Throughout the year, first-year Political Science and History major Seth Cain will interview a variety of Adrian College Faculty to get their sense of the current state of democracy, research projects that are informed by current political trends, and projections about the future of democracy in our society. In this wide-ranging discussion, Seth interviews Political Science Professor Dr. Phil Howe. Dr. Howe has spent his professional career and life studying comparative democracies in Europe and offers poignant comparisons about European democracies and the American model. He also offers instructive insight into the history of mass media in European politics and future prescriptions for the role of social media in American political discourse.
We hope you enjoy this thought-provoking conversation!
Seth:
Your work addresses democracy in divided societies. Could you talk about this and what projects you’re currently working on?
Howe:
That’s is a very big question. To simplify it, I have two big projects going on. Each of these projects involve collaborating with other people. On the one hand, I am engaged in many interrelated projects in which I am working with two historians. Specifically, two historians in Eastern Europe, Dr. Thomas Lorman, who specializes in Slovak and Hungarian history, and Dr. Daniel Millers, a specialist on Czechoslovak history. The focus on this line of research is Consociational Democracy. This is a model of democracy designed to explain how stable democracies can survive in societies deeply divided by race, ethnicity, language, religion and ideology. The main guy who researched this was a political scientist named Arend Lijphart who I studied with at UC San Diego. He developed this model to explain how countries like Switzerland, Belgium, and other types of countries with divided societies through language, ethnicity, etc. maintain stable democracies. Belgium is divided by Flemings and maroons; Netherlands have heavy religious divisions and basically this model tries to explain how stable democracies work in these countries. This has become the most dominant model when writing constitutions in divided societies. The constitution of South Africa after apartheid, constitution of Bosnia after the Dayton Accords was all based on Lijphart’s research, and it has been an interest of mine after studying with him back in the day. I have been working with historians because we have been interested in finding additional examples of Consociationalism and finding historical cases. Basically, what we have done has been looking at is the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, one of the things people don’t know about this monarchy is that they held elections for the legislator. In the Austrian half they eventually had universal male suffrage. Basically we are arguing that it wasn’t a democracy but a lot of the basic practices were there, and we have been making an argument and arguing that its legacy carries over to Czechoslovakia and it helps explain why it was a surprising, stable democracy after WWI, despite it being a country divided by Czechs, Poles, Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians, etc. A lot of this was trying to find the historical roots of that and trying to set up an interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and political scientists.
Dr. Lorman, Dr. Miller and I have co-written a book which is coming out with the Central European University Press on that entire topic and we are now engaging in a lot of research looking at other Central European states after WWI and why it didn’t happen there.
QUESTION 2:
Seth: You’ve spent considerable amount of time living and researching in Europe. How does European democracy differ from American-style democracy and what do the Europeans that you’ve interacted with think about the state of contemporary American democracy?
Howe:
Those are two questions and I am going to treat them separately. First, on how they differ. I have lived regularly in Central Europe, primarily in Austria and Hungary for the last twenty-five years now. I partly bring this up because I feel like I have a Central European perspective on Europe in some ways. I guess the short answer, American democracy is not the typical one. Most countries don’t have a two-party system. Most democracies are not presidential. I can go on this list, there is a lot of things that are actually unusual and that is neither good nor bad. But if I think of a typical democracy from a statistical view at this point its parliamentary systems and it’s a multi-party system and I believe those are the core differences. The kind of system I am thinking about is where there are several parties of equal size, where the government forms because a coalition forms, and then chooses a prime minister from the larger member of the coalition. To me that’s normal. If you want to see a typical democracy, it looks like Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Sweden. Americans tend to think I am either a Republican or a Democrat. I talk to European friends and they say, “I am a socialist but I lean green” and they tend to have complex answers.
Seth:
Why do you think Europeans think like that and why are there so many different party options in European democracies compared to American democracy?
Howe:
They think that way because they’re used to having so many options. The typical European party system is a central liberal party, a left-centered democratic party, right-centered Christian social party, and maybe a far left/right party. People think that way because their political world is very complex. Why it happens is complicated. I guess a short answer is, the American electoral system develops very, very early and the whole idea of proportional voting just didn’t exist. I mean you don’t see people experimenting with proportional representation until Belgium in the late 19thcentury. The U.S started early and never really jumped on that bandwagon. America introduced representative democracy before a working class was developed. Socialist parties tend to push for proportional representation and that happens a lot later.
What do Europeans think of contemporary American democracy? Well my initial answer is it depends. But that is not a very helpful answer. Let me tell you a story, there is a friend of mine who’s partner obsessively follows the Trump-Russia story all day long. At the point she doesn’t want to hear about it anymore. Point I’m making is both of these people are German and live in Germany. First thing I want to say is all Europeans I know are as saturated in American politics as Americans are. I read/thought more or less American politics in Europe than in America. Generally, most Europeans are concerned with American politics like how most Americans are. Oddly, Europe and America aren’t that far apart. Aspects of the current crisis are currently global.
