S1E2: How Viable is West­ern Lib­er­al Democ­ra­cy when Trans­plant­ed Across the World?

In this episode of Democ­ra­cy in Ques­tion? Shali­ni Ran­de­ria asks if the ideals of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy – free and fair elec­tions, sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers, rule of law and respect for human rights – may be export­ed eas­i­ly from the West to oth­er parts of the world? This is a ques­tion espe­cial­ly salient when some of these very ideals are being under­mined in sev­er­al coun­tries includ­ing the Unit­ed States (more about this ques­tion in the first episode? Fur­ther, Prof. Ran­de­ria asks her guests, Lau­rence White­head and Yan­i­na Welp, if West­ern mod­els of democ­ra­cy ought to be trans­plant­ed to oth­er regions of the world at all?

The con­ver­sa­tion con­sid­ers the fail­ings of mod­ern­iza­tion the­o­ry, and to what extent it was sim­ply mis­tak­en in assum­ing that there can be a uni­lin­ear, uni­di­rec­tion­al path to ever greater free­dom with the suc­cess­ful trans­plan­ta­tion of west­ern style, lib­er­al demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions every­where. This episode fea­tures ques­tions con­cern­ing democracy’s rela­tion­ship with pop­ulism and cap­i­tal­ism, as well as a dis­cus­sion of demo­c­ra­t­ic inno­va­tions from Latin Amer­i­ca that may be of inter­est to the West­ern world.

The pod­cast series Democ­ra­cy in Ques­tion? is host­ed by Shali­ni Ran­de­ria, Direc­tor of the Albert Hirschman Cen­tre on Democ­ra­cy at the Grad­u­ate Insti­tute in Gene­va, and Direc­tor of the Insti­tute of Human Sci­ences in Vien­na. Episode 2 fea­tures Lau­rence White­head, an Offi­cial Fel­low in pol­i­tics at Nuffield Col­lege, Uni­ver­si­ty of Oxford, and Yan­i­na Welp, research fel­low at the Albert Hirschman Cen­tre on Democ­ra­cy. Yan­i­na and Lau­rence recent­ly edit­ed a book togeth­er titled, The Pol­i­tics of Recall Elec­tions, that analy­ses the vari­ety of process­es and pur­pos­es of recall, by com­par­ing the prac­tices and out­comes of remov­ing elect­ed offi­cials before the end of their term.

This pod­cast series is co-pro­duced by the Grad­u­ate Institute’s Albert Hirschman Cen­tre on Democ­ra­cy, the Insti­tute for Human Sci­ences (IWM) Vien­na, and the Excel­lence Chair, Uni­ver­si­ty of Bre­men (Research Group: Soft Author­i­tar­i­an­ism) in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Richard Miron and Anouk Mil­let (Earshot strategies).