Andreas Schedler’s research while affiliated with Budapest Institute and other places

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Publications (59)


Rethinking democratic subversion
  • Chapter

May 2024

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36 Reads

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4 Citations

Andreas Schedler

¿Cuántas palabras vale una vida? Cobertura mediática y contexto local de homicidios en México

December 2023

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14 Reads

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1 Citation

Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales

Dada la magnitud de la violencia del crimen organizado en México, los medios de comunicación masiva no pueden cubrir sus víctimas salvo de manera selectiva. Pero ¿cuáles son sus criterios de selectividad? En este análisis cuantitativo exploratorio, examinamos un posible factor explicativo poco estudiado: el clasismo, es decir, la posible indiferencia hacia las víctimas pobres. Concretamente, nos enfocamos en si la atención mediática a la violencia letal varía en función del estatus social de la víctima, medido de modo indirecto por el ingreso medio del municipio en donde fue asesinado. Con base en datos originales sobre reportes de homicidios del periódico nacional Reforma (durante el primer cuatrimestre de 2017), encontramos un fuerte sesgo centralista, ya que este diario presta atención desproporcionada a la Ciudad de México, pero no un sesgo clasista, ya que su cobertura de los homicidios no discrimina de manera sistemática entre municipios ricos y pobres.


Figure 2. The Causal Structure of Political Polarization Source: Author elaboration.
Rethinking Political Polarization
  • Article
  • Full-text available

June 2023

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246 Reads

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47 Citations

Political Science Quarterly

The comparative study of political polarization has been central to current debates on the global crisis of democracy. It has been built on uncertain conceptual foundations, though. Established uses of the concept lack a distinctive semantic core as multiple meanings compete against each other. On the basis of a broad reading of the comparative literature, I seek to circumscribe the use and reconstruct the core of political polarization as an instance of extraordinary democratic conflict. In a first step, I delineate the basic parameters of debate by distinguishing between cluster-analytic and conflict-analytic approaches and by specifying the generic type of political conflict that characterizes the polarization of democratic polities. In a second step, I argue for political intolerance as the defining trait of both ideological and social polarization. In a final step, I introduce a third, democratic dimension into the debate: the breakdown of basic democratic trust that leads actors to view their adversaries as “enemies of democracy.” Such perceptions spell the end of democratic consolidation. When played among “democratic enemies,” democracy stops being “the only game in town.”

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Temps et démocratie : une invitationDemocracy and Time: An InvitationTiempo y democracia: una invitación

November 2022

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10 Reads

Temporalités

Time with its many roles and faces is a major player in the field of politics. But up to now, neither political science in general nor studies of democracy in particular have taken explicit and systematic notice of it. The present explorative article outlines some core questions that could (and should) be addressed by future research on political time: the construction of democratic time horizons (future and past), the nature of democracies' current present, the weight of time constraints, the force of institutional time rules, the choice of time strategies, and last but not least, the logic of time discourses in democratic polities.


Murdered Candidates in Mexico's 2018 Elections
(Continued.)
Making Sense of Electoral Violence: The Narrative Frame of Organised Crime in Mexico

October 2022

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23 Reads

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1 Citation

Journal of Latin American Studies

Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, I examine the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organised crime. By conceiving candidate killings as economic violence within the criminal community, this commonsensical frame of interpretation permitted Mexican society to ‘normalise’ these killings as ‘business as usual’ by criminal organisations.


Minimalist Storytelling: The Natural Framing of Electoral Violence by Mexican Media

September 2022

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4 Reads

Journal of Politics in Latin America

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Mexico’s so-called drug war claimed around a quarter of a million lives. Adapting to this enduring epidemic of violence, the print media have adopted a minimalist reporting style that gives only thin, formulaic accounts of violent events. As I argue, established journalistic minimalism does more than provide little information about violence. With practised impassiveness, it frames violence in a way that creates a certain narrative: not of social actors to be understood but of natural events to be endured. Through a qualitative content analysis of over 1200 news reports, I examine the persistent force of this “natural” frame in the face of an extraordinary development: the unprecedented intrusion of political violence into the 2018 general elections, when forty-eight candidates were assassinated.


