Seminars

Can citizens defend democracy while accepting violations of democratic norms when those violations benefit their own party or target opponents they regard as a danger to the regime? This presentation examines how partisanship and political tolerance shape support for two kinds of norm violation in a context of democratic backsliding: executive aggrandizement, which weakens checks and balances, and restrictions on the rights of association and protest, which withdraw political rights from an opposing group. We argue that democratic commitment becomes conditional rather than principled when party cues identify who benefits from a violation and who is targeted by it. Supporters of the anti-democratic party, whose leadership is associated with backsliding, should be more willing to tolerate executive aggrandizement that empowers their own side; supporters of the principled democratic party, its main opponent, may in turn treat restrictions on their opponents' rights as democratic self-defense. The analysis draws on an online survey experiment with 2,586 respondents in Brazil, randomly assigned to six vignette conditions that vary the type of violation and the partisan cue attached to it. The results support the expectations of partisan asymmetry and party-cue convergence: supporters of the anti-democratic party are more likely to accept a co-partisan violation of checks and balances, and the partisan gap narrows when the violation targets political opponents. Outgroup intolerance is not confirmed: agreement with restricting peaceful association and protest does not rise reliably even when an explicit party cue identifies the opposing camp as the target. Democratic commitment is conditional, but the democratic-defense paradox has a floor: partisan hostility alone does not license the suspension of civil liberties.

Cuba equals crisis. This framing has been the hallmark of most scholarship on the island over the last four decades - and it is incomplete. State planning, informal markets, dollarization, global capitalism, the US embargo and everyday survival coexist in a fragmented and dysfunctional economic order. Yet these contradictions--and "crisis" itself--are not temporary failures but the organizing principle of a politico-economic system that has morphed over the decades. Binary readings (formal/informal; socialist planning/market failure) obfuscate the fact that economic governance in Cuba operates through schizoid patterns—simultaneously prohibiting, enabling, and depending upon formal, informal, a-legal and illegal economic practices in a system where market driven inequality, egalitarian rhetoric, and US imperialism coexist uneasily. Thus schizonomics is a dysfunctional yet lasting and stabilizing mechanism of survival rather than a symptom of imminent collapse. This means rethinking the assumed keywords of economic policy in Cuba: Money becomes a pharmakon: cure, poison, and scapegoat. Economic distortions in the context of an endemic crisis produce a new culture: rebusque (making do). Any assumed 'transition' to capitalism belies the "recombinant" nature of the Cuban economy: schizonomics is not a temporary phenomenon but a framework that will operate in years to come.The question therefore is not whether specific reforms will succeed or fail, but what kind of economic system is reproduced through these recurring contradictions. The main focus is not on policy outcomes as much as on the political economy that generates them.