The Rise of the Political Entrepreneur
I sit down with Catherine De Vries, Professor of Political Science at Bocconi University and co-author of “Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe”
👋🏼 Hey, I’m Joanna! I’m a communications consultant sharing insights and ideas relating to democracy, wellbeing, business, AI, culture, spiritualism and the human condition…read on if this has piqued your interest.
The trumping of Trump (couldn’t resist) in the U.S. Presidential election has raised many interesting questions about the meaning of democracy, how people participate in it and interpret political issues and why they choose some candidates over others.
As someone interested in both politics and entrepreneurship, the idea that they are now intertwined makes sense in our current hyper-capitalistic and attention-grabbing age. Yet how does this work in practice, how can we spot it, and what impact does this political and entrepreneurship dynamic have on the fabric of democracy?
As a late discoverer of Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe the issues outlined in this book – from the rise of challenger parties in Europe and their comparison to disruptive entrepreneurs – couldn’t be more relevant in light of Trump’s recent election win. The idea that America’s government is essentially a company feels truer than ever. But what does this mean in practice? And if more disruptive politicians are breaking into mainstream politics in the same style as disruptive entrepreneurs, how should voters respond to this? Do we need to think more like venture capitalists and ask and inquire more about how our money (the taxes we spend) are accounted for?
This book taps and dives into the changing fabric of how we perceive and interact with politics and politicians, making it (in my opinion) one of the most insightful and pertinent political science reads in the last decade. Having nodded in agreement at Catherine de Vries recent piece in The Financial Times on “How we are moving from democracy to ‘emocracy’” I was keen to hear her thoughts on political entrepreneurship in light of the recent election results across the world, and what we as voters ought to think about.
Enjoy!
Joanna: I’m always fascinated by how the idea of a book comes about. What was the catalyst for the idea behind Political Entrepreneurs?
Catherine: Sara Hobolt, the co-author of Political Entrepreneurs, and I have been talking about political entrepreneurs in terms of advertising, selling and celebrity for a long time, around 20 years. This book is really framed around Europe, but it applies much more generally around the language of political strategy and people who are entering politics using their party as a vehicle.
We'd had big conversations around political entrepreneurs and I think the Danish and Dutch aspect is also really important because the breakthrough of political entrepreneurs in Denmark and the Netherlands happened at different points in time where we probably would think that these systems are quite similar in the sense that they have proportional representation, they're wealthy smaller states, they’re multi-party systems that look very similar. So we really started to question what is this stuff that we're seeing which is politics like a profession, like entrepreneurship, and then why is it different, why is causing the breakthrough of these different parties that call themselves outsiders that advocate against the system, why does disruption happen at different points in time?
Our existing work in political science couldn't really explain that so we thought “okay we have to go to the drawing board” and so we'd been working on it and then in 2020 it ultimately culminated in this brilliant book.
Joanna: You explain and show how political change is as much about the ability of challenger parties to innovate as it is about the inability of dominant parties to respond. Can you explain how they do this? What elements and qualities make these challenger parties so successful compared to mainstream parties?
Catherine: In the book we basically take the tools that economists have used to try to understand economic change, so how certain products became very popular and how certain entrepreneurs disrupt product markets. For example, Elon Musk developing electric vehicles and disrupting the vehicle market in the U.S with Tesla.
Disruptors in the political market, at least at the time where we're looking at now over the last 30 years, look very similar. We think of political entrepreneurs in the sense that they advocate different things and doing things in different ways so it’s a different product but it's also a different style. Coming back to Musk, you're using very unconventional ways to advertise your Tesla. It's not just the product, it's a different way of doing cars. That's the analogy that we're taking, so every chapter starts with an example from business and we're taking this mould to understand from.
