Historical Border Instability and Democratic Backlash

In this episode of the History-Politics Podcast, host David Myers speaks with UCLA political scientist Luwei Ying about her research linking historical border instability to the contemporary rise of populist politics. Drawing on her work as a Luskin Center for History and Policy grantee and the report she co-authored with David B. Carter and Sadaf Vafa, Luwei explains that regions which experienced repeated shifts in sovereignty, such as areas between France and Germany or territories historically contested in Eastern Europe, often developed weaker state institutions and lower levels of public trust. By combining historical border data stretching back to the thirteenth century with modern electoral patterns, the research finds that communities with long histories of unstable authority are more likely to exhibit skepticism toward government and support populist movements.

The conversation emphasizes that border instability does not directly produce a particular ideology, such as fascism or populism, but instead fosters long-term receptivity to anti-establishment politics. According to Luwei, globalization, immigration, and economic shocks may act as contemporary triggers, yet their effects vary depending on the historical institutional foundations of a region. Where governance has historically been fragile, such pressures are more likely to intensify distrust in political elites. 

Read the full report here: Historical Border Insecurity and the Rise of Populism

Luwei Ying is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in political science at Washington University in St. Louis in 2022. Ying studies international relations, examining how militant organizations propagate ideologies to mobilize, recruit, and exercise control over individual members and how these ideological strategies fit into the groups’ broader military agendas. She received the 2022 Peace Science Society Walter Isard Award for the best dissertation in Peace Science. Her work has been awarded the Best Paper in International Relations Award, the Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the 2019 MPSA Conference, and the Best Poster Award at the PolMeth XXXVII Summer Meeting. Her published work has appeared in American Political Science Review, Political Analysis and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.

Transcript

Narrator 0:10

Welcome to The History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work, from U CLA's Luskin Center for History and Policy. We study change in order to make change, linking knowledge of the past to the quest for a better future. Every other week we examine the most pressing issues of the day through a historical lens, helping us understand what happened then and what that means for us now.

David Myers 0:38

Hello, I'm David Myers, and welcome to the History-Politics Podcast: Putting the Past to Work. I'm delighted to host for today's episode Luwei Ying, assistant professor of political science at UCLA. Luwei was the co-author, along with David Carter and Sadaf Vafa, of a paper, Historical Border Instability and the Rise of Populism, that was supported by a Luskin Center grant. The resurgence of populism as a powerful force on today's political landscape, from South Asia to Europe to the United States, has attracted the attention of many scholars and observers. What explains its allure in so many different contemporary settings? Luwei Ying and her colleagues have focused on one interesting and intuitive factor to help explain its rise: border instability. Our conversation examines this finding in all of its historical depth, as well as a series of policy recommendations that the research team has proposed, including strengthening governance at the local level and fortifying history education. Welcome to Putting the Past to Work, Luwei.

Luwei Ying 1:55

Thank you for having me.

David Myers 1:57

It's great to have you. So can you tell us how you came to this topic, which was the subject of your report, Historical Border Instability and the Rise of Populism? What was the problem you saw that you thought needed more research?

Luwei Ying 2:12

Sure. We are political scientists who study international politics and institutions. And in that world, borders are arguably the most important institution there is. They define which government has authority, who counts as a citizen, and how sit uh how states build power over territory. So at the beginning, we were simply fascinated by borders themselves, how they change, when they move, and how those changes shape the process of state building historically. Initially, I thought the story might end there. I assume we were studying something that belonged mostly to the past, how states consolidated authorities centuries ago and how borders disrupted or supported that process. I felt like a classic historical project. However, as we dug deeper into the data and began connecting these historical patterns to contemporary outcomes, we started to see something much, much bigger. These old episodes of border instabilities weren't just nasty historical facts. They were actually showing up in today's politics. When we map regions that experienced repeated border changes and compared them to modern voting patterns and attitudes, we literally saw these historical disruptions helping explain where people are more skeptical of government, where trust is weaker, where populist movements tend to resonate more strongly.

