Is Democracy in Decline?
An autocratic crossroads
In Portugal at twenty past midnight on the 24th of April, 1974, a popular marching song called Grandola, Vila Morena started playing on radio stations all across the country. The song was banned by the military junta that had controlled Portugal since the 1930s because of its communist overtones. Playing it on public radio was enough to get the broadcasters imprisoned or even killed.
What anyone listening would soon discover was that the song was actually a signal to the Portuguese military to march on Lisbon, and occupy the airport, Police stations, and town halls. This was a military coup with the aim of forcing Marcelo Caetano from power. Leading figures in the military had come to the conclusion after two decades of colonial war in Africa that the conflict was unwinnable, and that replacing the government was the only way they could extradite themselves from the continent.
Soon, citizens of Lisbon could look out their window and see armoured tanks rolling into the city centre. The soldiers, many of whom were communist sympathisers, quickly found themselves surrounded by crowds of demonstrators who praised their bravery, offered them food and decorated their guns with carnation flowers, earning the Carnation Revolution its name. Caetano fled to Brazil amid massive public demonstrations across the country for democratic reform that made it impossible for any serious communist government to take hold. Within the year, Portugal had a constitution and an elected parliament, all of which had come at the cost of no more than six civilian casualties.
A year later, Spainish dictator Francisco Franco was dead and Spanish citizens had filled the streets demanding similar reforms to end the military government and democratise the country. This was the beginning of a democratic wave that would snowball across the Catholic countries of the world, reaching Greece before making its way into Latin America and removing military regimes in Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. By the late 1980s, democratic transitions were occurring in countries as far away as Taiwan, Korea, and the Philippines. This is what Samuel Huntington called democracy’s ‘third wave’, after what he saw as an initial democratic wave in the 19th century, and a second wave of transitions after the Second World War.
To political observers in the early 70s, there were few reasons to be optimistic about the state of democracy. The whole of the 1960s had seen the number of authoritarian regimes in the world rise from 45 to 66 by the end of the decade. The number of democracies in the world had declined from 31 to 30 over the same period. This authoritarian wave of the mid-century is what led George Orwell to say on his death bed that 1984 was the direction the world was headed in at the present time. 1984 was only off by a few years, as it was 1976 that saw 82 autocratic governments in the world. This was more than in any point in history, encompassing almost half of the world’s population.
The End of Autocracy
So what changed?
How did the high point of totalitarianism eventually give way to a democratic spring that would carry on for the rest of the 21st Century and eventually dissolve the Soviet Union?
The answer lies in part in the breakdown of economic standards that had governed western countries since the end of World War II. Richard Nixon’s decision to ‘temporarily’ (47 years and counting) unpeg the US dollar from the value of gold meant that the rest of the world’s currencies could no longer rely on a constant exchange rate. Central banks then had far less control over global interest rates and borrowing restrictions on private banks were lifted. This was the economic liberalisation that economists like Milton Friedman had understood were vital to get the west out of permanent stagnation. While communist regimes were somewhat competent at achieving success in a mostly industrialised economy, they were utterly hopeless at managing the new decentralised economic systems that relied on corporate finance, interest rates, and a consumer culture that boomed during the 1980s.
This growth of living standards in the late 1970s and 80s was the key to the third wave. Oppressive regimes could see for themselves how much better off other countries were. One of Burma’s military generals is said to have broken down in tears after his visit to neighbouring Singapore and seeing for himself the chasm between the lifestyles of his country and theirs. Deng Xiaoping, the architect of China’s great revival, reached similar conclusions in 1978 when he met Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew who told him; “there was nothing that Singapore had done which China could not do, and do better”. The democratic spring of the 1970s was a dress rehearsal for the unprecedented number of transitions that occurred after the breakdown of the USSR, which saw the independence of 17 former communist countries and the defunding of dictators across the globe. The Communist Party of Vietnam followed its Chinese neighbour after discovering privatisation could increase farm productivity by almost threefold.
In total between 1975 and 1995, the number of democracies in the world moved from 35 to 65. With the exception of a few states in Central Asia, every former Soviet country enjoys a higher standard of living and a freer political system today than it did in 1990, including Russia. The upswing in the 1990s was the impetus for Francis Fukuyama’s seminal work The End of History and the Last Man. The original essay refers to Georg Hegel’s belief that Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory against Prussia represented the end of the historic struggle because the French system had achieved the perfect balance between liberty and equality. Fukuyama suggests that in a sense Hegel was right, he’d simply chosen the wrong side, as it was the British democratic model that would spread across western Europe after a series of revolutions in the 1840s and then go on to become the standard for the rest of the world by the end of the 20th Century.
As Fukuyama pointed out at the time, by the late 1990s, dictatorship had been thoroughly delegitimised. Almost every country that was not democratic had to at least pretend to aspire to democratic governance to have any influence. The third wave continued throughout the 2000s, peaking in 2004 with the highest number of democratic countries in world history reaching 88, representing 68% of the world’s population.
Illiberal Democracy
So what went wrong?
In some ways nothing. Even the most optimistic predictions of the 1990s didn’t imagine every African dictatorship turning in their AK47s for Coco-Cola and rainbow flags. Commentators worried about the stability of these new democracies from the outset, and it’s encouraging how resilient the transformations of the 1990s have been.
But what the third wave did in the 1990s was not just massively increase the number of liberal democracies in the world, but also increase the number of governments that were neither democratic nor authoritarian but occupied a kind of middle ground, operating nominally democratic countries that in reality had no functioning legal system and very few civil liberties. These hybrid regimes were given the name ‘illiberal democracies’ in 1997 by Fareed Zakaria, but to call them democracies at all is perhaps giving them too much credit.