We define political entrepreneurs as people who have not been the dominant players in the political game. In the British case, the Labour Party or the Tory Party, or in west Europe the Social Democrats and the Christian Democrats which are kind of the dominant players in politics. So basically, those parties have an existing way of doing politics which is very much centred around left-right issues such as more state intervention in the economy. What political entrepreneurs do is they sell you a different product, such as Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party which became the Brexit Party, and in many European countries immigration really cut across that divided the parties and the clientele of these dominant parties, and they try to mobilize this. So the product innovation is what we call the policy innovation, but they do something different in that they actually don't have those dominant players to kind of talk about companies.
If you think about patents like you would have a patent on an electric car, in politics there's no patent. You can't say “this is my issue, you can't touch it” or “it’s my policy, you can't touch it”. These parties try to make their innovations endure so that they have no copycats and have no mainstream parties copying them by also adding rhetorical innovation and trying to do politics in terms of style in a different way, so the system doesn't work. They want to say they're different both on what they're selling you and the way they're doing it with rhetorical and policy innovation. This is what makes a very successful kind of political entrepreneur, how they respond.
Joanna: You say that challenger parties adapt more quickly to shifting voter tastes and harness voter disenchantment better, similar to a disruptive start-up. Is this because they are better at voicing the problem and proposing a solid solution (like a start-up seeking venture capital), or is it because they are simply better at capturing attention through the problem, yet the solution to the problem itself isn’t fully outlined (which a start-up would have to do if they were seeking capital)?
Catherine: I think it's more the latter because if you think about it as more of a marketplace for votes, voters just need to vote for you, they don't have to put the money there. There’s going to be less of a check, like how are these guys really going to do it, it's going to be based more on a feeling – are these guys really advocating or rhetorically giving me something that fits my grievances at the moment?
So what you will often see is these political entrepreneurs, these challenger parties that are challenging the mainstream, are kind of like campaigns. What they're really good at is advocating this grievance around the EU, let's say, or around immigration. Sometimes what we also know is that they don't change people's position but what they do is make people think about politics through the lens of that grievance. So you go to the ballot box and you might want to vote for a good economy but now you're thinking immigration is a really big issue so I'm going to vote on immigration.
It's often the politics of attention grabbing that we're doing. So it fits the role that you're talking about and then they want the vote of that. That is where the problems can arise for political entrepreneurs – can they deliver?
In my own country a politician was killed many years ago ahead of the election, but his party had a very short tenure, around 80 days, and they couldn't really deliver on the promises. I think that is where you see the issue for political entrepreneurs – they're really good at advocating grievances. Then if they become so popular that they're entering government they will have to actually deliver on “the product”. They will have to go to the first stage and really say what the solution is. It will really depend on what they do in office but also for them, you have to understand, actually solving the grievance is against their business model.
If we accept that they actually are grievance machines, they just want to solve a little bit so they want to seem capable enough to have dealt with these issues, but they don't want to solve the grievance as such because that doesn't really help them. So think about Donald Trump and the U.S. election. There was a bipartisan bill on dealing with immigration and that was going to come out of the legislature in the U.S. And Trump said to kill it because he wanted to keep immigration on the agenda.
So the issue is that it's really an attention-grabbing exercise but when you are big enough like Donald Trump who will now be entering government again, it becomes how well did you govern in 2020?
If you want to think about people as being investors in that they are getting bang for their buck, and that will be something to see when they enter government and how it rises. We've seen fortunes going very well, we've seen forces not going so well, so that will just depend on what these guys deliver when they're in government. This has enabled political entrepreneurs to enter and sometimes thrive in the mainstream. Mainstream parties need to respond to the innovation they propose.
Joanna: What has enabled political entrepreneurs to enter – and sometimes thrive – in the mainstream, and what do mainstream parties need to do to respond to the innovation they propose?
Catherine: You previously had in place very favourable conditions for mainstream parties who talked more or less about state intervention in the economy, they were locking their voters in either through churches or conservative institutions and through trade unions on the more left side or more progressive institutions and that has changed. We've seen the demise of trade unions, we've seen the demise of the traditional working class, we've seen the development of service jobs, we've seen women entering the labour market and we've also seen the end of communism collapsing which gave us a little bit of a kind of counterbalance to some neoliberal ideas.
