Seeing Like an Entrepreneur: Building Competitive Democracy Through Creative Destruction

Liberal democracy faces existential threats from far-right authoritarian populism. Moving beyond the traditional dichotomy between militant democracy and tolerant democracy, this paper proposes a theory of competitive democracy, which revitalizes democracy through political innovation and creative destruction. Democracy is renewed when entrepreneurial parties leverage party competition with authoritarian populism rather than merely defending the status quo. While 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 entrepreneurial parties compete with, absorb, and ultimately surpass these innovations, while firmly rejecting the far right’s normative dangers. The paper advances three hypotheses on political innovations that enable anti–far-right entrepreneur parties to regain electoral ground: (1) adopting forms of democratic direct leadership where intermediary institutions are weak; (2) leveraging high-intensity digital campaigning in digitally saturated electoral environments; and (3) 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 to 2024, the analysis finds that all three strategies are associated with significant reductions in far-right vote shares.