Seeing Like an Entrepreneur: Exploiting Authoritarian Populism as Creative Destruction

Liberal democracy faces existential threats from far-right authoritarian populism. Drawing on Joseph Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction, this paper explores how liberal democracy can be revitalized by leveraging party competition with authoritarian populism rather than merely defending the status quo. Although authoritarian-populist parties erode democratic norms and institutions, they also introduce political innovations—analogous to cost, quality, and marketing advantages in Schumpeter’s original framework—that enhance their adaptability to a transformed political environment marked by intensified cultural conflict, the rise of social media, and the erosion of traditional intermediary institutions. Democratic renewal therefore depends on how anti–far-right parties compete with, absorb, and surpass the political innovations of the far right. The paper advances three hypotheses on political innovations that enable anti–far-right parties to regain electoral ground: adopting democratic leadership where intermediary institutions are weak, leveraging high-intensity digital campaigning in digitally saturated elections, and advancing a progressive-nationalist program exemplified by Europeanism centered on environmentalism, democratic renewal, and European integration. Using multilevel models of party–election outcomes in 15 Western European democracies from 2000 to2024, the analysis finds that all three strategies are associated with significant reductions in far-right vote shares.