If you think about the product markets and how effective loyalty through these big structural changes has diminished. This has enabled political entrepreneurs to get votes because before it was very difficult if you were a political entrepreneur.
It was a very difficult kind of strategic game to enter into politics, such as if a trade union didn’t support you if you are on the left, so that's one set of structural conditions. Another set of structural conditions is the media environment. I think a key political entrepreneur par excellence was Silvio Berlusconi in Italy who was a business entrepreneur and one of the richest guys of the moment, like an Elon Musk of the 1990s, and he entered Italian politics after a huge corruption scandal blew open the political system because the two parties basically were implicated into corruption, and he saw an opportunity within three months.
He basically set up his own political party and ran for an election in what was a changing media environment. He was a media entrepreneur and he owned at a certain point around 70 to 80 percent of commercial television in Italy, so he was able to control the message a large amount.
If we fast forward now to Elon Musk and X and Donald Trump being on non-traditional media and him being able to utilise that has also allowed for certain messages. When you have this disruption in the media markets, traditional political parties were not as apt to deal with these changes. You needed innovation and then you needed some people to say that they’re going to try commercial television or try social media and that really helped them. So that's the structural changes, but I think there's been another change and that's on the demand side of voters.
The information that voters consume and the way that they're tied to parties has changed, but there's also a type of person who just enters politics in the first place so when these parties change and when politics became so much more unpredictable because of these structural changes disappearing you might have some people who previously were never really into politics thinking they’ll give it a shot.
So you see the Berlusconi’s entering, you see Trump entering, you see people like Boris Johnson. These are people who have had celebrity status in other domains, they're able to capitalise on that within politics. We've also seen the development of a certain type of politician who before was kind of locked out because traditional parties didn't give them room, and now because of these changes in the demand side of politics and voters getting information in different ways, there's an opportunity for different types of political entrepreneurs to enter into politics and to actually become successful.
There’s been work in political science to show that the celebrity status of Donald Trump on The Apprentice helped him because a lot of politicians need to establish name recognition. It can also be through traditional politics, but it can also be through business, so Elon Musk or Silvio Berlusconi or other people, that becomes an entry, especially when we've just established that maybe politics is more about attention grabbing than it is about policy wonks. Studies show that more emotional language in politics, like feelings, celebrity and emotion persuade more over evidence and fact.
The content on which we run has changed and that engages people in a different way. That's something that's different for politicians and then also gives an entry advantage for celebrities because they're already in the discussion, they're in the media bubble, they know how to work commercial TV, they know how to work social media, how advertising works and how to monetise stuff. We've seen a lot of cultural bearing shift into politics, and it just takes a couple of people who are innovators to be ahead in doing that. It also means that there's innovation potential for other people. You could argue Bernie Sanders was an innovator on the Democratic side in the U.S., and Tony Blair fully understood the power of media in the UK
Politics is not only about good policy proposals, but also about rhetoric style and how you do things that are important. It’s also important to think about the level of professionalism and what we often get wrong is that we put people like Berlusconi or Trump or Boris Johnson in the category of buffoons and clowns, but they understand the attention-grabbing game so they’re actually quite professional in that sense.
Whether we like it or not, as an academic I have to look at it from a distance and see that these are very effective communicators in their style, and it doesn't mean giving a good speech.
It's not just a question of policy. It’s often people who've made their entire career by selling rhetoric. Look at how Kamala Harris only appeared on a couple of podcasts whereas Donald Trump appeared on something like 15 ridiculously high listening figure podcasts. There has been a lot of media innovation in the right sphere in the U.S. right and Trump was able to capitalise on this. For a candidate like Harris to succeed you need to be investing in that liberal-leaning media structure or people pundits.
