Voter turnout and protest activity are rising across Western democracies even as membership in political parties, unions, and civil society groups keeps falling, a paradox the political scientist Anton Jager calls "hyperpolitics." In an FP Live interview with Foreign Policy editor in chief Ravi Agrawal, Jager, whose new book Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization Without Political Consequences has become a favorite among Europe's political and intellectual elites, defined the term as "re-politicization without re-institutionalization": more people voting, protesting, and even turning to political violence, without a matching rise in the kind of durable organizations that used to translate that energy into policy change.
Jager was careful to say the trend isn't simply a symptom of democratic crisis. He pointed to Germany, where turnout in the upcoming Saxony election has roughly doubled since 2006, from 44 percent to more than 80 percent. "That is not a crisis of democracy," he said, arguing the real puzzle is why so much of today's political energy fails to reshape actual policy or the underlying balance of power, pointing to the United States, where a long-standing polling majority for public healthcare has never translated into legislation. He cited Black Lives Matter's 2020 protests, in which roughly one in ten American adults may have taken part, France's leaderless "yellow vest" movement, and the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, organized largely through WhatsApp groups and a presidential Twitter feed, as "chemically pure" examples: intense, numerically massive mobilizations that dispersed without leaving lasting institutions behind.
Asked whether the right has gotten more out of hyperpolitics than the left, Jager said yes, and offered two explanations: the right has easier access to private funding for mobilization, and the left is typically pushing against more deeply entrenched power relations, harder to dislodge than the targets the right pursues. He pointed to Greece's Syriza, which won on an anti-austerity platform in 2015, held and won a referendum rejecting continued austerity, and then had to implement austerity anyway under pressure from European authorities, as an example of how steep that climb can be.
Jager acknowledged his book focuses on the West largely out of caution about generalizing, and argued India and China are exceptions that prove his rule rather than counterexamples: the BJP, closely tied to the RSS, functions as a genuine 20th-century-style mass party with deep institutional roots, while the Chinese Communist Party reinvented itself as a cross-class mass organization after COVID-19, binding China's business elite closely to the party itself, structures neither country's Western hyperpolitical movements have managed to build.
On what comes next, Jager declined to predict an end date for the trend, calling the structural drivers "deep-seated" and unlikely to fade soon, but pointed to competing attempts at reinstitutionalizing political energy on both sides, from the Democratic Socialists of America on the left to the more organized second Trump administration, built around vehicles like the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 and an empowered ICE, on the right, as evidence that some political actors are already trying to convert hyperpolitics into lasting power.