Can populism be good for democracy, or does it always lead to autocracy? In the Season 3 finale of PALcast, host Fabio de Sa e Silva sits down with student intern Daniel Basey to take stock of what the Project on Autocratic Legalism has learned about how rising autocrats use law to gain and keep power.

They discuss PAL's main findings, the upcoming Cambridge handbook, and plans for Season 4. Daniel also argues that economic class helps explain who backs populist movements, from 1930s Germany to Japan today.

Along the way you'll get a reading list on fascism's social base. Learn more at autocratic-legalism.net.

Cited works:

Javier Corrales, The Authoritarian Resurgence: Autocratic Legalism in Venezuela. Journal of Democracy, 26(2), pp. 26, 37-51, 2015.

Kim Lane Scheppele, Autocratic Legalism. The University of Chicago Law Review, 85(2), pp. 545-584, 2018.

Rosalind Dixon and David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal globalization and the subversion of liberal democracy. Oxford University Press, 2021.

Ozan Varol, Stealth Authoritarianism. 100 Iowa L. Rev. 1673, 2015.

Fabio de Sa e Silva, Autocratic Legalism 2.0: Insights from a Global Collaborative Research Project, Verfassung und Recht in Übersee 55(4), pp. 419-440, 2022.

Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933. University of North Carolina Press, 1983.

Thomas Childers, The Social Bases of the National Socialist Vote. Journal of Contemporary History, 11(4), pp. 17-42, 1976.

Arthur Schweitzer, Big Business and Private Property Under the Nazis. The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago, 19(2), pp. 99-126, 1946.