Innovation is a constant process so you're going to see disruption again. There’s going to be new people who are going to learn lessons from this and they're going to start innovating on that side. It’s always a game between innovators and dominant players. So now the question is when you as the disruptor becomes the dominant player, how do you then make sure that you're going to be the one that's going to make sure that you are not going to be caught off guard in the future by new disruptors?
Joanna: You recently wrote a piece for The Financial Times saying that we are moving from democracy to an ‘emocracy’. At what point did emotion matter more than factual evidence?
Catherine: It's both old and new. If you read classical philosophers like Aristotle, they talk about emotions and how fearful they are of political discourse being overtaken by what they would call a demagogue. Only demagogues use emotional rhetoric and that often comes along with worries about disinformation, misinformation and not telling the truth. That's been an ongoing discussion within politics. But what has been particularly different is what I just outlined before which is that if you have political entrepreneurs that have a certain type of business model of politics that makes them gain from that emotional appeal and they start organising their campaigns around it and they start to make that a professionalised machine let's say in the way that Berlusconi did in Italy who I see as the founding father of democracy by way of marketing strategy, how you advertise in terms of controlling part of the commercial media and making that your business model.
For someone like Donald Trump, who says he likes to do a deal, which is something he used to say, that gives you some flexibility then to move around with policy. Because if you're talking about policy a lot, you're going to be locked in. People are going to say, hey, but that was your election promise, right? So what you often do is you talk about something, but you actually don't give very concrete policy details because that locks you in when you govern for having to do a whole set of things. And people might get disappointed and that creates grievances for your opposing side that allows a new entrepreneur to come in.
But it's also a strategy of not being tied through policy and making it about what feels right instead of what evidence suggests would be right to do in that situation. We've seen this strategy transmitting into different countries. And in some countries, this has led to really a qualitative difference in the political discourse. It's like politics through neoliberalism.
Joanna: What are the most-important takeaways from the book that you think normal citizens should be more aware of? Similarly, what are the most important takeaways for mainstream political parties, especially in this year (2024) of elections?
Catherine: We need to think about how we organise how people get information and what are the rules systematically. If you gain from the current system, why would you change it, right?
It’s not only about the head, but also about the heart. And the heart often resonates very strongly to these kinds of emotional appeals. And when people say politics should be positive, it's really about grievances, about people being upset about certain things, and that being channelled. Of course, you can channel that in different ways, more constructive ways, less constructive ways, right? But I think the idea that politics should be about good vibes, that is something I don't fully understand. It can be about hope, but good vibes are not probably what most people are feeling when they're thinking about public policy issues or issues to be solved.
It's really interesting to think about what is your rhetorical and emotional appeal, how do you structure that and how do you do that, but in a constructive way, right? You can say that some of the examples we've just talked about have been less constructive. There's been playing people against each other, us versus them etc. But there has to be a positive construction of this.
It's not this idea that policy is good, and emotion is bad in politics. There's always been this kind of emotion. What we are worried about is people, untruths and demagogues. We're not worried necessarily about appealing to people on an emotional level. We're all emotional beings that have grievances, that have, you know, hopes and worries, and we want to see that expressed. That is something that mainstream parties need to think about. How do you structure a campaign like that?
For voters, it's more about constructively digesting emotions. Some of the things are about you yourself being “played” by politicians and being pitted against other groups, or being made more fearful, or create perception gaps.
It’s about what feels right but not about the numbers. You get these instances where people say that there are more immigrants in their environment and more crime. But it doesn’t relate to the fact. That what we need to understand.
What are the facts really showing us, and what would be an actual solution to the problem? What we need to distinguish between is those politicians who are very good at advocating grievances, but provide no policy solutions, or no solutions, let's say, and those that do.
There is also a responsibility for individual voters to try to think more carefully about that. We have to square this kind of venture capitalist question that you had before and the attention grabbing. This seems like a good idea, but if I were a venture capitalist, would I put a couple of million on this idea? Politics is that high stakes. We really are creating politics. Even if it feels like I'm only giving the vote, and I'm just going to take a big risk. But a venture capitalist would want to think on the return of their money.