Some Reasons Democracy Can Fail
And How to Think About Preserving It
The Freedom House research institute claims that the past fourteen years, 2005–2019, has been marked by a continuous democratic decline; that is, each year there were more countries falling to lower freedom scores than there were countries that improved. While democracies still make up a majority of the world’s nations, which wasn’t the case just a few decades ago, the consistency of this decline is worrying.
This essay will outline some theories of democratization as potential reasons for its decreasing success as well as examine case studies of particular countries to showcase the points of these theories. It will then conclude with a rationale for why this evidence is significant towards the study of democracy and comparative politics and how it can be used to prevent further reduction of freedoms throughout the world.
To explore the reasons for democratic decline, a standard must be set to judge democratic freedoms. Democracy simply means a system where the highest levels of government are voted on in periodic, competitive elections, in which most of the adult population is eligible; but just having free and fair elections alone isn’t enough to say a country is truly free, so to that qualification must be added liberalism, the protection of individual rights, and republicanism, a governmental system with indirect representation, accountability, separation of powers, and checks and balances.
This sort of free state tends to come from a social contract between the people and the government. In England, for example, in the year 1215, barons, wealthy landowners, negotiated with King John for increased personal freedoms and political power, in exchange they agreed not to revolt against the monarchy; the document they signed was called the Magna Carta and it was one of the first social contracts, while also being an example of a political theory of democratization called elite bargaining. Over the course of English history, there were a number of further conflicts between Parlement, a semi-republican section of the government started by the Magna Carta, and the crown, but eventually, Parlement made themselves more powerful than the monarchs and England continued on the path to full democratization.
Elite bargaining requires the most powerful members of a state to realize that democratization, or at least parts of it, is in their own interests and so they implement it in society; in the case of England, the barons would gain political rights and power and the king would get to keep his thone. However, the are many situations where elites don’t have an incentive to call for democracy and they might actually achieve their ends more easily without the messiness of getting their citizens involved in governing.
Nigeria is a good example of this problem; while it has had semi-legitimate elections since 1999, it has long been plagued by military rule dominating republican governance, and violence and corruption are in many ways the normal status of the country. Nigeria is rich in oil and makes billions of dollars a year exporting it around the world, and yet most Nigerians are extremely poor because this money goes into the pockets of the elites; this is why there is little incentive among elites to pursue a stronger democracy, they make more money and have more power without it.
More fundamental than this problem of distributing money though is where the money comes from in the first place. Oil doesn’t require much industrialization or modernization to acquire, thus a few people are able to do it relatively easily and keep all the profits. When the economy involves and requires a lot of people, it becomes much harder for elites to subdue them into passivity; they’ll start demanding a larger share of earnings, workers’ rights, and democratic reforms.
This situation is called the modernization theory of democratization, where industrialization creates more wealth for society, better education, and more reasons to work together, and then people start using this unity to demand that the increased goods the society is producing be distributed fairly, thus they adopt democratic principals. Britain, during the industrial revolution, went this route. Elites in Nigeria, on the other hand, don’t necessarily feel the need to industrialize their economy because of this specific resource endowment, oil, so there is little involvement of the people in the process of growing the economy which prevents them from justifying a push for a stronger democracy.
This example is one way in which many countries with low democratic freedom scores might continue to trend downward, simply because their current economic and political status makes it very difficult for those with power to see the advantages of democracy, and those without power to see the advantage of risking a fight for democracy.
The last theory of democratization stems from the second one and is called the neo-modernization theory. It states that a country needs to be wealthy to prevent falling back from democratization to authoritarianism, to consolidate its democratic institutions. An example of this case is the Weimar Republic in Germany after World War One. In order to appease the Allied victors of the war, Germany replaced its monarchical system of government with a democratic liberal republican system. There were many problems with the constitution the Germans created that contributed to the collapse of this system, but likely the most important factor in its downfall was actually the economic situation in Germany.
As the economy began regaining traction a few years after the War, with it came a strengthening of the Weimar Republic; the Nazi party only won 2% of the vote in the 1928 elections. However, with the Great Depression, Hitler and the Nazis won 18% of the vote just two years later in 1930, demonstrating the fragility of democracy when it isn’t supported by economics. When a country is getting poorer under a certain system the people are going to demand change, even if it means giving up democratic systems; although many people likely didn’t understand much of what the Nazi party would do once they took power.
Another problem of democratization that should be pointed out is related to neo-modernization theory, and is the fact that a state with a good economy will likely continue in its present status even if it is authoritarian and not democratic; such was the case with Mexico for roughly the period of 1920–2000. After the Mexican Revolution, the PRI party took over and held power for decades, partially because they were able to keep up a functioning and growing economy. The modernization theory could still be said to be true though because as Mexico industrialized the PRI adopted more free-market economic policies and eventually was forced to compete in real elections.
The take away from the examples of Mexico and Germany then is the reasons democratic freedoms are declining around the world could be due to poor economic conditions, leading to authoritarian governments promising to fix the problem, and/or authoritarian governments actually improving economic conditions so that there isn’t any popular movement for democracy.
As shown, economic conditions greatly influence the potential for democratic development; from elite bargaining, where monetary incentives can drive people in power towards or away from democracy, to the modernization theories, where an increase in economic output is said to predicate and consolidate democratization.
Economics must be looked to then to understand the decline in freedom throughout the world, and here is one possible explanation based on some current economic changes: some of the world’s largest economies, the US, the UK, and China to some extent, are becoming more protectionist, favoring self-sufficiency over free trade. A result of this could mean not only negative economic conditions for countries that rely on free trade, globalization, and international aid and investment but also a diminishing of the positive perception of democratic qualities throughout the world. Countries negatively influenced by these changes in the global order could either switch back to authoritarianism in protest or stay authoritarian without greater incentives to change.
Furthermore, the Coronavirus pandemic that has forced most countries into isolationist policies and even national lockdowns, greatly limiting economic production, will likely also contribute to this trend of de-democratization for the same reasons. Hungary, most notably, has already fallen back into authoritarianism from democracy, although they didn’t adhere to liberalism that much in the first place.
Recognizing these problems and how they will create further limits on freedom around the world is important to be able to counteract the unfavorable consequences. Knowing how easy it is for democracy to fail is important to properly protect what freedoms millions of people throughout human history have fought for. All the evidence from history is pointing out that, despite there being a lot of incentives for the countries of the world to fall apart and focus more on themselves, a global effort to promote prosperity for everyone will ensure everyone is better protected from the evils of authoritarianism.
Bibliography:
- O’Neil, Patrick H., et al. Cases In Comparative Politics. 6th ed., W W Norton, 2018.
- Repucci, Sarah. A Leaderless Struggle for Democracy. 2020, freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2020/leaderless-struggle-democracy.
