Satisfaction with Democracy has Been on the Decline

 By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal

Elections for national office this year have been, or will be, held in more than 60 countries, home to nearly half the people on earth. People around the world generally believe representative democracy is a good way to govern their countries. Yet in recent years, democracy has been facing increasing challenges.

A shrinking voter turnout globally and increasingly contested election results are posing a risk to the credibility of democracy, according to a report published by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) Sept. 17.

It has been measuring democratic performance in 158 countries since 1975 and revealed that 47 per cent of these nations witnessed a decline in crucial indicators over the past five years, making it the eighth consecutive year of global democratic decline.

Global voter turnout between 2008 and 2023 plunged by 10 percentage points, going from 65.2 per cent to 55.5. As well, between mid-2020 and mid-2024, one in five elections were legally challenged. In the United States, less than half of respondents called the 2020 presidential election “free and fair” and the country “remains deeply polarized,” the report said.

A Pew Research Centre survey published last June 18 also found that enthusiasm for democracy has slipped in many nations. Even in high-income democracies, dissatisfaction has been on the rise.

 Asked in 12 economically advanced democracies -- eight of them European, two in east Asia, plus Canada and the United States -- how satisfied they are with the state of their democracy, people in these nations have become more frustrated with their democracies since 2021. A median of 49 per cent across these 12 nations were satisfied with the way their democracy was working in 2021; today, just 36 per cent hold this view.

Satisfaction has not increased in any of the 12 countries surveyed, while in six --Canada, Germany, Greece, South Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States -- it has actually dropped by double digits.

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital, strong institutions, and shared stories. But all three have been weakened in the past decade.

Politicians seem to be going out of their way to alienate and infuriate voters, pursuing unpopular policies at the very same time as they demonise and clamp down on debate. The most frequently used counter populist frame is “conspiracy theory.” Today they attach the label to a wide range of issues, and they often frame their opponents as foreign, crazy, dangerous, and undemocratic.

Governments have been using so-called hate speech, fake news, and misinformation as justifications for censorship. What all censors have in common is their unshakable conviction that they “know the truth and must control the ideas or influences to which you may become exposed to protect you from falling into error (or sin),” writes civil rights lawyer Stephen Rohde in the June 14, 2022 Los Angeles Review of Books.

But it’s clear that voters are beginning to realise that all those calls to censor “hate” and “misinformation” are simply calls to censor them. It is increasingly common to see individual rights attacked as selfish and contrary to the “common good.” Western leaders extol democracy yet pay little homage to personal freedoms.

But it’s not just formal government that wields such power. As Tom Slater, editor of the British internet magazine Spiked, noted in 2022, “Big Tech censorship increasingly resembles state censorship by the backdoor, with the dirty work outsourced to the private sector. Capitalist power is being wielded against ordinary people, at the behest of the state.” Software engineers have become social engineers in our democracies.

“We are living through the capture of institution after institution by economic, political and cultural elites rich in either cultural capital or just plain capital, but rarely majority support,” according to British political theorist Alan Johnson in a 2023 article in Fathom. “They are arrogantly imposing their designs and preferences on the ‘deplorables’ and ‘bigots’ over whom they sometimes let it slip they think they rule.”

As a result, majorities feel shut-out and coerced by a global economy and by laws and treaties that seem to originate in far-away bodies and which they do not feel they can influence, and by the illiberal cancel culture imposed on them by (often tiny) activist minorities. Even in places where incumbent governments have retained power, they’ve done so with significantly less public support than before.

So does capitalism inherently undermine the agency of citizens in a democracy? In The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, published last year, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times in London, thinks that it does.

The tension arises because inherent to democracy are agency and equality before the law, whereas inherent to capitalism are hierarchy and difference. Yet democracy needs capitalism: only its dynamism, competition and creative destruction can produce a reasonable expectation of gradually rising living standards. In an interview, Wolf maintained that the market economy is failing. “It’s failing economically, and because it’s failing economically, it’s failing politically. This created a profound disillusionment with elites.”

Perhaps we should remember political theorist Michael Walzer’s admonition, in the 2020 book Justice is Steady Work, that “The final victory of liberal democracy isn’t anything like final; democracy still needs advocates and fighters.”