An ambiguous toolof demos accountability: taking the metaphorical concept of majoritarian tyranny seriously

November 2021

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30 Reads

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2 Citations

Political Research Exchange

Even before the invention of modern democracy, political theorists have warned about the dangers of ‘majoritarian tyrannies.’ While the concept has been perennially suspicious of serving as an antidemocratic stratagem, I propose to revalue it as an antipopulist tool of horizontal accountability among citizens (‘demos accountability’). Subverting the populist narrative of popular unity and virtue, it allows aggrieved minorities to call their majoritarian fellow citizens to account for the injustices they help to produce. Given its metaphorical quality, however, its rootedness in the image of the personal tyrant, the idea of majoritarian tyranny carries deep democratic ambiguities. To recognize these ambiguities, I argue, we need to resist the suggestive power of its animating metaphor and take the empirical complexities of its logical building blocks seriously: the exercise of tyranny, the exclusive targeting of minorities, and collective action by the majority. My stepwise analytical reconstruction of these three constitutive elements of majoritarian tyrannies reveals two metaphorical pitfalls that threaten the democratic fertility of the concept: its vilifying and its simplifying assumptions.


¿Borrón sin cuenta nueva? La injusticia transicional en guerras civiles económicas

June 2021

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3 Reads

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7 Citations

Perfiles Latinoamericanos

Ante la persistencia de la violencia criminal organizada en México, se ha discutido la posibilidad de superarla usando medidas de justicia transicional. ¿Qué tan viable sería su aplicación? Tratamos de responder a esta pregunta en dos pasos. Primero, trazamos un mapa conceptual de la violencia societal organizada que nos permite identificar la llamada narcoviolencia como una guerra civil económica y distinguirla de las guerras civiles políticas. Después, discutimos la aplicabilidad de la justicia transicional al contexto mexicano. Aunque identificamos analogías importantes, terminamos resaltando un obstáculo infranqueable: la justicia transicional solo puede servir como vía pacificadora si el Estado que recurre a ella para desarmar a las bandas criminales tuviera la capacidad de garantizar que ese desarme sea permanente.



Citations (45)


... As democratically elected leaders take aim at democratic institutions and the rules of the game have become a battleground in many democracies, autocratization and democratic resilience scholarship is turning significant attention to actors. 59 However, as this literature mostly grapples with the interactions between "autocratizers" and "pro-democracy" actors, it risks taking into account a very partial selection of relevant actors and foregoing the possibility of fully applying an actor-centred lens to better understand the wider elite coalitions that sustain autocratizing processes. 60 Thus, the actor-centred approach -especially if applied in its thicker form -can illuminate aspects of how regimes function and, as discussed below, how they change that get lost in the more dominant procedural approach. ...

Reference:

What is a “regime”? Three definitions and their implications for the future of regime studies
Rethinking democratic subversion
  • Citing Chapter
  • May 2024

... He both rejected Colombia by living abroad, and seemed compelled by it in choosing to study the 'other' within: the subjects of racialised violence, different facets of people's multiple, intersecting identities become associated with their political positioning, casting the identity of the 'other' as a threat. Others define 'polarisation' as occurring when political actors frame each other as enemies who threaten democracy, and promote intolerance toward each other (Schedler, 2023); though again the question (pace Machiavelli) is whether this is not just a form of 'politics as usual'. Polarisation scholars argue it is a question of degree: they hold that some polarisation is 'normal', but add adjectives such as 'pernicious' or 'toxic' (McCoy & Somer, 2019, 235), suggesting that there are forms of polarisation that are more harmful and unacceptable than others. ...

Rethinking Political Polarization

Political Science Quarterly

... No dudamos que la violencia criminal persigue objetivos muy distintos a los que se buscaron en esos dos grandes con ictos del pasado, ya que se rige por una encarnizada rivalidad entre grupos que controlan el comercio de mercancías ilegales y la extracción de rentas de las poblaciones locales, con el n de monopolizar mercados y evitar la competencia. Pero también, muestra una segunda dimensión de violencia contra instituciones y funcionarios públicos que empareja las motivaciones económicas con claras consecuencias políticas (De la Calle y Schedler, 2021). Por su parte, tanto la guerra de independencia como la revolución fueron con ictos con una clara raíz política, en la que también experimentaron explotación de recursos económicos y extracción de impuestos (Aboites y Jáuregui 2005). ...

¿Borrón sin cuenta nueva? La injusticia transicional en guerras civiles económicas

Perfiles Latinoamericanos

... Does it mobilize similar sentiment to strike back among voters of the incoming government? These consequences are vital for future prospects of rebuilding democratic reciprocity and whether there is a "way back" after spells of democratic backsliding (Schedler 2021). Second, how do voters of the incoming government, who represent the demand side of democratic restoration, respond to elite strategies taken to restore democracy? ...

Democratic Reciprocity*

Journal of Political Philosophy

... Political scientists and journalists have written about the top-down mechanisms of polarization focusing on electoral and communal strategies: 'At the macro-level, the self-reinforcing dynamic of political polarization… is well understood' (Schedler 2020). Essentially, this powerful consensus views the turn towards Hindutva as a strategic and ideological choice by leaders and parties of the Hindu right to win more votes. ...

