RevDem Podcast

Review of Democracy
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RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture.

  1. Gen-Z: An Emerging Political Force? – A Discussion with Răzvan Petri and Vlad Adamescu

    2 DAYS AGO

    Gen-Z: An Emerging Political Force? – A Discussion with Răzvan Petri and Vlad Adamescu

    Politicians have usually neglected the needs and concerns of young voters, since they were seen as the most inactive and unreliable segment of the electorate. However, the interlocking crises of the contemporary global landscape have awakened Gen-Z’s political consciousness and have made them realize that their voice should also be heard. But have politicians adapted to this new reality and are they willing to discuss the issues that young people find imperative? In our new podcast, Vlad Adamescu and Răzvan Petri discuss the new wave of youth engagement in Romanian politics. Starting from their own Politică la Minut (Instant Politics) initiative that aims to increase political participation among young Romanians, they analyze how the current political situation in Romania has moved away from the divide between post-communist and anticommunist factions and is now similar to the landscape in other European states, where the conflict occurs between liberal and conservative forces. Petri and Adamescu also emphasize how, as opposed to Hungary or Poland, Romania has always managed to avoid the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader. However, it has faced another problem: the cartelization of political parties through the existence of several clientelist pyramids. In turn, this entails that establishing a new reformist political party is extremely difficult, since it will have to overcome the obstacles generated by these political cartels. Adamescu and Petri note that this may be one of the main reasons why Gen-Z still lacks appropriate political representation in Romania, even if young people are prominent voices in civil society and are active members of various NGOs. The conversation was conducted by Luca Matasaru. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.

    33 min
  2. Why Would Elected Leaders Hollow Out Their States?

    4 DAYS AGO

    Why Would Elected Leaders Hollow Out Their States?

    In this episode of our podcast series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Andrés Mejía Acosta and Javier Pérez Sandoval about their new article, “Why Populists Hollow Out Their States.” They discuss how, why, and when elected leaders seek to undermine the state; what libertarians and leftists share when it comes to practices of state erosion and where they might differ; how the pertinent examples from Latin America they present in the article may be placed in a global context; and in what ways the connections between low-capacity states and flawed democracy may be conceptualized. Andrés Mejía Acosta is associate professor at theUniversity of Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs. Javier Pérez Sandoval is a postdoctoral research associatein democracy at Notre Dame. Alina Young edited the audio file.

    26 min
  3. Ultimate Failure Via Major Accomplishments – Julian E. Zelizer on the Paradoxes of Joe Biden’s Presidency

    2 APR

    Ultimate Failure Via Major Accomplishments – Julian E. Zelizer on the Paradoxes of Joe Biden’s Presidency

    In this conversation, Julian E. Zelizer – editor of the new volume The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden. A First Historical Assessment – discusses the key accomplishments of Joe Biden’s presidency as well as the sources of his ultimate failure to fulfil his promise. He explores the historical origins of the Biden presidency, reflects on its foreign policy record, and considers the questions future historians will be debating.

    15 min
  4. Did Fear of Vampires Inspire Early Scientific Inquiry? A Discussion with Ádám Mézes

    30 MAR

    Did Fear of Vampires Inspire Early Scientific Inquiry? A Discussion with Ádám Mézes

    Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recent crises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force is not new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism.Our focus throughout this series will fall on the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments ofepidemic disease, religious fracture and institutional weakness. They explained crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collective anxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a fine barometer ofthe how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated. In our third podcast, we host Ádám Mézes, with whom we discuss the fascinating topic of vampire contagion in the Habsburg Empire and its broader impact on the history of science. As in the earlier conversation with Kateryna Dysa on witchcraft trials, the discussion begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a vampire, and who has the authority to define it? The first clear definition of vampires in the Habsburg lands comes from a medical report written in 1732. It describes the vampire as “a returning dead, a revenant, a physical corpse that (…) it is also to spread its condition to its victims”, asour guest emphasizes. Because Ádám Mézes focuses on the Habsburg case, most of the written sources he uses come from medical personnel and members of the clergy. These reports were mediated through translators and shaped by theconceptual frameworks of imperial officials. Many of them interpreted the unfamiliar beliefs through the categories of Catholic demonology. Thus, religious confessions played an essential role in defining vampires.  The conversation then moves to the specific political and epidemiological context of the Habsburg military frontier, which strongly influenced the perception about vampires. Officials stationed along the frontier were trained to watch for signs of contagious disease. When several unexplained deaths occurred in the same village, suspicion quickly spread. As John Blair emphasized in our first podcast of this series, reports of vampires often emerged as a possible explanation for the sudden wave of deaths. In an ironic twist, the focus on vampires had an important effect on scientific investigation. Mézes brings the examples of two physicians who exhumed and dissected bodies suspected of being vampires. At that time, systematic research on human bodies was morally and legally constrained. However, by observing cases of suspected vampirism, such physicians could produce empirical insightsabout the human body and the process of decay. Our discussion concludes with possible avenues for future research. Our guest emphasizes that primary sources in Orthodox and Catholic monastic archives, as well as administrative records, still require investigation. In turn, thehistorians should move away from the literary stereotypes created in the 18th and 19th centuries and focus instead on reconstructing the complex social worlds in which the figure of the vampire first took shape.

