A Bridgewater College political scientist will give a talk about authoritarianism and democratic backsliding in Harrisonburg on Tuesday evening. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Kevin Pallister's research focuses on elections and the erosion of democracy in Central America. The grassroots group Harrisonburg-Rockingham Indivisible has invited him to speak at the Massanutten Regional Library at 6 p.m. on Tuesday.
KEVIN PALLISTER: It's about how authoritarian regimes around the world work, and the common tactics that they use to stay in power, and also how some democracies give way to authoritarian regimes and what that process looks like, and how it can, under some circumstances, be reversed.
What takeaways should an American audience glean from the examples of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua?
PALLISTER: They show us, just like some other countries around the world like Hungary and Turkey and many others, that democracy can look like it's consolidated and it's pretty safe, and it's just the way things work, and then an elected government can start chipping away at institutional constraints and the rule of law, and pretty quickly those countries can find themselves in a situation where it's really hard to recover the democracy that everyone kind of took for granted for a long time.
Pallister said authoritarianism researchers are seeing a trend across the globe.
PALLISTER: Most of those measurements show us in the past 15 or so years that more countries have moved in an authoritarian direction than have moved in the more democratic direction. … At the same time, there are always ebbs and flows, and so we've seen drastic changes recently in Hungary, for example.
This lecture is free and open to the public.
