Democracy and Globalization

Anger, Fear, and Hope

Josep M. Colomer, Ashley L. Beale

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367461928
• eBook ISBN: 9781000053630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Cultural Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As democracy is disrupted by globalization, the solution is to globalize democracy. This book explores the causes of the current crisis of democracy and advocates new ways for more representative, effective, and accountable governance in an interdependent world.

Part 1 analyzes the split of the middle class and the subsequent political polarization which underlies people's dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in developed countries. It also addresses the role of political emotions, including disappointments about unmet expectations, anger incited from opposition candidates, fear induced from government, and hope wrapping up new proposals for reform and change. In Part 2, the authors argue that a more effective governance would require reallocations of power at local, national, continental and global levels with innovative combinations of direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, international relations, political economy and democratic theory, as well as general readers interested in politics and current events.

PART I

The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Democracy is like a good marriage: Almost everybody says they would like to have it; some people get it, others do not; and many of those who get it, screw it up.

Indeed, all across the world, almost everybody says they are in favor of democracy. Most people in most countries so declare. Even authoritarian regimes render homage to democracy by adopting its name.

Yet some countries have it, others do not. The diffusion of democracy has stalled in about half the countries and for just over half the population of the world, and it has not made much progress since the beginning of the century.

And many existing democracies have screwed it up. In developed countries there is widespread mistrust in governments and dissatisfaction with the performance of actual democratic regimes.

The people’s mood in some democratic countries began to change after the end of the Cold War by the late twentieth century. In the previous period, the threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, an invasion by Soviet troops, or a domestic communist takeover had given Western democratic rulers wide latitude for decision-making, not only on foreign policy but also on closely related domestic policies. During most of the Cold War period, most people in the United States and Western Europe were fearful of foreign threats and sought or docilely accepted their government’s protection. As a result, many rulers were able to keep state secrets, their public policy performances were not seriously evaluated, the media allowed them discrete privacy, and they gained the reverence and even devotion of the ruled. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Western democratic rulers lost an alibi for the Soviet threat, nuclear war included, and citizens lost their fear.

With that gate open, the Great Recession initiated in 2008 generated expressions of frustration and anger regarding the lower performance of democratic governments. As a consequence, today’s political atmosphere in many democratic countries is the opposite to what it had been during the previous period: it is dominated by general mistrust in government, close scrutiny of corruption practices, leaks of confidential plans and messages, frequent scandals about the private business or sexual affairs of even minor politicians, and loud claims for more transparency and accountability. Angry protests, government defeats, “surging” new candidates and parties, and demagoguery proliferate. The spread of digital media and social networks has greatly exacerbated the chaotic uproar.

The most recent visible backlashes in well-established democratic regimes, which we will analyze in the following pages, include many government parties’ electoral overthrows, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, the startling referendum and further chaotic process for Brexit, and the bizarre election and tenure of US president Donald Trump. There is also the degeneration of former democratic or liberal regimes in less developed countries, including in Latin America, the drift towards authoritarianism of elected governments in countries such Russia, Thailand, and Turkey, and other downturns. People all over the world seem to embrace the principles of democracy as an ideal but in many places neglect its actual embodiment and disregard real democratic practices and rules. Compared with several decades ago, there is more democracy but less governance.

What can be termed the Great Disruption more heavily affects developed democratic regimes. In contrast, democracy is thriving, rather unexpectedly, in some poor countries of low wealth but notable political and economic performance, such as India and Indonesia. While democracy is in crisis in many developed countries, it flourishes in some underdeveloped ones.

Meanwhile, more dictatorships than might be expected persist. Some authoritarian rulers prove their resilience and gain people’s acquiescence, even support, thanks to their positive economic performance, as can be seem most prominently in China.

We thus observe, against a certain tradition in the social sciences, that high economic development does not guarantee high-quality democracy, that democracy can exist without much development, and that dictatorships can endure when they are accompanied by significant economic growth.

A government’s poor performance has enormous political consequences because people’s support for democracy and its institutions largely depends on its effectiveness in producing broadly distributed satisfactory results. A government’s performance and relative economic growth appear to count more than the absolute level of development in explaining the success, resilience, or crisis of different political regimes all across the world.

The loss of significant decision-making powers in national politics has the notorious side effect of banalizing political campaigns and giving politicians’ crude ambition greater visibility. Traditional government parties, unable to deliver as people have traditionally expected, are dejected and in decline. Outsider candidacies replace or hijack existing parties. As the regular work of most politicians does not require much in the way of professional or technical skills regarding public policies, they are recruited from among people with little experience of public affairs and lower qualifications and honesty. Most political action becomes agitation and propaganda. Multiparty cooperation vanishes, polarization increases, and institutional conflicts and constitutional crises proliferate.

