On March 22, 2022, Zhaotian Luo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Chicago, was invited as the guest speaker of the 5th Young Scholar Workshop in the Institute for Global Public Policy (IGPP) of Fudan University to present his recent study on democratic backsliding. Three young political economists, Tianyang Xi, Associate Professor in the National School of Development at Peking University, Yiqing Xing, Assistant Professor in Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, and Chen Cheng, Assistant Professor in the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, served as discussants. This event was held online and moderated by Jianzi He, Assistant Professor in the IGPP. Over 160 participants joined in this virtual event.

Motivated by democratic backsliding that has recently took place in various countries, Professor Luo sought to explore the vulnerabilities of democracy against backsliding and discuss the conditions of robust democracy by dynamic game theory approach. His model elaborates two types of such vulnerabilities: populism and the risk of antagonism. The former happens when the incumbent is so appealing to citizens that backsliding becomes costless. The latter happens when citizens want to remove the incumbent who, however, commits to expanding his or her incumbent advantage. Therefore, as the model suggests, democracy could be robust against backsliding only when citizens have moderate preferences over politicians and when the incumbent does not recklessly undermine democratic election. More interestingly, his model implies a tradeoff between the quality of democracy and the quality of politicians. Better democracy requires less appealing politicians.

After the presentation, the three discussants provided valuable feedback to Professor Luo’s research. They also raised several intellectually stimulating questions, such as whether the model points to vulnerabilities of democracy or vulnerabilities of human nature, what would happen if similar dynamic models are applied to legislative or judicial politics, and so on. Professor Luo responded to all the questions raised by the discussants and by other participants. Due to the enthusiasm of academic exchanges, about 90 participants continued to stay online for another 40 minutes after the scheduled termination time.