Authors Meet Critics - Depolarizing Politics and Saving Democracy

The roundtable features leading scholars of democracy who will comment on a forthcoming book by Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, Depolarizing Politics and Saving Democracy. The discussants will reflect on the book’s findings and proposals for overcoming polarization and addressing democratic backsliding given their own expertise.
The book addresses the rise of pernicious polarization – the division of society into mutually antagonistic political camps -- in democracies around the globe and the question of how to understand and address it. The book argues that problems of democracy and pernicious political polarization are closely interrelated. The solutions to pernicious polarization lie in democratic politics, democratic reforms and what we call democratic remaking. The book posits that four fault lines of polarization are critical to address in contemporary cases of extreme political polarization: national identity and belonging; liberal versus majoritarian democracy; income and wealth inequality; and competing visions of the social contract. The book presents two potential strategies, active depolarization and transformative repolarization, and five principles to address polarization. It draws on historical and contemporary experiences of a wide range of countries. It then addresses two crucial cases of pernicious polarization today – the backsliding wealthy, established democracy of the United States and the autocratizing electoral democracy of Turkey. It concludes with a review of the toolbox of strategies and interventions identified in the empirical chapters and the need for innovative solutions to remaining crucial challenges for today’s polarized democracies.