David Myers 3:49

Okay, so we're gonna get we're gonna get to that correlation to the present, but I want to just go back to one of your opening definitional uh statements about borders being a unit of measurement uh of great interest to political scientists, because I who am not a political scientist would say, well, probably states would be the basic unit of measurement uh or the site of greatest interest for political scientists. Um why not states? Or are borders sort of the necessary precondition for state-based sovereignty? Well, why borders per se?

Luwei Ying 4:22

Yeah, so that's literally two sides of the same core. How do we define a state? Well, you have to define the borders, right? So when I say borders, I broadly mean territory, I broadly mean the states. And that's why I emphasized the important role of borders in stability.

David Myers 4:42

Right. So what actual border disputes first caught your attention? Or I mean, were you drawn to the abstract principle of border instability, or were there actual historical cases that really captured your attention? I mean, you asked me about, if you were to ask me about um border instability, I would think of France and Germany over the course of the 19th and 20th century. I would think of uh uh uh of other sites in uh in East Central Europe. Was there a specific case or series of cases that drew your attention to this? What was it actually that really got you onto border instability?

Luwei Ying 5:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So uh a few places really jump out, and we we often learn from the cases first and then try to see the patterns. So you've already mentioned some very interesting ones, like the Northeastern France and Alsace. These are very classic examples. Um, this is a region that has been pulled back and forth between uh French and German rule over centuries. So uh when we see sovereignty changes like that, it's uh not just symbolic, it affects who runs the course, what language officials use, or whose laws apply, and uh how it feels like to live in a place like that. There are, of course, other examples. Uh again, I would say Poland, that's a very prominent one. If you think about uh the the uh history where half of the nation, half of the communities were uh suddenly found themselves under a different states almost overnight. Uh well, people lived through that repeated cycle of new rulers, new rules, and new systems. There are tons of examples like that. Uh and I do have to say that this paper mostly draws evidence from Europe, mainly because Europe gives us unusually fine-greened historical and electoral data that allows us to do this kind of quantitative analysis, but I very much see the underlying logic as well more uh as more universal. So the story is not Europe is special, uh, it's whatever borders have shifted repeatedly and state authority has been unstable. So uh we can find communities with uh long-term skepticism about uh government effectiveness around the world, and uh we are particularly likely to find communities like that when we see that communities experienced border changes historically around the world.

David Myers 7:27

So, where if you were to continue this study, where would you like to go next?

Luwei Ying 7:32

Oh, good question. So uh I can think about many regions. Uh one, I guess one example would be South Asia, after the partition of India and Pakistan in uh I guess 1947, uh the border didn't just move. Millions of people were uprooted, uh, communities were divided, and entire regions had to rebuild political authority and the new states that left long-standing legacies of displacement, mistrust, and even governance, and of course, research opportunities for us.

David Myers 8:10

And then I would by similar logic, would um would Israel-Palestine qualify, another instance of partition? Does that satisfy some of the criteria that were of interest to you?

Luwei Ying 8:21

Yes, absolutely. I was actually just about to talk about the Middle East. That's a very prominent example as well. And actually, not only Israel-Palestine, like uh in the Middle East generally, we see a lot of borders being drawn and redrawn during the colonial and post-imperial periods. And that has a lot of legacies long after the border shifts.

David Myers 8:47

So I want to talk about that, uh, imperial legacies, uh, because one of the uh effects of the dismantling of world empires um in the midst of and uh in the immediate aftermath of the First World War was the creation of successor states that um really created not just new borders but new national identities for millions and millions of people. And it uh inspires one to engage in that act of sentimental nostalgia for the the the grand old era of of empires. Um so I'm wondering if your model of border instability really um explores cases that emerge out of the First World War or extends into um uh the great age of global empires, of Australia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, uh, the Ottoman Empire. How does that border instability look like in the Great Age of Empire?

