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The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now resembles the ruling parties in autocratic societies more than their former center-right counterparts in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant change since 2000, the Republican Party has begun to demonize and encourage violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to those of the ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland, and Turkey.
The change has led and been fueled by the rise of Donald Trump.
In contrast, the Democratic Party has changed little in its adherence to democratic norms and, in that sense, has remained similar to the center-right and center-left parties of Western Europe. Their main difference is the focus of the economy.
The new study, the largest ever conducted of its kind, was conducted by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using recently developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when the Authoritarianism is in the crosshairs. rise.
Anna Lührmann, deputy editor of V-Dem, said the Republican transformation had been “without a doubt the most dramatic change in an established democracy.”
V-Dem’s “anti-liberalism index” measures the degree of commitment to democratic norms that a party exhibits prior to elections. The institute calls it “the first comparative measure of the ‘litmus test’ for loyalty to democracy.”
The study, released Monday, shows that the party has followed a similar trajectory to Fidesz, which under Viktor Orbán has evolved from a liberal youth movement to an authoritarian party that has made Hungary the first non-democracy in the European Union.
India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has similarly transformed under Narendra Modi, as has the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Law and Justice party in Poland. Trump and his administration have tried to cultivate close ties with the leadership of those countries.
The Republican Party has remained relatively committed to pluralism, but it has come a long way toward abandoning other democratic norms, becoming much more likely to disrespect opponents and encourage violence.
“We have seen similar changes in parties in other countries where the quality of democracy has declined in recent years, where democracy has eroded,” Lührmann said. “It fits very well into the pattern of parties that erode democracy once they are in power.”
“The demonization of opponents is clearly a factor that has changed a lot when it comes to the Republican party, as well as the fostering of political violence,” he said, adding that the change has been driven largely from above.
“We have several quotes from Trump, showing how he has encouraged his supporters to use violence against journalists or political opponents.”
In Western Europe, center-right parties like the Christian Democratic Union of Germany and the People’s Party of Spain have stuck to their commitment to democratic norms. To the same extent, the British Conservative Party has moved somewhat along the liberal-anti-liberal spectrum, but not to the Republican extremes.
“The data shows that the Republican party in 2018 was far more illiberal than almost all other ruling parties in democracies,” the V-Dem study found. “Only very few ruling parties in democracies in this millennium (15%) were considered more illiberal than the Republican Party in the United States.”
The institute has found that the decline of democratic features has accelerated around the world and that, for the first time in this century, autocracies are in the majority: they hold power in 92 countries, home to 54% of the world’s population.
According to the V-Dem benchmark, nearly 35% of the world’s population – 2.6 billion people – lives in nations that are becoming more autocratic.
