Godspeed!

”the people on the bus go up and down” does sound kinda unsafe

Dunno what’s more surprising this or conservatives getting shrooms

Great to see some fun coverage of @carleton.edu, but "BREAKING" may be a somewhat exaggerated way to describe a house where students have been making cookies for 40+ years.

On your second Q, you spurred me to poke around and countries with that score do have a nontrivial amount of HOG turnover in elections (~10-20%?) though in my read a lot of those are cases where protest was required to get the incumbent to step down. So still rare all things considered.

What Kind of Autocrat Loses an Election? How to Beat Trump is How Hungary Beat Orban. Just Vote Him Out.

Fair questions, on the first it's hard to say since I'm not a V-dem coder 😉. I was reacting more specifically to more general writing about the case; don't agree with everything in this article but it has some good examples of what I mean:
mikepesca.substack.com/p/orban-elec...

That said I do see the general unwillingness to grapple with the question of whether Orban losing means the experts at least partially misread this case (again, a if not the banner case for many!) makes me even more wary of relying too much on expert surveys to answer these questions.

Well you are the first to answer so you get extra credit :)

Definitely fair to take a principled stance to look at global averages with different methods and not overreact to individual cases.

Saying “Hungarian democracy was fine!” is obviously dumb but what about “Hungarian democracy was not as damaged as the conventional wisdom stated.” Many experts said Orban losing was near impossible. When near impossible things happen beliefs should change!

Which should have contributed to the tilting of the playing field! Maybe taking over traditional media matters less than we thought…

Judging by the (non)response to this, I should admit I was wrong. The democratic pessimists would not have said Orban losing would be evidence against their position. Rather, there is nothing that they would admit is evidence against their position 🤷‍♂️

#notallminimalists

Haha just texted Anne that we need to edit that. Work in progress...

Regardless of how and whether you aggregate we need better country/state-level measures to start with!

(Though also totally agreed the Cowen post is not making the case well; of course Orban losing and conceding doesn't retroactively nullify everything he did.)

A preview of something @annemeng.bsky.social and I are cooking up

One can argue that this is not meaningful evidence against broader claims about global democracy. So I’ll return to the opening question: what would such evidence look like? If you can’t answer that, you aren’t approaching this question scientifically.

The point is not that an incumbent losing means all was fine either the democracy in a country. Obviously Orban did many undemocratic things and tilted ejections in his favor. But there has to be some inference that maybe he hadn’t insulated himself in power as well as many claimed.

Suppose Orban had stolen yesterday’s election. That would have been strong evidence of further democratic decline there, and it could remain a banner example of a purported trend. But if the opposite happened, that has to be strong evidence of something else! You can’t have it both ways.

And to pick an individual case, if Trump ran for a third term, successfully ignored a SC ruling, or prevented Ds winning midterms from taking their seats I would admit I misread the state of US democracy.

While I favor a more minimalist view of democracy, systematic (or, yes, objective) evidence that civil liberties, horizontal checks, or free media really have declined on average would also move my views.

As someone who holds the opposite view (more that I am uncertain than all is well) I can give many answers to this Q: eg, if incumbents start winning at higher rates or by higher margins, or if a better measure of electoral competition shows it really has declined over the last 10-20 years.

Something I would like to hear from people who are confident the world is getting less democratic is what evidence or events would lead you to revise that belief?

Part of what I'm getting at here is I'd bet a common answer a few years ago would have been "Orban losing" bsky.app/profile/anth...

Appreciate that, thanks! Hopefully we can discuss in a better forum some other time.

That is definitely not what I am saying. I think we are talking past each other and I need to write something longer to clarify.

I think we may need to accept that some descriptive questions, like some causal questions, are fundamentally unanswerable. (At least with certainty.)

Don’t totally disagree with this, but peacefully conceding defeat is important! And many figures similar to Orban did not do this. Unclear how much of this is a difference in authoritarian goals vs just losing by so much that trying to fight it was futile.

Looking forward to seeing what you are up to!

Yes I am aware of the basics of the topics that I write and teach about. To be more specific my point is that a lot of the doom and gloom discourse has been dismissive of the centrality of electoral competition to democracy, and this is a good example of why I think that is misguided.

Was about to say wow very formal way to refer to Anne