The Rise of the Right Wing Through an IAD Framework
Governing the Democratic Commons
Introduction: beyond ideology, toward institutional failure
The contemporary rise of right-wing populism and authoritarianism is often described as an ideological wave, a cultural backlash, or a moral regression. Such explanations capture fragments of the phenomenon but fail to explain its persistence, its adaptability, and its capacity to take over democratic institutions from within.
A more productive approach is to treat democracy itself as a shared resource system—a political commons—subject to overuse, capture, and collapse. In this sense, Elinor Ostrom’s Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework, originally designed to analyze commons governance, offers a powerful lens to understand how and why democratic systems are being destabilized and, in some cases, appropriated by right-wing authoritarian actors.
This article applies the IAD framework to the rise of the right, drawing implicitly on recent analyses:
- Black Pill by Elle Reeve
- How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa
- National Populism by Roger Eatwell & Matthew Goodwin
- Whiteshift by Eric Kauffman
- Fascism: A Warning* by Madeleine K. Albright
1. Democracy as a commons
In IAD terms, a commons is not defined by what it is, but by how it is governed. Liberal democracy relies on several shared, non-excludable resources:
- Trust in electoral outcomes
- A shared informational space (truth, credibility, verification)
- Institutional legitimacy
- Norms of restraint and mutual recognition
These resources are vulnerable to free-riding, strategic defection, and capture, especially under conditions of rapid social change. The rise of the right can therefore be read as a governance failure of these democratic commons.
2. Exogenous variables: stress on the system
Biophysical and material conditions
- Several structural conditions reshape incentives within democratic systems:
- Demographic change and large-scale migration
- Globalization and perceived loss of sovereignty
- Digital media platforms optimized for speed, outrage, and visibility
- Electoral systems that reward polarization and negative mobilization
These conditions do not mechanically produce authoritarianism. However, they lower the cost of defection from cooperative democratic norms and increase the returns on conflictual strategies.
Attributes of the community
The IAD framework insists on the role of shared norms and identities. Across Western democracies, several shifts are visible:
- Growing identity-based polarization (national vs. cosmopolitan)
- Status anxiety among historically dominant groups
- Declining trust in elites, experts, and institutions
- Moralization of political disagreement
What Eatwell and Goodwin describe as “national populism” is not marginal extremism, but a reconfiguration of political participation around identity defense rather than collective problem-solving.
Rules-in-use
Perhaps the most underestimated dimension is the evolution of formal and informal rules:
- Freedom of expression norms without corresponding accountability mechanisms
- Weak regulation of digital platforms
- Electoral rules vulnerable to minority capture
- Erosion of informal norms (truthfulness, institutional loyalty, restraint)
As Madeleine Albright warned, authoritarianism rarely breaks the rules outright. It exploits them, hollowing out their purpose while maintaining legal form.
3. The central action arena: the democratic public sphere
Within the IAD framework, outcomes emerge from interactions inside action arenas. The central arena here is the democratic public sphere, where narratives, identities, and institutional authority are contested.
Key actors
- Political entrepreneurs (populist and mainstream)
- Media platforms and journalists
- Fragmented citizen publics
- Courts, electoral commissions, legislatures
Positions and incentives
- Visibility and attention are rewarded more than accuracy
- Mobilization is more effective than persuasion
- Identity affirmation outperforms policy coherence
- Institutional referees operate under delegitimization pressure
This configuration strongly favors actors willing to defect from cooperative norms.
4. Patterns of interaction: how takeovers happen
Media dynamics
Digital platforms reward outrage, irony, and emotional intensity. As Elle Reeve and Maria Ressa document, radicalization is often incremental, community-driven, and algorithmically reinforced. Disinformation becomes not a side-effect, but a strategic tool.
Liberal democracies are failing to manage identity, information, and institutional trust in an era of rapid change — and the right has learned to exploit this faster than liberalism has learned to respond.
From an IAD perspective, the monitoring and sanctioning mechanisms of the informational commons collapse, making truth a costly strategy.
Identity dynamics
Political interaction shifts from negotiation to boundary enforcement. Demographic change and cultural anxiety are framed as existential threats. Eric Kaufmann’s work shows how the refusal to acknowledge majority identity concerns paradoxically intensifies backlash.
In IAD terms, cooperation becomes irrational when actors believe that recognition itself is a zero-sum resource.
Institutional dynamics
Institutions designed to arbitrate conflict are gradually transformed into instruments of dominance:
- Selective enforcement of rules
- Politicization of courts and oversight bodies
- Delegitimation of elections and the press
Authoritarian capture thus appears not as rupture, but as institutional repurposing.
5. Outcomes: a degraded equilibrium
The system stabilizes around a new, inferior equilibrium:
- Persistent polarization
- Declining accountability
- Reduced reversibility of political outcomes
- High costs of trust reconstruction
According to Ostrom’s criteria, this equilibrium scores poorly on efficiency, equity, adaptability, and sustainability. Yet it can persist for long periods, precisely because defection becomes the dominant strategy.
6. Diagnostic conclusion
From an IAD perspective, the rise of the right is not primarily an ideological victory. It is the result of institutional design failures under conditions of identity stress and media acceleration.
Identity provides motivation
Media provides coordination
Institutions fail to impose credible constraints
The contemporary right-wing surge succeeds where liberal democracy fragments: it aligns identity, media, and institutional strategy into a single feedback system, while its opponents treat each domain in isolation.
When democratic commons are poorly governed, rational actors exploit them.
7. Implications
This analysis suggests that responses focused solely on:
- fact-checking,
- moral denunciation,
- or electoral mobilization,
are insufficient. Effective resistance requires institutional redesign, capable of governing identity conflict and information flows as shared resources rather than moral absolutes.
Final synthesis
The right-wing rise is best understood not as a deviation from democracy, but as a consequence of democracies that no longer know how to govern themselves.
Authoritarian politics emerges when democratic institutions fail to govern identity conflict and information flows as shared resources, allowing rational actors to defect from cooperation and capture the system.
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