Populist leaders, plebiscites, and authoritarian drift

https://politicalrealitypodcast.com

Follow Tom:

• Tom Pepinsky’s website with links to his research & books: https://tompepinsky.com

• Tom’s blog: https://tompepinsky.com/blog

• His substack: https://tompepinsky.substack.com/

Selected books and peer-reviewed works by Tom relevant to this episode:

• Recent paper on authoritarianism: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2020.1775589

• Recent paper on voting in authoritarian vs. democratic systems: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/voting-in-authoritarian-elections/1C066CD75F6F070930181135B288F632

• Book on global challenges to democracy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-challenges-to-democracy/C50D0AC769FF0AA2C62DA9337F2C03E6

• Covid paper we briefly referenced: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0249596

• Book based on his research on partisanship and Covid: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691218991/pandemic-politics

Selected essays by Tom relevant to this episode:

• Preventing a slide into authoritarianism in the US: https://www.vox.com/politics/477317/donald-trumps-ego-democracy-authoritarianism

• Crucial characteristics of fascism: https://tompepinsky.com/2017/01/03/berman-on-fascism/

• An absolutely fantastic “mini syllabus” on how to make sense of the Trump administration through a comparative political science lens: https://tompepinsky.com/2016/12/21/comparative-politics-and-the-trump-administration/

• US’s lost leadership in East Asia: https://eastasiaforum.org/2025/11/02/a-united-states-that-is-disintegrating-and-no-longer-a-leader-in-asia/

• Life in authoritarian states: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/9/14207302/authoritarian-states-boring-tolerable-fascism-trump

Working papers by Tom relevant to this episode:

• Democratic backsliding: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5363315

• Biased learning from elections: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/q9zpm_v2

Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism