Around the globe, power is concentrating in the hands of strongmen. In this episode of The Stakes, political scientist and Kettering Foundation Research Fellow Erica Frantz warns that this shift toward "personalist politics" is dangerously eroding both democracies and autocracies, replacing accountability with loyalty and collective decision-making with control. 

Frantz explains how today's strongmen—from Xi Jinping to Viktor Orbán to Donald Trump —surround themselves with loyalists, undermine checks and balances, and weaponize security services. The dangerous result: increasing corruption, repression, and economic instability.  

In the United States, she argues, democratic backsliding has accelerated unusually fast, with weakened institutions and a judiciary increasingly deferential to executive power. Yet history offers some hope. Frantz points to Poland, Brazil, and India, where organized opposition movements and unified electorates have slowed or reversed democratic decline.