Luwei Ying 9:43

Yeah, so uh first of all, the World War I is definitely one of the most dramatic moments because borders changed fast and the stakes are huge. So you're absolutely right to highlight that milestone. But our argument is a little more stubborn than World War I caused this whole thing. What we're saying is the long-run accumulation matters. Some places have been on the frontier of shifting authority for centuries, long before say uh 1918. And that long experience shapes how local state building unfolds over time. And what's really striking in our research is just how far back this pattern goes. Our historical border data reaches all the way to around 1200, and we still see these effects arguing forward all the way into the present. That means the timeline isn't just the world wars, it stretches across major turning points in European political history. That includes, for example, the Treaty of Westfalia in uh 1648, uh when modern states' borders and sovereignty really began to harden, or the French Revolution in 1789, which transformed ideas about citizenship and the states. We usually think about these moments as reset points. But we see regions that had long histories, uh, histories of border changes continued to carry those legacies of disrupted governance through these milestones.

David Myers 11:22

So, do you think, just to go back to the aftermath of the First World War, um I very much appreciate that long during perspective, but just trying to think of some of the correlations that you're trying to draw out as you did in the study, do you think that we can explain border instability as a chief driver of uh those ideological aberrations or perhaps um uh not so uh aberrant phenomena that emerged in the 1920s, like fascism and Nazism? Um, your report studies the correlation between border instability and populism as it manifests itself today. But I'm wondering about these other cases of extreme uh ideologies, um uh ideological movements.

Luwei Ying 12:04

Well, that's such a great question, because that question gets at the what kind of politics border instability might generate. Right. I would put it this way: border instability is not a fascism machine, it's more like a long-run factory for anti-establishment receptivity, a tendency to believe that mainstream elites and institutions don't deliver. What that receptivity attaches to depends on the era and what options exist. In the interwar period, in some contexts, that could contribute to openness to authoritarian movements. Well, in post-1945 Europe, where elections are the primary arena, this often shows up as higher support for populist parties, which campaign on the slogans like the system is rigged, the elites filled, we'll fix it. So I would say border instability is a deeper condition. Populism or authoritarianism is one possible expression, depending on the political manual available to that country at that point.

David Myers 13:16

Right. So the correlation, therefore, is between border instability and resentment toward elites. Um, and part of that, as you say in the report, is because of the inability of governing regimes to uh engage in any kind of long-term investment or infrastructural building that would provide a sense of stability. Is that is that uh the argument?

Luwei Ying 13:44

Yes, yes. I would call it the key mechanism.

David Myers 13:49

So you can't have stable governmental functions when you have border instability.

Luwei Ying 13:57

Well, I wouldn't say that um it's it's not it's not like black and white. So if you have unstable borders historically, you are having a much more uh harder you you you will have a harder time in building these uh state institutions. If you had that in history, you would have to put in more efforts.

David Myers 14:25

Okay, so I want to just um put forward a kind of countervailing proposition uh that arose while reading your report, um, which would suggest that border permeability, which I kind of am equating with border instability, so therein lies um the first flaw in my uh logic, but border permeability, um open borders, um can allow for uh a degree of cultural integration or exposure to different kinds of um uh groups of people in ways that may um increase levels of tolerance, um you know, based on sort of the old principles of contact theory, whereby exposure to the other is a conditioning agent uh that mitigates um xenophobia and hate uh and uh other forms of discrimination. Um the countervailing view uh is that um that border instability induces a kind of anxiety um and resentment uh towards elites and a sense of uh of longing for greater stability. So I wonder how you assess these two ways of understanding um border instability. And in the first instance, I should just clarify again that I mean border permeability that allows for the passage of people back and forth whereby they have the opportunity to encounter people whom they otherwise would not.

Luwei Ying 16:00

Yeah, uh I I think the key is to separate two different things that may sound, may sound similar. The first is border permeability. Uh, can people cross-treat interact? And the second is border instability. Does sovereignty keep switching? New rulers, new institutions, new laws? So I think what you said about contact theory is mostly about permeability and interaction. Well, our paper is about instability of authority, and those can move in opposite directions. We can think about uh Europe. So today, EU has a very stable border, but it is very permeable, meaning that you can easily drive across borders and contact and cooperate. But when borders change, what gets disrupted, disrupted is the slow work of governance, bureaucracies, legal predictability, long-term investment, uh, accountability change. It's hard to invest in public goods if you don't know who will be in charge in uh 10 or 20 years, or if the incentives are to extract quickly before authority shifts again. So I would say um the big picture is not stable bottle good, open border bad. It's stable authority helps build institutions. Openness can be great when institutions are stable enough to manage it.

