Scott Baker, Aniket Baksy, Nicholas Bloom, Steven Davis, Jonathan Rodden 22 December 2020
Elections can cause economic uncertainty, especially when elections take place in a politically polarised context. This column studies how national election cycles in 23 countries influence economic policy uncertainty, as measured by the share of newspaper articles that discusses uncertainty and economic policy. Economic policy uncertainty clearly rises in the months leading up to national elections. Average economic policy uncertainty values are 13% higher in the month before and the month of national elections than in other months during the same election cycle. In the US, economic policy uncertainty increases are especially pronounced around close and highly polarised presidential elections.
Two years ago, at the end of a democratic theory seminar, I read Alexander Kirshner’s book
A Theory of Militant Democracy (2014) and decided to continue his discussion about the paradox of democracy. The paradox asks: can a democratic society, in a non-contradictory way, restrict political participation if said participation is a threat to democracy?[2] For the purposes of my essay, “antidemocrat” is taken to mean a political actor that wishes to exclude a socially salient group of participants from the demos.
Kirshner’s book is illuminating, though not the first to bring the concern to the table. Karl Loewenstein, writing in the time of Nazi Germany, coined the term “militant democracy” to argue that it is permissible to violate “fundamental principles” of democracy such as the right to participate as an electoral candidate.[3] Loewenstein argued that antidemocrats – like the Nazi party – can exploit the tolerance of democracies and thus, must be met with int
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