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”.