    29 min
  5. : Democracy on a Tightrope: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Risks of Imbalance

    23 MAR

    : Democracy on a Tightrope: Politics, Bureaucracy, and the Risks of Imbalance

    In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Gabriela Lotta about Democracy on a Tightrope: Politics and Bureaucracy in Brazil,co-authored with Pedro Abramovay and recently published by Central European University Press . Drawing on the Brazilian case, the conversation explores the risks that emerge when the relationship between politics and bureaucracy breaks down: on the one hand, therise of technocratic governance and the “fetishization of meritocracy”; on the other, the erosion of bureaucratic institutions by political leaders. Through a series of concrete policy cases, Lotta reflects on how these tensions shape democratic governance and what a more productive relationship between politicalleadership, expertise, and citizen participation might look like—both in Brazil and beyond.

    40 min
  6. EU Research Spotlight: Nils-Christian Bormann on Violence, Elites, and Democratic Stability

    19 MAR

    EU Research Spotlight: Nils-Christian Bormann on Violence, Elites, and Democratic Stability

    What happens when democracy faces violence as a recurring feature of political life? In this episode, we discuss the DANGER – Democracy, Anger, and Elite Response European Research Council (ERC) project with PrincipalInvestigator, Nils-Christian Bormann. This EU-funded research project examines how European democracies responded to political violence, economic crisis, and rising extremism in the interwar period. The conversation explores the project’s core questions, including how violence interacts with democratic stability and what role political elites play in moments of crisis. We also discuss the project’s mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale data collection with in-depth historical casestudies, as well as innovative open-source datasets and visualisations. The episode highlights key early findings, most notably the relationship between local violence and support for extremist parties and reflects on what these historical patterns might tell us about the vulnerabilities of contemporary democracies.

    43 min
  7. How Courts Can Hold Authoritarian Leaders Accountable

    16 MAR

    How Courts Can Hold Authoritarian Leaders Accountable

    In many democracies today, elected leaders challenge institutions, undermine electoral rules, and test the limits of constitutional order. Yet legal accountability for suchactions remains rare. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, produced in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Luciano Da Ros and Manoel Gehrke about their article “How toBring Authoritarians to Justice.” Focusing on Brazil’s response to Jair Bolsonaro’s attempt to overturn the 2022 election results, they examine how courts can confront authoritarian behavior by elected leaders—and why judicial action sometimes succeeds where political opposition alone does not. The conversation explores the strategic role of Brazil’s high courts, the tensions between judicial intervention and democratic legitimacy, and what Brazil’s experience reveals about the broader challenge of defending democracy in thetwenty-first century.

    42 min
  8. Anticipating Autocracies: Contradictions in Broken China

    9 MAR

    Anticipating Autocracies: Contradictions in Broken China

    In this latest conversation, we speak with Minxin Peiabout his latest book, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2025),which challenges the enduring assumption that economic development naturally leads to democracy. Pei argues that China’s post-Mao reforms produced not political liberalization but a resilient, adaptive form of authoritarianism.Focusing on the Deng Xiaoping time, he shows how these changes also reinforced centralized authority, fostered corruption, and sidelined reformist actors—laying the groundwork for neo-authoritarian rule. The conversation turns to nationalism and the Patriotic Education Campaign, probing how nationalism in contemporary China has been mobilized to legitimize Xi Jinping’s totalizing control. We ask whether the features once seen as China’s strengths—partydominance and controlled markets—are now sources of fragility under Xi Jinping.Dwelling on the significance of the title of the book, we explore how the rise of China, counterintuitive to many in the West, is ultimately an example of contradictions inherent in modern as well as Chinese politics.

    37 min
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About

RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture.

Information

  • Creator
    Review of Democracy
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    408
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Review of Democracy
  • Show Website
    RevDem Podcast

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