THE ROLE OF DONALD TRUMP IN (RE)-SHAPING GLOBAL DEMOCRACY

Abstract

In the last decade, democracy has been in decline, due primarily to the increasing electoral success of extremist political parties, on both ends of the political spectrum, who campaign on a polarising populist and/or nationalist platform. This paper then argues that Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign, that began in 2015, and subsequent presidency accelerated the electoral success of these extremists, through a diffusion effect. The logic lies with the US great power status where its hard power creates many pathways for its influence to flow while its soft power legitimises its own transition to the world. Thus, with both the Republican Party, under Trump, and the Democrats, to combat Trump, shifting further away from the centre (political polarisation) and adopting extremist positions, this would result in extremist parties across the world attaining greater electoral success. To prove this argument, this paper utilises a mixed methods approach, beginning with a quantitative study of the overall performance of extremist parties from 1992-2019, before breaking it down specifically into the performances of left and right-wing extremists respectively. Using a novel dataset constructed by the author, it was found that since 2015, indicating the presence of political extremism in the US, both the percentage of votes and seats won by extremist parties across the world has increased. However, when analysing the performances specifically for left and right-wing extremists, only the latter registered an increase in both its percentage of votes and seats won while the former registered only an increase in its percentage of votes won. With these results, this paper proceeds to the qualitative section, where it conducts a variation of the most similar system design, the within case analysis, to show how this diffusion effect led to the increase in percentage of votes, since 2015. This paper proceeds to select the Vlaams Belang and Vänsterpartiet, to represent the right and left-wing extremist respectively.