Describes the response to COVID-19 in each country, emphasizing the role of experts and challenges to their authority. While the USA saw populist resistance to shutdowns and other measures, Sweden saw a “war between experts” in which private scientists challenged the government’s hands-off policy. Japan saw public unity but a good deal of internal conflict regarding Covid policy, especially involving the 2020 Olympic Games.

This chapter shows how power-sharing contributed to Tunisia’s democratic breakdown in 2021. The populism and polarization produced by the 2015–19 grand coalition paralyzed the country between 2019 and 2021. The new populist president, Kais Saied, clashed with the parties in parliament, while the extremist factions in the assembly clashed among themselves, inhibiting governance. When disaffection with the political class reached a fever pitch during COVID-19, Saied decided to strike, shuttering the parliament and cracking down on the political parties. In a nationally representative survey conducted in 2022, I find that a desire to dissolve all political parties (populism) and to dissolve Ennahda in particular (polarization) were by far the two strongest predictors of support for Saied’s takeover, more so than frustrations with the economy or fears over the COVID-19 pandemic. Experimentally, priming respondents that Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi was now on trial increased support for Saied’s moves by almost 15 percentage points. Rather than saving the transition, the continued pursuit of power-sharing produced precisely the populism and polarization that helped overturn it.

This chapter probes whether the theory travels beyond Tunisia by conducting a cross-national analysis of grand coalition governments across all democratic transitions between 1942 and 2020. It shows that grand coalitions are statistically associated with democratic collapse, even when controlling for the underlying structural challenges that lead to them. The correlation between grand coalitions and democratic breakdown likewise remains even when pursuing techniques to address potential confounding, such as propensity score matching, inverse probability weighting, and an instrumental variable. The data also lend support for both mechanisms, showing that grand coalitions lead to a higher vote share for populists in the next elections and lead to increased mass polarization as well. While grand coalitions in the first few years of a transition have only mixed effects on democratic breakdown, continuing a coalition beyond that point makes breakdown far more likely. After establishing the rules of the game, new democracies must transition to the politics of competition, rather than continued consensus.

This chapter illustrates the dark sides of continuing to pursue power-sharing after establishing the rules of the game. It outlines why the major political parties in Tunisia decided to keep governing together through another grand coalition government between 2015 and 2019, and how these efforts both worsened polarization and sparked the rise of populism. It first shows that the decision of Nidaa Tounes and Ennahda to enter into a grand coalition ceded space for the emergence of hardline parties on either end of the spectrum, worsening polarization. Second, the extended power-sharing inadvertently sparked populism as well, by tainting all of the mainstream parties as part of the establishment and fueling the rise of populist outsider Kais Saied. Drawing on interviews and original election surveys conducted in 2019 and 2020, I show that the grand coalition led the party system to collapse, with frustrated voters shifting to populist and extremist forces instead. Had the political parties not entered into a grand coalition, they may have kept Tunisians invested in the two major, moderate parties and staved off the rise of these populists and extremists.

This introductory chapter outlines the core argument of the book: that power-sharing can be useful at the start of a democratic transition in order to generate consensus over the rules of the game, but extending power-sharing beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel. Power-sharing frustrates the voters of each party and risks the party system collapsing in favor of populists and extremists. By worsening polarization and populism, power-sharing thus makes democratic breakdown more likely. The chapter outlines the contributions of this theory to the existing literature on democratization, polarization, and populism, showing that democratic transitions require a balance between competition and consensus. The chapter illustrates the core argument in Tunisia and draws parallels to other cases in the Middle East, in Europe, and in Latin America. It ends by previewing each chapter of the book and defining the key terms.

This final chapter concludes by tracing out the book’s contributions to our understanding of democratization. It highlights that while inclusion, consensus, and power-sharing are useful in the transition to democracy, it is differentiation, competition, and polarization that help to consolidate democracy. It highlights how the more successful cases of democratization, like South Africa, pursued grand coalitions only at the very start of the transition, before shifting to normal competition once the constitution was established. The chapter also provides some initial theorization as to what a healthy degree of polarization might look like, introducing the notion of “polarization within bounds,” where parties seek consensus only when adjusting the rules of the game, but seek competition within those bounds. Finally, it offers some brief reflections on the state of democracy in the United States and Europe. It argues that the initial strategies of mainstream parties toward populist threats have been self-defeating and provides some recommendations building on the insights of this book for alternative strategies to deflate populist threats.