QUESTION 3:
Seth:
How would you describe the current state of our democracy?
Howe:
Troubled.
Seth:
Troubled? Why would that be?
Howe:
This gets to the broader example. This leads us to the politics of polarization. This is sort of the hot topic. There are a couple of observations. First, the roots of American political polarization run pretty deep and aren’t going away any time soon. I mean, basically American party system started to realign after the 1960s and sort of became more pronounced in the 90s. What I mean when I say realigned is, we used to live in a normal political world in the U.S-like post-FDR was one in which there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, where church attendance wasn’t a good predictor of which party you voted for, tons of southern Democrats, and a bunch of northern Republicans. Even attitudes towards ethnicity wasn’t a good party prediction. We used to have two very broad parties that overlapped. Basically, in response to civil rights reforms in the 1960s we are now in a world where party affiliation is based on where you live, and media outlets. Our party system is divided and stretched on every possible line. And that’s not something created by the last election. It’s not clear to me what resolves that. In the long run, the Republican Party has shrunken itself to a small demographic. A good predictor of who will vote Republican is old white people without college education are more likely to vote Republican. However, the country is increasingly becoming less white, so that won’t work anymore. Eventually the Republican Party will have to start branching out and we might have a more complex division between the two.
QUESTION 4:
Seth:
What political, social, or economic issues are most important to you and how would you elevate the prospect of our current democratic system to address them?
Howe:
Oh lord. That is the hardest question so far. The issue of health care is very important to me. The fact you can’t guarantee health care to the entire population is something I find troubling. In some sense, is an existential one. A looming environmental crisis that needs to be addressed and the clock is ticking, and I hope it is not to late. In terms of solutions, I will be an optimist on this. Good news to me, it seems our environmental concerns, our economic concerns, and our concerns about jobs and concerns about energy are all pointing at the same direction. We can switch to the kind of economy that we can use American technological power to generate cleaner energy and generate new jobs. I just hope we haven’t let the clock tick too long on this because that larger issue of climate change has not been effectively addressed yet for some time. We tend to talk catastrophic about this, but I mean it’s not like all life on earth will end, but it is the case of water crisis, or water wars. Flooding leads to radical immigration patterns. If the polar ice caps melt does it change our naval strategy? I think that is an obvious issue that needs answering.
QUESTION 5:
Seth:
Over the past few election cycles, social media’s political discourse has become increasingly influential and controversial? Do you see social media as an agent of good or bad in fostering an inclusive democracy?
Howe:
This is an indirect way in going to this. In concern to my research, I have spent a lot of time reading party newspapers from the late 19th- early 20thcentury, and it reminds me of right now. You will have said German voters in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy who are getting all their news from a German, Christian, social newspaper that they are reading in a German, Christian, social pub, before, socializing with their German, Christian, social groups. There would be another whole set of newspapers, women groups, and social groups for German nationalists, socialists, and another set for German agrarians. If you look at the Czech system there is self-enclosed ideological bubbles for Czech liberals and another one for Czech socialists, etc. A lot of this is because of the rise of mass media: the mass-produced partisan newspaper. Our current politics and political media remind me of Austria-Hungary just with fewer ideological camps.
I see it at the moment as an agent overwhelmingly for bad, for a number of reasons. On one hand there is a lot more access to more detailed information out there. Just through twitter I am following any number of political scientists and subsets of journalists and the list goes on. If you use these things well, you can actually turn twitter to the best newspaper in the world only if you are careful about who you follow. But since most people aren’t doing that, we have the ideological bubble problem. To add on top of that, it’s like the rapid spread of misinformation. Most people even before the rise of the internet are fairly superficial news consumers, so, we have people superficially consuming a lot of information that hasn’t really gone through a lot of filters and fact checks, and on top of that, the possibilities of deliberate misinformation going on. We can expect that the 2020 election, not just Russia, but probably a large number of other countries might work actively to disrupt American political discourse. I do not see any good in this. In the long run, I hope we can adapt to this media and I don’t know how this is going to work.
Twitter just banned political ads. Maybe Facebook will do the same. Maybe we will get smarter as a culture as how we handle information. On a more optimistic side, lots of European societies have taken different responses to this because they have to. Keep in mind, Russia intervention in elections via social media has applied to the Brexit vote and elections throughout Europe. Basically, we need to use our entire culture and society to defend against this. The parties need to be concerned, the media needs to be concerned, educational systems have to train people to be smart media consumers and so on and so forth. So, on the optimistic side I think it’s possible to find the ways to deal with this complex media environment, but so far, the U.S is not doing much and frankly just not enough push from the top to lead us into that direction.
You can catch Dr. Howe on twitter at @DrPhilipJHowe.