This gigantic shift can explain many of the negative, angry, and hostile reactions of voters against incumbent rulers. People’s evaluation of the performance of governments is not determined by actual outcomes per se, but—as has been observed for other human activities by recent psychological studies—by how they relate to previous expectations. Economic recession is especially fatal for democracy in developed countries because it affects people accustomed to living with sustained growth and complacently expecting it to continue. Expectations are the mother of all frustrations.

By contrast, in underdeveloped countries where people have low expectations of government due to historical poverty and economic stagnation, unexpected international and technological changes are welcome and governments may appear successful. If this happens within a formal democratic structure, people can be very satisfied with the way democracy works.

1

It is not about development, but effectiveness

We are stalled. Democracy in the world during the first decades of the twenty-first century has failed to meet expectations of a continuous expansion of forms of government based on freedom, open elections, and the rule of law. The number and proportion of countries under colonial control or with dictatorial regimes steadily decreased over several decades following the Second World War. It was expected that the trend would continue. Instead, we see now that while many dictatorships create misery, others in countries with different levels of development—including, most conspicuously, China—seem to prosper.

At the same time, existing democracies in developed countries such as the United States and the countries of the European Union, which were supposed to be “consolidated,” have been suffering internal turmoil to the point where there are concerns about further deterioration or even survival. In contrast, democracies in some underdeveloped countries, such as India and Indonesia, are able to deliver good results to their citizens and increase their popular support.

Development does not guarantee democracy

The association between economic development and democracy is in question. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the postulate that only developed countries could have an effective democracy gained great influence, especially through the work of political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) and his many followers. At the time there were barely two dozen democracies in the world, almost all in rich, developed countries, while much of the rest of the world lived in poverty and under autocratic regimes or colonial domination. Using mostly British and the American references, Lipset identified “some requisites” for a democracy to exist and flourish: economic development and political legitimacy.

For certain interpreters the emphasis on the level of development implied that, in the long term, high economic development would bring about a general cultural and political modernization which would include the establishment and consolidation of democracy. This focus inspired policies for the promotion or support of democracy in different parts of the world by the United States and the European Union as well as the World Bank and other global institutions. At the same time, some dictators in relatively underdeveloped countries used the doctrine as an excuse to postpone the political opening of their regimes.

Recent experiences have shown the diminishing impact of economic development on democratic change. We have seen how economic prosperity can be compatible with dictatorships which, precisely thanks to that prosperity, can endure. Generally, dictatorships survive by using different forms of control and repression, but the delivery of positive outcomes also helps them. Authoritarian rulers can implement a trade-off: the deprivation of subjects’ liberties and participation in exchange for economic prosperity and other results.

The regime’s delivery of prosperity is related to political legitimacy, Lipset’s second “requisite.” Legitimacy is not just a moral belief or judgment about the right of rulers to rule; it tends to be based on their good performance. The efficacy of the regime is to solve collective problems and effectively implement appropriate policies, especially regarding the economy, that “can strengthen, reinforce, maintain, or weaken the belief in legitimacy,” as pointed out by political scientist Juan Linz (1978). In a further self-revision after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, when the number of democracies had multiplied, Lipset (1994) adopted the idea and stated: “What new democracies need, above all, to attain legitimacy is efficacy—particularly in the economic arena.”

However, it has turned out that a government’s good performance, especially regarding the economy, can legitimize any regime, not only a democracy but also authoritarian rule, especially in underdeveloped countries. After observing this, political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George Downs (2005) pointed to “an ominous and poorly appreciated fact: economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes.” Economic growth expands the resources at the disposal of dictatorial rulers and “over the short term, it also tends to increase citizens’ satisfaction with their government, making it less likely that they will support a change of regime.”

Economic growth may favor the existing regime, whatever it is. With economic growth, an existing authoritarian regime can evolve towards more liberal forms or be replaced with a democratic formula, as the traditional theory assumed. But if it proves sufficiently effective as it is, it can be increasingly legitimated and supported due to people’s appreciation of the performance by the rulers in charge.

The importance of government legitimacy sustained by efficacy in promoting economic growth can explain the political success of both democratic India and dictatorial China, as well as that of regimes in other underdeveloped countries whose economies have been growing at high rates for several decades. That is why large majorities of both Indian and Chinese citizens “trust [that] the government is doing what is right for their country.” Likewise, most rich democracies unable to provide high rates of economic growth during the recent Great Recession experience lower levels of trust by their citizens or are openly mistrusted, as shown by the worldwide Pew Center Survey summarized in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Economic performance and trust in government

Source: Adapted from Pew Research Center 2017 Global Attitudes Survey and data from the World Bank.