What researchers Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have suggested is that the illusion of a democratic decline from the 2000s onwards is caused by a misdiagnosis of many countries that were never democratic to begin with. They argue that the 1990s should not be seen as a triumph for democracy, but rather as a crisis of authoritarianism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, many authoritarian regimes were forced to allow multi-party elections simply because they were too bankrupt to pay their own soldiers.
Governments in Cambodia, the Congo, Cameroon and Gabon held elections out of fear of their own survival, as dictators were unseated across the globe. Since then, many that survived the 1990s learned to manage electoral theatre and manipulate their medias just enough to survive. The demand for mineral resources and oil in the 2000s further strengthened many regimes and allowed them to entrench their positions.
Levitsky and Way show that by most measures, the world today is more democratic than it was in 2000, and significantly more than in the 1990s. The question then is why have democratic trends slowed down? Even with the overlapping methodologies, it’s possible to identify four main reasons why democracy is in a state of fluctuation:
1. Information Technology
In 1958, Aldous Huxley remarked that the reason the world was becoming less free was that the technological devices available to governments in underdeveloped countries meant that it was far easier for totalitarian systems to develop.
Similarly, today’s social media is actually helping many authoritarian regimes control their populations. Far from Mark Zuckerberg’s prediction that; ‘When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place’, actually the system doesn’t always end up in such a good place, especially in theocracies.
In Mexico and Russia, government-controlled social media posters are employed to endlessly post pro government content and help to steer conversations in the right direction. President Erdogan in Turkey managed to foil a coup attempt using face time, and in China a universal credit system denies public transport to millions of citizens based on their tracked behaviour.
Social media’s ability to organise mass demonstrations, has actually given authoritarian governments the excuse they needed to further crack down on civil liberties. In the Middle East, every Arab country today (excluding Tunisia) is less free than it was before the Arab spring, as the rulers of those countries learned how to effectively crack down on mass protests.
2. The Rise of China
Just as the Soviet Union exported its political and economic model of communism around the world, China today does the same with its form of state-directed capitalism. By some measures, China is already a larger economy than the United States, and despite its attempts to introduce a stable legal system, it has shown very little signs of democratic transition.
The average GDP per capita in China compared to democratic India is more than twice as high. The success of the country proves to the rest of the world that with the right balance of state direction and economic freedom, developing countries don’t need to adopt multi-party democracies to succeed. As China’s influence grows to encompass much of Africa and South Asia, its political structure will look more and more like an appealing alternative.
3. Western Retreat
A combination of failed states in the Middle East and the 2008 financial crisis have damaged the west’s ability to project its political system on to the rest of the world. Despite being able to take out any dictator with a Tomahawk missile, attempts to improve autocracies using military interventions have mostly been met with failure since the early 2000s, Mali being a notable exception.
One reason for this is that after 1989, eastern European countries transitioned to democracy after a controlling power structure was removed. It was then assumed that this same method could be applied to the rest of the world and that removing regimes would allow the public to rise up and implement democratic institutions. In reality, the power vacuum created the conditions for a descent into civil war.
4. The Deterioration of the Rule of Law
Measures of the efficiency of the rule of law show that many western countries have actually gotten worse at implementing their legal systems. One measure of democracy that has consistently declined is that of civil liberties in the world, especially in developed countries since the 2000s. Social media plays a role in this, but so has the increasing over-regulation of civil law, which has meant that businesses are under an increasing burden of compliance, that legal defence is expensive and time consuming, and that laws are enforced inconsistently. This has created a legal environment where governments can selectively punish citizens based on vaguely defined civil rights, and where legal reforms are less and less effective.
Autocratic Stalemate
The real story of democracy in the last 30 years may be that: the third wave of democratisation has been more resilient than many expected, that many movements towards democracy in the developing world were only superficial, and that countries don’t actually need to become democracies to be economically successful.
The supposed threat to democracy may not be that western societies are declining, but that many authoritarian governments have become more resilient. Those that survived the 1990s learned how to deal with media pressure and economic sanctions and now have less to fear from military intervention.
Despite the many challenges that democracy faces, they are not insurmountable, and the evidence shows that while certain areas of free political system are suffering, overall trends are in net stasis rather than in decline. Support for democracy in the world is stronger than ever, and despite the lack of progress in terms of corruption and law enforcement, most mass demonstrations today are protests in the developing world against corruption. It’s noteworthy that the current leaders of Nigeria, India, and China all stood on political platforms of rooting out corruption in their countries.
The literature on promoting the rule of law and reducing corruption in the world demonstrates that there are no easy solutions. Even so, there seem to be some effective means of combating corruption that organisations like the World Bank and Transparency International have identified. Including: Independence of the legislature, the executive body and the judicial system, transparency about budgets to stop financial fraud, rights to access information, and having a smaller civil service that gets paid more. Most attempts to improve the rule of law have been failures, but evidence from Hong Kong, Singapore, and Uruguay shows that it can be done.
The prospects for a fourth wave of democracy seem slim, but in most ways the current situation is far more hopeful than it was in the 1970s. The economic situation is not as dire as it was then. Neither is there a significant rise of authoritarian governments. Since the year 2000, autocratic transitions have occurred in Thailand, Turkey, Venezuela, Honduras, The Philippines, Mali, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. Whereas countries that have moved in the opposite direction since then include: Brazil, Croatia, Ghana, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Serbia. This is further evidence of the fluctuating balance of power, and a stalemate in the world that could bend towards either direction.
Autocratic regimes that lift their citizens out of poverty may however find that their citizens demand legal representation once they have achieved a certain level of income. In this sense, it is these governments, not free societies, that have a far less stable future. Whatever the odds are against democratic stability, from historic experience, it would be inadvisable to bet against it.