Do Other Countries’ Elections Matter?

Like a lot of Americans, I watched the FIFA World Cup this past summer. It was heartening to see how much foreigners enjoyed their stay in the United States, suggesting that the U.S. still has some soft power reserves. It was… less heartening to see Donald Trump’s intervention to get a star U.S. player unsuspended, which eventually led to Belgium — and karma — kicking USMNT’s butt. And karma chas continued its winning streak with FIFA President Gianni Infantino facing some comeuppance for his massive suck-up to Trump. For the purposes of this post, however, what was striking to me was that after Team USA was eliminated I presumed I would be agnostic about who won the World Cup. Spain versus Argentina in the finals? The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World did not think it had a dog in that fight other than hoping for a good game. That is, until I watched Argentina play dirty for the first twenty minutes — after which I concluded, “if there is a God, Spain will triumph and Argentina will lose and lose badly.” My point is that it is possible to develop a rooting interest in international events pretty damn quickly — heck, it took me less than half an hour watching the FIFA World Cup final. And sometimes that rooting interest is grounded in wanting the ethically superior team to prevail. I raise this because Matthew Yglesias — who, according to himself, has been right about some things — has authored a take on Xitter in the wake of recent election losses for Trump administration allies Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia and Flávio Bolsonaro of Brazil: Now I think I understand what Yglesias is trying to say. The charitable interpretation is that Yglesias prefers a world in which each country’s elections are entirely a function of the domestic politics of that country. Believing that overseas electoral outcomes are pivotal to domestic electoral outcomes presumes a fragility — or at least a vulnerability — of democratic self-government to events in other countries. There is no denying that from a democratic theory perspective, one would like national elections to be independent events. If each country’s election is serially correlated with every other country’s democratic election, the prospect of ideological waves and counter-waves becomes an issue. More plainly: if illiberal populist parties start winning, it could trigger a cascade effect in which populists start winning everywhere. And then the world looks a lot like the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers: So let’s stipulate that one would like democratic regimes to be robust enough to resist such cascade effects — and functional enough that voters would primarily care about domestic issues. That said, however, given the world we actually live in I find myself baffled by Yglesias’ earnest take. My earnest take, as someone who strongly prefers democracy to the alternative, is that it is entirely acceptable to have a rooting interest in the elections of other countries. A world in which small-d democrats win over Capital-P Populists is a world I can root for. This holds with particular force given the Trump administration’s abiding interest in bolstering its allies within democratic allies — you know, things like loaning dollars to Argentina’s Javier Milei right before that country’s midterms. And this is just one example. As I argued early last year, “neither Donald Trump nor his administration are isolationist. They are not pursuing a values-free foreign policy. Rather, they are actively promoting their brand of far-right populism and are actively meddling in the domestic politics of other countries.” Watching Trump’s preferred candidates lose is hopefully the beginning of a trend that extends to next Tuesday. Furthermore, watching them lose now is crucial to puncturing the perceived power and influence of the Trump regime. Each time one of his preferred partners loses an election, it reduces Trump’s influence while also acting as a harbinger for Trump’s slide into irrelevance. So I guess what I’m saying is that my earnest take is that given the Trump administration’s influence attempts among allied publics, it’s probably healthy that so many people have developed strong rooting interests in elections in countries they don’t live in.