A key point is that with existing technology, and depending on the institutional setting, poor countries have more potential for economic growth than those that have already achieved high levels of wellbeing. Upward social change and improvement in the conditions of life may be more attainable by the destitute than by those who are already at the top. And, as was argued by Juan Linz (1988) and with relevance for mature democracies, the opposite result, ineffectiveness in delivering policy, “weakens the authority of the state and, as a result, weakens its legitimacy.”

Rich democracies are in trouble, poor democracies can thrive

In contrast to vulnerable dictatorships, most mature democracies under stress have proved to be resilient to crises and have survived as such. But many democratic regimes in rich countries have screwed it up. Largely due to certain consequences of technological change and globalization, the governments’ effectiveness in delivering appropriate policies and their efficacy in securing sustained economic growth have vastly deteriorated. We knew that economic recessions tend to erode and disgrace authoritarian regimes, but it had not been remarked that they could also corrode well-established democratic regimes. Low performance weakens the authorities’ legitimacy and the subsequent social support to the existing institutional and political arrangements, whatever they are.

At least since the Great Recession, the ultimate sources of the ineffectiveness of democratic governments may lie outside their reach because they may be international or triggered by unforeseeable and uncontrollable technological and economic transformations. Yet this has not deterred disappointed people from holding the democratic rulers responsible for bad results. Of course, protesting and blaming politicians in conditions of freedom is much less uncomfortable than rebelling against authoritarian rulers. Taking advantage of political and civil liberties, citizens of democratic countries disappointed with rulers’ performance have been replacing them in dramatic turnovers of existing political parties, party systems, coalition governments, traditional candidates, and incumbent presidents and prime ministers, as we will describe in more detail later.

Most people follow Winston Churchill’s suggestion and keep supporting democracy as the least bad of all regimes that have been tried or invented, as we said at the beginning. But the popular perception of bad governmental performance erodes support to existing institutions, governments, and parties. Most people like the idea and the principles of democracy—as they might like an ideal good marriage—but, to pursue our comparison further, they may not like the current partner or the existing institutional arrangement and screw things up. For the same reason that dictatorships fall when they do not deliver, existing democratic regimes in developed countries have been disrupted by lack of government effectiveness during the most recent period.

Democracy is not reserved for developed countries, it is not a luxury good only available to the rich. It can be established initially at any level of poverty and can exist without much economic development.

About half of the democratic regimes and much more than half of the world population living in a democracy are in relatively poor countries. More precisely, there are 93 countries with democracy in the world (according to Polity IV for 2018). About half of these democratic countries, 45, can be considered relatively poor while the other half, 48, are relatively rich, depending on whether they are above or below the world average person’s annual income (17,300 dollars per capita for all the world including both democratic and non-democratic countries, which is also about the level at which the line of poverty is usually drawn in the United States).

More specifically, about 4.1 billion people, or 55% of the world population, live in a democracy. Of these, 57% live in a poor country, according to that measure. Without counting XXL India, the percentage of the population living in a democracy in a relatively poor country is still as high as 37% of all people living in a democracy.

India is, of course, the most prominent case. Democracy was initially adopted after independence when the country was extremely poor, the economy was mostly agrarian, and most people were illiterate. At that time, almost everybody outside India predicted a prompt collapse of the experiment, and even now some traditional scholars are puzzled by the case and exclude it from their reviews because it does not fit the classical doctrine.

Yet, India is not an exception. The earliest modern democracies, such as Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, or the United States, had also enforced broad male suffrage for competitive elections in the nineteenth century when they were fairly poor, as poor as India was in the mid-twentieth century or as are now, at similar levels of per capita income (in purchasing power), dictatorial countries like, say, Azerbaijan or Egypt.

Democratization is thus not necessarily associated with high levels of economic development. The traditional theory of joint economic, cultural, and political modernization failed because it was based on a myopic observation of a small number of successful rich democracies during a short period. But the number of cases quadrupled in the following decades and involved many countries with much more disparate economic and cultural structures. Students of democracy in the 1960s did not even know what they did not know—they looked at the world like a photo when actually it was a long movie made up of action, drama, crime, horror, and some happy-ending heroic or even romantic comedy. When democracy began to spread across the world, some general propositions inferred from a few previous experiences did not hold.

Dictatorships fall at different levels of economic development. Their end is often accompanied by episodes of economic re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Introduction: The crisis and the future of democracy
• PART I: The Great Disruption: Anger and fear
• PART II: The global future: Hope
• Conclusion: Should we still call it “democracy”?
• Bibliography
• Index