S09E08: Johan­na Lutz on Iden­ti­ty, Par­ti­san­ship, and the Vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties of Democracy 

This episode explores advances made by the far-right in Aus­tria and in Ger­many and exam­ines cru­cial fac­tors raised by Lutz’s recent report on iden­ti­ty, par­ti­san­ship and polar­iza­tion. What are the unex­pect­ed con­ver­gences and sim­i­lar­i­ties across Euro­pean coun­tries? And what are the impli­ca­tions of the find­ings on the con­test­ed notion of illib­er­al democ­ra­cy? Lis­ten to hear about the chal­lenge of mobi­liz­ing dis­af­fect­ed vot­ers and what char­ac­ter­izes iden­ti­ty-democ­ra­cy tradeoffs.

Guest fea­tured on this episode: 

Johan­na Lutz is the direc­tor of Friedrich Ebert Foun­da­tion’s Democ­ra­cy of the Future pro­gram in the OSCE region office in Vien­na. She served as deputy head of the foun­da­tion’s EU office in Brus­sels and also presided over the net­work of polit­i­cal foun­da­tions in Brus­sels. With a back­ground in polit­i­cal sci­ence and pub­lic law, Johan­na Lutz has lived and worked in Ger­many, Egypt, and Brazil. Her most recent pub­li­ca­tions include the co-authored arti­cle “In Europe, Democ­ra­cy Erodes from the Right” in the Jour­nal of Democ­ra­cy and the influ­en­tial report titled “Iden­ti­ty, Par­ti­san­ship, Polar­iza­tion: How Demo­c­ra­t­i­cal­ly Elect­ed Politi­cians Get Away with Auto­c­ra­tiz­ing Their Country”.

About

Shalini Randeria

Shalini Randeria is Rector and President of the Central European University (Vienna/Budapest). Before, she was Professor of Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute Geneva, and Rector of the Institute of Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna from 2014 to 2021. She has published widely on the anthropology of globalisation, law, the state and social movements. Her empirical research on India also addresses issues of post-coloniality and multiple modernities.