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Is Roe Vs Wade Just The Latest Blow To Democracy?

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The July 2022 issue of the respected Foreign Affairs journal contains an article that forecasts ‘America’s ‘Coming Age of Instability’ (by Steven Levitsky and Lucian Way). That the article posits America’s descent towards Hungarian/Russian style autocracy, something that would have been surprising ten years ago, but today is the norm, chillingly so. For example, in January 2022, the front cover of the Economist magazine that shows the Republican Party in the USA ‘walking away from democracy’

It is remarkable in the sense that journals like Foreign Affairs, and the broader foreign policy community in America have habitually encouraged the spread of democracy across the world and on occasion pronounced themselves worried about democracy in Europe.

More troubling for the rest of the world, that the lodestar of modern democracy is beset by institutional decay and the withering of its democracy is a grave concern. It is part of a broader pattern. Britain, in its own way, rightly admired as an exemplar of democracy and strong institutions, has a post Brexit government that is doing much to erode this reputation, such are the temptations of populism.

Hong Kong

An even more troubling, recent example is the de facto snuffing out of the free press and opposition in Hong Kong. It has been subsumed by China, with barely more than a squeak of protest from democratic countries.

With the world order setting off on a new chapter that is marked by dazzling technologies, financially healthy consumers, we remain in a democratic recession, to use the political scientist Larry Diamond’s term. Diamond has recently written in Foreign Affairs jornal that the world may face the prospect that American democracy would die out, leaving the international political economy directionless and shapeless. To that end, the politics of states like Georgia may be more meaningful than what happens in domestic politics across India.

Democratic Recession

Diamond’s thesis is backed up by the most recent Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index which shows democracy in poor health. Almost 70% of countries covered by the index recorded a decline in their overall democracy score and the broad index of democratic health is at its lowest since 2006. It is sobering that only 8% of the world’s population live in ‘full democracies’). Most of the leading democracies of the world are largely small advanced countries, which contributes to a sense of the vulnerability of democracy vis a vis larger countries,

Similarly, Freedom House shows that last year was the worst year since 2005 (when they began measuring the spread of democracy) for democracy in the sense that the number of countries whose democracy weakened versus those where it improved (-45) is the highest on record.

In general, the spread of democracy halted in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and then deteriorated from 2015 onwards. This is a key watershed. Under globalization the idea was that democracy would spread out from the democratic countries to the rest of the world, now, in a multipolar, contested world, democracy is simply one of a number of competing models or sets of values.

COVID and Democracy

One of the threads to have been made very clear by the Covid crisis is the importance of civic society, competent government and the way in which different political systems have dealt with the crisis in disparate ways. In this light, an excellent piece of research by Cambridge University’s Bennett Institute for the Future of Democracy caught my eye.

Their contribution has been to build a panel of data on citizen views of democracy (which they take to be the functioning of political systems) going back to 1973. To this end they have time series data that allow them to map satisfaction (or not) with democracy across countries.

In the context of a world turned upon its head, it is not a surprise that dissatisfaction with ‘democracy (political systems)’ is at an all time high (58%), with that dissatisfaction prominent in developed countries like the US and UK. The Cambridge figures confirm the view that we are in a global political recession.

Again, some developed countries – notably small advanced countries like Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland do not suffer from this and have near record levels of satisfaction with political systems – they however are the peak of the democratic pyramid here, accounting for only 2% of the world’s population.

Parts of Eastern Europe and Asia are also ‘happy’ with their political systems. In time it may be that political systems in larger countries need to devolve power – in France to its regions, in the UK through Scottish independence and perhaps even more to its regions.

There is a lot to dig into beyond these results – the apparent demise of democracy hand in hand with that of globalization, the growing perception that the Anglo-Saxon countries and their political economic model are failing (i.e. inequality), and the allure of less or un-democratic political systems that marry social control with economic growth, notably in China.

My own ‘view is that the end of globalization, the diminished credibility of some political systems, falling productivity, rising indebtedness and climate damage are closely linked causes and effects (they feed off each other) of the end of an era in world affairs. Righting them will require a hugely ambitious program of investment in human development. That is the challenge ahead.