It’s not that simple
It’s not that simple is a podcast by Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation dedicated to major interviews with international personalities linked to politics, economy, and society. Conducted by renowned journalist Pedro Mendonça Pinto, the conversations with our special guests aim to demystify and simplify some of the most fascinating and relevant topics of our time. They will be objective, frontal, informal and informed dialogues to clarify why some issues «are not that simple».
The Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation was founded in 2009 by Alexandre Soares dos Santos and his family to study the country’s major hindrances and bring them to the attention of the Portuguese people. The Foundation’s mission is to promote and expand the objective knowledge of Portugal today, thereby helping to develop society, strengthen the rights of citizens and improve public institutions and to cooperate in endeavors to identify, study and resolve society's problems. The Foundation is independent of political organizations and has no ideological affiliation with any political party. Its work is guided by the principles of human dignity and social solidarity and the values of democracy, freedom, equal opportunities, merit, and pluralism. www.ffms.pt
It’s not that simple
DEMOCRACY, with Daniel Ziblatt
Is democracy dying? What challenges do democracies around the world face nowadays? How can they overcome such challenges? To answer these questions, Pedro Pinto interviews Daniel Ziblatt in this episode of “It’s Not That Simple”, a podcast by the Francisco Manuel dos Santos Foundation.
An expert on democracy, Ziblatt is Eaton Professor of Government at Harvard University and is director of the Transformations of Democracy research unit at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center in Berlin, Germany. His three books include How_Democracies_Die (Crown, 2018), co-authored with Steve Levitsky), a New York Times best-seller, translated into twenty-two languages. He is also the author of Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2017), an account of Europe's historical democratization, which won the American Political Science Association's 2018 Woodrow Wilson Prize for the best book in government and international relations and American Sociological Association's 2018 Barrington Moore Prize. In recent years he has been a fellow or visiting professor at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy), Center for Advanced Study (Stanford), Max Planck Institute (Cologne), University of Munich, and the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris).
In this episode, Ziblatt identifies the warning signs of when a democracy is being threatened, not by a coup, but by authoritarian politicians “chipping away” at its foundations from within. He also gives examples of countries where democracy is in good health. Ziblatt then looks at the impact of the Russian war against Ukraine in the world’s democracies and what the future might hold. He addresses the failed attempts – in the US and in Brazil – to overturn the result of their presidential elections, and what they say about the future of democracy there and around the world. Finally, Ziblatt turns to Portugal and the rise of its populist far-right, discussing how mainstream parties in Western democracies can deal with that threat, in a conversation well worth listening to.
• How Democracies Die, Daniel Ziblatt (with Steven Levitsky), 2018
• Conservative Parties and the Birth of Democracy, Daniel Ziblatt, 2017
• Daniel Ziblatt on "The Causes of Populism and the Problem of Cultural Majority Rights"
• Daniel Ziblatt (with Alper Yagci and Muharrem Aytug Sasmaz) on “"How Voters Respond to Presidential Assaults on Checks and Balances: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Turkey"
• Daniel Ziblatt (with Rachel Riedl, Dan Slater, and Joseph Wong) on "Authoritarian-Led Democratization"
• A piece about the book “How Democracies Die”
• An interview with Daniel Ziblatt about the state of American democracy
• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “Political Polarization”, with Ezra Klein
• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “Elections”, with Nate Silver
• Podcast It’s Not That Simple, “(I)liberal Democracy”, with Catherine de Vries
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