Dani Rodrik: evaluation

Transcript context

…You were born in Turkey, you grew up in Turkey. I have so many questions about Turkey to ask you, but let me just try two or three. Let’s take the Turkish city of Konya. I’ve been to Konya. Outsiders sometimes call Konya the Bible Belt of Turkey. I’m not sure that’s a good comparison, but it’s a more religious city than Istanbul. It’s a kind of heartland city in Turkey. Just a little simple question. I would put it this way. Do you trust the median voter in Konya? If you think about Turkey’s troubles, if Turkey were truly ruled by the median voter in Konya, to what extent would things be fine, or to what extent is the problem it’s not really democratic enough? Do you see what I’m asking? Because in some obvious ways, the current regime is not very democratic, even though there are elections of a sort. But do you trust the median voter in Konya? I do trust the median voter in Konya, as I would trust the median voter in any country. However, I think when you think about democracy, it’s not just about the median voter. I think, and this is why I’m working on this topic, on the question of liberal democracy. The things about democracy that we really care about are just two-fold. One is that we want the median voter’s views to be reflected. The second is we don’t want to allow the median voter to do whatever he or she wants to the rest of the population. That’s why I think the constraints that liberalism or liberal institutions, the rule of law, the constraints of non-discrimination of minorities of ideological or ethnic or religious sort. Those are equally important parts of well-functioning democracies. One thing that has happened in countries like Turkey, which is actually a very widespread phenomenon around the world, is as the franchise and elections have spread around the world, by the count of the Polity, which is this group that keeps track of this, we have now more democracies than autocracies in the world. But they’re all electoral democracies. They’re democracies precisely in the sense that you meant, which is that you have elections regularly they’re generally free and fair. But what they do, however, is that they allow the winners of those elections to more or less freely trample on the rights of those who are not part of that winning majority. So the liberal element of that democracy is really what’s missing. I’m all for empowering the median voter in Turkey or elsewhere, but all in the context of rules and practices that ensure equal treatment of minorities of all kind. That’s really the part that I think, for example, the whole political economy literature on democracy has missed out on, because essentially it’s just thinking about it in terms of elections and the median voter, not thinking about it in terms of these restraints on what the median voter can do. Thinking in terms of minorities, if we go to the Eastern Mediterranean in times past, today’s İzmir was once Smyrna. It was a fantastically cosmopolitan city. Greeks, Armenians, people from all over the Middle East, Westerners lived there. It was for quite a while in harmony. The earlier Ottoman Empire was quite a cosmopolitan place in many parts. Again, by its time, a fair degree of harmony. In the early part of the 20th century, that changes very fundamentally. You have some very violent events, and it’s never gone back. Do you think it’s possible for the Eastern Mediterranean to be an area where these civil minorities have protection, or do you think the more monoglot version, Turks plus Kurds, now plus refugees, is simply what we’re going to have? How do you think about that whole change? A great, terrible, unfortunate development, or somehow, it’s a bit like the European 17th century. Great human tragedy, but a clearing out that enabled nation-states to in some way move forward?…

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