Revolution and Reaction: The Diffusion of Authoritarianism in Latin America. By Kurt Weyland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 320p. 99.99cloth,99.99 cloth, 34.99 paper.
  • Citing Article
  • March 2020

Perspectives on Politics

... Just as the uncertainties of "transitions from authoritarian rule" implied that fissures had opened in the foundations of the authoritarian regime, the uncertainties of contemporary "democratic crises" imply that fissures have opened in the foundations of democracy. While the former meant the end of authoritarian consolidation, the latter spells the end of democratic consolidation (see also Schedler, 2019a). ...

Erratum to: The breaching experiment. Donald Trump and the normative foundations of democracy

Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

... Otros analizan los casos de transgresiones mayores, como la manipulación de elecciones, la violencia en contra de opositores o el sometimiento de las cortes supremas. No obstante, también es necesario dar cuenta de las dinámicas de subversión de las normas democráticas manifiestas en comportamientos, en expresiones verbales y discursivas (Maerz y Schneider, 2021;Schedler, 2019), o en la transgresión de normas como el pluralismo y la verdad en la esfera pública (Chambers y Kopstein, 2022). En esa dirección, Nicole Curato y Diego Fossati (2020: 5) proponen llamar "innovaciones autoritarias" a las prácticas de gobernanza que están diseñadas para restringir la participación pública o sabotear la rendición de cuentas; esas prácticas no solamente son innovaciones y se extienden más allá del ámbito de la gobernanza. ...

The breaching experimentDas Krisenexperiment: Donald Trump and the normative foundations of democracyDonald Trump und die normativen Grundlagen der Demokratie

Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

... Generar conocimiento en perspectiva feminista es una apuesta que se puede emprender a través de diversas disciplinas, como la ciencia política, teniendo en cuenta que los conocimientos sobre el poder no se deben quedar en el planteamiento de cómodas certezas que lleven a reproducir las mismas estructuras y a facilitar decisiones políticas, sino que éstos funcionan mejor desenmascarando y desestabilizando suposiciones comunes, y desencadenando nuevos y más profundos debates (Schedler 2004). También desde el Derecho, reconociendo que este no solo es parte de la sociedad, en el sentido de su interrelación con todos los factores que la conforman, sino que, en tanto construcción social, tiene la posibilidad de erigirse como un motor de transformaciones (De Sousa 2014). ...

La relevancia pública de la política comparada
  • Citing Article
  • December 2004

... I ranije su teoretičari -Karl Šmit (Carl Schmitt) u 1930-tim i Herbert Markuze (Herbert Marcuse) tri decenije kasnijeupozoravali na opasnost od sistematske depolitizacije, ali aktuelne debate u društvenoj teoriji i političkim naukama odlikuje poseban intenzitet i raznovrsnost teorijskih i ontoloških pozicija (Beveridge, 2017). Sunovrat političkog i "depolitizacijska kriza" (Beveridge, 2017), sumnjičavost prema političarima i omraza u pogledu svega što ima veze s politikom (Hay, 2007), političko otuđenje, razočaranost i rezigniranost (Torcal & Montero, 2006), generalizovana antipolitika (Clarke et al., 2017(Clarke et al., , 2018Fawcett et al., 2017;Schedler, 1997) -pojave koje istraživači redom beleže na strani političke potražnje, logičan su ishod erodiranja politike i neprogramatskih načina na koje se ona danas sve češće koncipira i organizuje. Ima i onih koji uzroke političkog otuđenja i pasivizacije pronalaze u samom društvu, u okrunjenim socijalnim vezama, niskom poverenju u druge ljude te ključne demokratske institucije, oslabljenom građanskom aktivizmu (Patnam, 2008;Pharr et al., 2000) ili, pak, porastu broja obrazovanih, dobro informisanih, angažovanih, i evidentno sve zahtevnijih i kritičnijih građana (Norris, 1999(Norris, , 2011. ...

Introduction: Antipolitics — Closing and Colonizing the Public Sphere
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 1997

... Luego podrían valorarse otras formas en las que la situación actual ha considerado una diversidad e intentos de clasificación de la situación presente. Pero ante el espacio tan limitado será necesario anunciarlos y quizá delinear con más detalles el término regímenes híbridos de Leonardo Morlino (2009Morlino ( y 2008, autoritarismo competitivo (Levitsky y Way, 2004) y autoritarismo electoral (Schedler, Greene, y Slater, 2015). ...

La política comparada de las elecciones autoritarias: Un debate en torno a The Politics of Uncertainty: Sustaining and Subverting Electoral Authoritarianism de Andreas Schedler

Política y Gobierno