Policy Briefs on Global Challenges to Democracy

This policy brief examines how sophisticated rhetorical strategies—combining overt divisive messaging with coded extremist language—operate across multiple communication levels to legitimise violence and undermine democratic institutions. Drawing on recent research in political psychology, comparative analysis of global democratic backsliding, and evidence from successful counter-messaging initiatives, it proposes a comprehensive framework for protecting democratic discourse. Traditional responses such as fact-checking and moral condemnation have proven inadequate against sophisticated extremist communication strategies that exploit emotional and identity-based appeals. Success requires coordinated international action across civil society organisations, educational institutions, technology companies, government agencies, and the business community.

This report examines the alarm felt in Aotearoa New Zealand during the first seven months of the second Trump administration as an autocratic President has managed to undermine basic democratic values and institutions, show open disdain for multilateral organisations, and do harm to global trade through his tariff policy. These developments challenge New Zealand’s deeply held political principles and values as well as a long tradition of empathetic and compassionate politics. This is a moment for co-operation rather than competition, and for building solidarity between progressive social democratic movements and polities all around the world.

This report examines the consequences for India of a second Trump presidential term. With his steep tariffs and cheap insults, Trump has eroded a decades-old Indian public consensus of a pro-America policy and revived old animosities towards the US. If an estranged India’s strategic engagement with America and the democratic world loosens, it can only be more bad news for its troubled democracy. Not that America has ever seemed to care about Modi’s assaults on democracy, or he, about its sensitivities.

This report examines the terminology applied to the second presidency of Donald Trump. It has been called ‘fascist’, a ‘descent into fascism’ or a ‘revolutionary government in the form of an imperial court’. The US itself has been described as a ‘flawed democracy’. What are the arguments for describing Trump's USA as a plutocracy or fascism? Don't we rather see the bizarre features of a form of rule described one hundred years ago by the German sociologist Max Weber as patrimonial, or more precisely, sultanistic?

This report outlines the significant threat to democratic governance in Latin America posed by Trump’s renewed presidency. His attacks on the rule of law and alignment with authoritarian leaders have emboldened regional allies to weaken oversight institutions, concentrate power, and target vulnerable groups. As US soft power declines and China offers economic engagement without democratic conditions, the region faces growing risks of institutional erosion, deepening polarization both within and between countries, and rising political instability.