David Myers 17:31

Oh, that's a very helpful distinction. Um, so uh what what the paper does is basically make the claim that there is a correlation between border instability and populism. And we've talked a little bit about um how border instability might or might not be a driver of other forms of uh extreme uh ideological movements. Um, but I have to say, when I think of uh populism um in its current incarnation, I often think of uh it as, especially in its ethnocentric variant, as a reaction to globalization and the kind of broad-sweeping claims of globalization and for that matter the economic effects thereof. Um so you're not making a totalizing argument for this is the only way to understand populism, but I wonder how globalization figures into your thinking, if at all.

Luwei Ying 18:24

Yeah, I would say globalization is clearly a major trigger in the modern populist wave. Trade shocks, migration, culture change. What we are seeing here is that globalization doesn't hit a blank slate. It hits places with histories. Our evidence suggests that economic variables like GDP and employment don't fully explain the relationship. We still see an effect of historical border instability after accounting for all these variables. So here's an intuitive way to put it: globalization is the storm. Historical border instability is whether your house was built with solid foundations. So two towns can face the same storm, but if one has a long legacy of weak governance, roles, services, local administrative capacities, trust, people there are more likely to say, oh, of course the government messed this up again. Uh and that's exactly the emotional fuse populists use.

David Myers 19:27

Right. So when I think of the classic uh site of your thesis, um where you have border instability historically and um very um unmistakable forms of populism, I think of Hungary under Viktor Orban. Um I think of um sort of the populist politics, which um he has called illiberal democracy, um, and I think of the long history of border instability, um, certainly in the wake of the First World War, the Treaty of Trianon in 1940, 1944, but even before then. Um I'm wondering if you were drawn to Hungary as well, or if I'm sort of understanding the variables in play uh as you had intended them.

Luwei Ying 20:11

Yeah, for sure. Hungary is a very intuitive case to talk through. What our framework suggests is not Hungary become populist because of this one treaty. It's that in places where a longer history of disrupted state building, people can develop a durable skepticism toward the establishment, toward whether liberal institutions actually deliver. And leaders like Orban are very skilled at converting that kind of skepticism into a political story, the people versus corrupt elites, plus um often a narrative about external interference, Brussels, migrants, global capital. So, yes, Hungary is a case where the historical foundation's story line up perfectly um with our story. Uh, and it becomes a case very easy to see the relationship of the two variables we are we are studying here.

David Myers 21:12

So let's move to another case um where we see skepticism toward elites, indeed, uh that has boiled over into a quite hardcore resentment that has led to very significant uh forms of um populist politics, um, and that is the United States. How are we to understand Trumpian-style populism? We have one of the variables, but perhaps not the other. I'm just sort of curious whether you think your study sheds any light on the case of the United States in the 21st century.

Luwei Ying 21:44

Yeah, United States. Uh I would say broadly uh the theory applies here as well, but with a very important a very important twist. In Europe, we're measuring centers of border changes in a dense historical. Historical map of shifting sovereignty. Well, in the United States, we didn't see it. Borders have been more stable in the modern area. But the United States absolutely has frontier histories contested in cooperation and internal governance legacies that can create similar dynamics of uh the state didn't build effectively here, or the state wasn't legitimate here. So I would frame it like this: the mechanism travels, even if the historical source looks a little bit different. The mechanism here is uh long-run experiences that teach communities that government is ineffective or unresponsive. That leads to a result, which is anti-establishment politics becomes more appealing.

