RevDem Podcast · Review of Democracy

End of Year Podcast Part II- – Looking Ahead to 2026

·47 min·3 clips

AI is being embedded in welfare delivery, policing surveillance, content moderation, and political communication in India.

This is a patient, interview-led conversation. Adrian Matus and Anuba Anushri open by moving from the year's stock taking to a sharper question about what should worry them in 2026, and they frame the discussion around underestimated risks, emerging democratic fault lines, and the questions shaping their intellectual agendas. Adrian starts with artificial intelligence, pointing to the way AI has moved from a future concern into an immediate political fact. He treats the subject less as a novelty than as something already shaping public debate. From there, the discussion turns to the relationship between wealth and democracy. Money is described as a force that decides who can run, which issues get seen, and how institutions can be captured or hollowed out from within. The conversation also stresses that economic power rarely works only through formal campaign finance. Patronage, corruption framed as development, and the privatization of public goods all widen the gap between democratic appearance and democratic substance. Another worry is the cost of resisting these trends. When disinformation and other sophisticated technologies are deployed by powerful groups, even detecting and countering them can require more capital than many publics have available. The lens then widens to Asia and to the global south. There, rising inequality, precarious work, and concentrated wealth make democratic participation more expensive and more uneven than it looks on paper. Elections may remain competitive, but the field of competition is already tilted before a vote is cast. That tilt shows up in media influence, cash-based politics, and forms of vote buying that substitute money for substance. The hosts also connect these pressures to protest movements that have surfaced in recent years as responses to inequality. Those movements suggest that public frustration is not abstract, even when institutions continue to perform stability. Education enters as another important terrain, alongside AI, because both bring challenges as well as opportunities for democracy depending on how they are adopted. The episode keeps returning to a central warning: democratic erosion often happens beneath the appearance of normal governance. Rather than drama or polemic, the conversation offers a careful, serious look at how institutions fail, adapt, or hold. It closes as a useful guide for listeners who want a measured view of where democracy may be strained in the year ahead.

As heard by us

A dense but steady guide to the democratic pressures shaping 2026.

The conversation treats democracy as a system under pressure in 2026, with AI, money, inequality, and the privatization of public goods all part of the same picture.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a serious forecast for democracy in 2026.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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