Democracy was the most successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and what can be done to revive it?
THE protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine have many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention in Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to replace the kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych. But their fundamental demand is one that has motivated people over many decades to take a stand against corrupt, abusive and autocratic governments. They want a rules-based democracy.
It is easy to understand why. Democracies are on average richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures. That so many people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal.
Yet these days the exhilaration generated by events like those in Kiev is mixed with anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated itself in capital after capital. The people mass in the main square. Regime-sanctioned thugs try to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of popular intransigence and global news coverage. The world applauds the collapse of the regime and offers to help build a democracy. But turfing out an autocrat turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government. The new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds itself in a state at least as bad as it was before. This is what happened in much of the Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange revolution a decade ago. In 2004 Mr Yanukovych was ousted from office by vast street protests, only to be re-elected to the presidency (with the help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010, after the opposition politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as hopeless.
Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world.
In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain (1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000 Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the world total, as democracies.
Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. A report issued by America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments” with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at long last, democracy is triumphant.”
Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years later. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable democracy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard action against democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were only 11 democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”… MORE
Freedom score, by country
The return of history
Democracy’s ups and downs
The return of history
The democratic distemper
Video: Spotifying politics
Getting democracy right
Video: Democracy: A view from Cairo
Getting democracy right
The Economist Post-debate
About this debate
The coming year (2014) will be full of elections. The world’s most populous democracy, India, heads to the polls, and many other big emerging markets—including Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey—will elect presidents. Add to that mid-term elections in America, voting across all 28 countries of the EU for the European Parliament and many other polls, from Afghanistan to South Africa, and 2014 will see a great global exercise in democracy.
Yet many people fret that, despite all this voting, democracy is in poor shape. Turnout in elections in the rich world has been dropping since the 1970s, from more than 80% to less than 70% (in the case of European Parliament elections, turnout has fallen every time since voting began in 1979, to just 43% in 2009).
Voters in many countries are rejecting mainstream parties and turning to fringe groups. In America, politics too often look dysfunctional and gridlocked. Elsewhere, from Brazil to Thailand to Ukraine, people have taken to the streets in protest. Is all this evidence that representative democracy is failing to adjust to the age of the internet and social media? Or is democracy working more or less as it should, giving opportunities to citizens to express dissatisfaction with their leaders?
Background reading
Leaders: Revolting voters
Daily chart: The 2014 ballot boxes
Growth: Autocracy or democracy?
Prosperity and protest: Cry freedom
The Latinobarómetro poll: Listen to me
Latinobarómetro 2013: SlideShares
Databases – Latinobarómetro: Opinión Pública Latinoamericana
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