David Myers 22:52

So, where in your model is um a factor that seems so prominent in present-day populism, uh, which is population movement and particularly uh the movement of immigrants. Um, there's so much anti-immigrant rhetoric that seems to be a driver of uh a populist politics. Um, but that factor is um is not present or at least explicitly mentioned in your report. So I'm just wondering where you think that fits into the model.

Luwei Ying 23:22

If at all. I'm really glad you mentioned anti-immigration uh sentiment because it it literally connects the metaphorical border and literal border here. Uh anti-immigration uh anti-immigrant politics often treats the border as a symbol of control. So if you can't control the border, you can't control anything. That's their logic. So when people already believe institutions are ineffective, immigration can become the most visible proof that elites have lost control. In our language, immigration can be a contemporary trigger, but it resonates more when the baseline belief is the state doesn't deliver. That's why border rhetoric is so powerful. It's about competence and sovereignty, not only culture.

David Myers 24:15

Okay, so um you've described very compellingly the correlation between border instability and populism. The question that remains for us to answer is what to do about it. Um you offer a series of recommendations in the report, and I wonder if you could share some of them with our listeners.

Luwei Ying 24:35

Yeah, uh I would say the good news is the policy takeaway is surprisingly hopeful. So in in our paper, we have uh we have presented some survey evidence, and they suggest people in historically unstable area areas are not necessarily rejecting democracy as an ideal. They're just saying democracy isn't working in practice. So that's great. The response shouldn't just be uh defend the democratic values in the abstract. It should be make government work better, where trust has been historically hardest to build.

David Myers 25:12

So that's there and just ask you, I want to return to recommendation, but do you think the same about the current democracy crisis in the United States? That the crisis is not necessarily one of a complete abandonment of faith, but a crisis about uh people's expectations about what can be delivered uh by and through democratic institutions.

Luwei Ying 25:35

Yes, yes, that's my belief, at least.

David Myers 25:38

So you're not an arch alarmist in that regard, as for example, I might be.

Luwei Ying 25:44

Well, I I'm a little bit more optimistic than you. I would say uh we are seeing a lot of evidence in the United States that people still believe democracy is great and they want to uh they want to hold on to the democratic ideal, but they differ in how to achieve that. They differ in approaches and they they have different opinions on what should be changed in their society.

David Myers 26:12

Okay, tell us about some of the other recommendations that emerge.

Luwei Ying 26:16

Yeah, sure. So I actually uh listed a bunch of them in the report, but I want to highlight four of them. Uh, one is strengthen local governance capacity. Uh basically, I mean invest in local public services and administrative capacity, especially in places where the state historically um underinvested. If the core complaint is you never showed up for us, the answer has to be show up reliably. The second is uh place-based economic integration, not just general growth policy, but targeted infrastructure and reskilling tied to real local industries. So communities feel plugged into the national economy, not left behind. The third would be community engagement and uh participatory governance, give people visible local channels to shape decisions, participating in budgeting, uh, advisory councils or uh accountability and show them that accountability is not a slogan, uh it's experienced. And finally, historical education and narrative repair. I know this sounds very soft, but it really, really matters. If distrust is inherited across generations, then helping communities understand their own history, why governance is fragmented, why identities are complicated, can reduce the temptation to accept simplistic, scope-kate stories.

David Myers 27:54

To read more about this uh very interesting subject and to get a deeper exposure to the recommendations offered, I encourage everybody to read this paper, Historical Border Instability and the Rise of Populism, which can be found on the website of the Luskin Center for History and Policy. Um and I'd like to thank uh one of its co-authors, Luwei Ying, uh, for a really fascinating conversation. It's been great to talk to you, Luwei

Luwei Ying 28:21

Thank you so much, David. Thank you for having me.

Narrator 28:32

Thank you for listening to Putting the Past to Work, the History Policy Podcast at UCLA from the Leskin Center for History and Policy. You can learn more about our work or share your thoughts with us at our website, LuskinCenter.history.ucla.edu. Our show is produced by David Myers and Roselyn Campbell with original music by Daniel Reichmann. Special thanks to the UCLA History Department for its support, and thanks to you for listening.