just had a black president before that and you know uh so i would say undoubtedly some people voted for president trump because of that uh you know we all know how much racism there is you know in the united states but there's actually less racism now than there used to be in some sense in the u.s would be my sense so so then george wallace you know who was also a populist was was not was much less successful you know when he was trying to be a populist in with a much overtly racist strategy so i'm not denying all of that but i guess i feel i'm not sure quantitatively how important that is relative to other things and i honestly my interaction recently with democratic politicians is that democratic politicians are all in denial and they want to blame hillary clinton wants to blame having lost the election on things like that and i think that's a fundamental mistake because there are lots of big problems in the united states you know about inequality and social exclusion and you know you go i don't know if you've ever been to gary in i was in gary indiana last week because my wife wanted to go see where michael jackson was born gary indiana is a very scary place uh it's a very scary place and she we drove through that and she's from colombia and she was like how can how can this place exist in in the world's self-styled richest country it's an absolute outrage you know and and and and i just think that that there's a this everyone has been in denial the democrats are in denial and somebody has to come with a much more progressive social policy agenda and and and i don't so i'm not going to deny for one second what you say is true but i sort of feel when i see democratic politicians talking about things like that it distracts them from what they should be doing i mean that's my opinion a very last question because really we have to finish here so maybe you can come here oh no thank you very much it was very interesting and you rooted the narrative of a control position a conflict between elite and populism in history and history of italy i wonder um the the elite in fact has inner conflicts i mean there even in machiavelli's time between families between corrupted elite and non-corrupted elite competently and incompetently yeah possibly come that in last year's these conflicts have not been evident for the people how does it come that the people have thought that collusion was stronger than conflict among the elites within the elites yeah i don't know i don't think anyone anticipated it you know like when donald trump won the republican election don't you think like all the democrats and hillary clinton were like high-fiving and you know oh it's in the bag you know like people it's it's remarkable you know at the the extent to which it was completely unanticipated and i i you know we i'm not sure i understand that i you know i don't know what the social science is on this i mean i think you know then trump turned the election into this uh thing about identity and and he unleashed all of this you know maybe emotions is the right word or somehow he framed things in a way which the traditional politicians hadn't thought of doing and it was it just resonated with a lot of people and i think that was just extremely surprising i didn't did you anticipate that joel i didn't anticipate it and i don't think anyone it's just a huge surprise you know uh and i think now everybody is scrabbling around trying to understand it you know people economists like me are trying to conceptualize it much better try to understand how to theorize about it and and you know and and i think in retrospect you can see as i was trying to suggest you know historically this is you know this is it's it's there all the time you know and and it's been neglected by social science and uh you know and and the po you know but as i said this the social distance you know the political class themselves didn't understand i don't know how trump figured that out if it's just random chance or he really figured out that this was a winning strategy or that's just i don't know i don't know it's a question but we are companions we don't want to see many other meetings at this festival so thank you again all right me hey