At this year’s LEQS Annual Lecture, which marks LEQS’s 10th anniversary, Jonathan Hopkin will discuss his new book, Anti-System Politics, which traces the evolution of this shift and argues that it is a long-term result of abandoning the post-war model of egalitarian capitalism in the 1970s. That shift entailed weakening the democratic process in favor of an opaque, technocratic form of governance that allows voters little opportunity to influence policy.
Recent elections in the advanced western democracies have undermined the basic foundations of political systems that had previously beaten back all challenges-from both the left and the right. The election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency, only months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, signaled a dramatic shift in the politics of the rich democracies.
Jonathan Hopkin (@jrhopkin) is Associate Professor of Comparative Politics in the Department of Government at LSE.
Miriam Sorace (@MiriamSorace) is an LSE Fellow in EU Politics at LSE’s European Institute.