This chapter explores the use of restorative nostalgic political propaganda by antidemocratic forces to pursue a myth of a “golden age” and reinstate policies built on racism, homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny. Although conservative political figures in the US have long capitalized on the allure of restorative nostalgia to delegitimize progressive social and political reforms, today’s populist MAGA movement is different in both kind and degree. In a quest to “make America great again,” the MAGA movement aims to turn the clock back on decades of social justice gains by villainizing the social progress and expansion of rights that have made many of our lives possible. This chapter explains the historic use of restorative nostalgic propaganda by fascist regimes to blame modernity and the expansion of civil and political rights for the loss of a “great mythic past” defined by simplicity and prosperity. Under this view, individuals who advocate for progressive reforms are demonized and branded as enemies of the state. Restorative nostalgic political propaganda demands the exclusion and erasure of nonconforming individuals to restore the “simple life” and regain national glory.

This introduction examines the widespread contemporary use of “fascism” as both a historical term and a lens for understanding current political movements. It argues that fascism is increasingly invoked to describe phenomena ranging from populist far-right parties to extremist groups, reflecting fears that its appeal is pervasive, emotionally resonant, and resistant to legal containment. Recent publications, often aimed at broad audiences, have popularised diagnostic approaches, such as Umberto Eco’s concept of “Ur-Fascism,” which identifies recurring ideological traits without offering a precise definition. The discussion extends these concerns into the realm of music, questioning simplistic assumptions about fascist aesthetics and highlighting the complexity of cultural participation under such regimes. It proposes that music’s role in fascism cannot be reduced to propaganda but must be understood across broader social practices and historical contexts. The text introduces a volume that adopts a comparative, flexible approach to analysing the multifaceted relationship between music and fascism across time and place.

This chapter defines political polarization and discusses its key features. We distinguish between different types of polarization, including affective (emotional-based) and ideological (ideas-based) polarization, and identify characteristic features of polarized societies: identity, subsumption, entrenchment, totality, existential threat, denigration of opponents, non-compromise, and the erosion of fairness, civility, and neutrality. We then present leading explanations for the dramatic rise in political polarization across the globe – rising inequality, globalization and working-class alienation, post-Cold-War conservative resurgence and reinforced liberalism, and the echo chamber effect of social media – and clarify how polarization relates to, yet differs from, populism and democratic backsliding. The chapter closes by presenting polarization’s harms and by foregrounding one such harm that structures the book’s argument: the drift of previously nonpartisan institutions (media, academia, religion, bureaucracy, courts) toward partisanship.

The epilogue discusses the post-independence history of legal nationalism in India and Israel. It traces its decline and recent resurgence. In the years following Indian and Israeli independence, leaders such as Nehru and Ben-Gurion sought to preserve the anglicized legal system inherited from the colonial period, and revivalist legal projects failed to materialize. From the late twentieth century onward, however, legal nationalism re-emerged. In India, Hindu nationalist politicians belonging to the BJP have called for “decolonizing” Indian law. In Israel, right-wing politicians from the Likud Party and religious parties have pressed for an expanded role for Jewish law in state law. Both movements reflect global illiberal currents that sometimes depict Western liberalism as opposed to non-Western traditions. The early twentieth-century scholars examined in this book did not treat Western and non-Western law, institutions, and values as inherently incompatible. Their nuanced scholarship emphasized similarities between Hindu and Jewish law and modern liberal and democratic values. The overlooked writings of these legal thinkers of colonial India and Mandatory Palestine remain relevant today.

If clientelistic politics are standing in the way of the potential for electoral competition to induce investment in state-building, might the decline of clientelism be a way out of the weak-state trap? This chapter considers the case of urban Senegal, where the role of informal intermediaries as political brokers has been on the decline – at least in Dakar, which is home to most informal businesses. Using historical, geographic, and electoral data, I first show that collective clientelism, while still a prominent phenomenon in rural Senegal, has declined over time in Dakar, where it used to be a dominant strategy. Interview data suggest this is due to the decline in demand for locally excludable goods and the decline in reliance on social networks and local leaders. Instead of turning to programmatic candidates, the case indicates that many urban voters instead move from patronage politics to populism, attracted by charismatic leaders and populist promises. This suggests that programmatism is not a necessary substitute for clientelism and that the reduction of clientelistic politics is not sufficient to spur a programmatic transition.