Year of the Ballot

Some of the countries holding elections this year aren’t democracies. Many others face serious threats to their democratic institutions, mainly from authoritarian populists invested in undermining the rule of law. The former U.S. president Donald Trump, for example, leads the incumbent Joe Biden in several recent polls—despite Trump’s attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 election and the 91 felony charges he’ll soon face in four court cases. So what do all these elections, and all the people voting in them, say about the state of democracy globally?

Steven Levitsky is a professor of government at Harvard University and the coauthor of the 2018 book How Democracies Die. To Levitsky, this year’s extraordinary numbers of voters and elections are less important than the fundamental reality that—despite all the focus on democratic breakdowns among activists, journalists, and even scholars—democracy worldwide remains surprisingly stable.

Populist authoritarians continue trying to undermine democratic institutions, but in recent decades, very few countries have turned from democracies into stable autocracies—even as events like the Great Recession or the Covid pandemic provoked voters’ anger at their governments. As Levitsky sees it, growing economic prosperity over generations has helped create democratic opposition movements and broad middle classes capable of resisting the ambitions of aspiring dictators.

Still, Levitsky says, the resilience of democracy in the United States, the world’s most powerful country and oldest continuous democracy, remains an uncertain question—less because Donald Trump might win November’s presidential election and more because the country is now caught in a cycle of crises it will struggle to emerge from.

That said, these numbers are ultimately good news. Elections in places like Russia and North Korea—autocracies that will completely control the results—of course don’t count. But it’s good news that there’ll be a record number of even minimally competitive elections. And it’s good news that more people than ever have even a partial opportunity to change their governments with their votes.

But to look at the health of democracy in the world, it’s important to compare it today to the time just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. That decade had, far and away, the most favorable international conditions for democracy in history.

The Soviet collapse left the liberal West—led by the United States and Europe—as the world’s dominant economic, military, and ideological model. And it remained that way until the Iraq War in 2003.

In those years, nearly all countries wanted to be on good terms with the West, and adopting multi-party elections was part of building or maintaining those good terms. These were the best possible international circumstances for democracy to spread.

But since the 1990s, those conditions have eroded. It was inevitable that Russia was going to reemerge as a powerful country. China has slowly and steadily grown into an important economic, diplomatic, and military power.

The West has meanwhile experienced a decline, and it’s scored a handful of own goals that have only accelerated that decline. Altogether, the U.S. and Europe haven’t had a great 20 years—whether from the rise of ethno-nationalist, even authoritarian, forces; the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009; the global migration crisis; or Covid, which has left electorates around the world very grumpy.

In other words, there are a lot of reasons why so many voters have become unhappier and more prone to vote for populists—and why so many democracies have become more volatile. The world is a much less favorable place for stable, liberal democracy now than it was in the 1990s.

And yet, given this much darker environment, democracy has done well globally. There are different ways we can measure the number of democratic countries, but the leading democracy indexes show only five or six fewer democracies today than there were 20 years ago. Which is a fairly modest decline. Given the stark difference between international conditions today and in the 1990s, it’s remarkable, really, that there are almost as many democracies now as back then.

“One reason behind the perception that democracy is in severe decline—and that authoritarianism is on the rise—is that the breakdown cases get a lot of attention. Every story on democracy mentions Hungary and Venezuela. All the cases of countries that have moved in a democratic direction over the last 15 or 20 years, though—they don’t get so much attention. Armenia, Malaysia, Nepal, the Gambia, and Honduras—these places have all become more democratic in recent years, but you don’t hear much about it.”

“In many cases, countries sliding away from democracy end up sliding back toward it within a decade. Bolivia, Ecuador, Honduras, Malawi, Peru, Sri Lanka, and Zambia are all democracies where autocratic governments came to power and fell in the past 15 years. Around the world, people are not only fed up with democratic governments—they’re fed up with all governments. They often vote out, or push out, unpopular autocrats, too. The net result is some democratic decline, yes, but it’s nowhere near what a lot of media reports have suggested. The decline of democracy has been greatly exaggerated.”

“I’m less pessimistic than a lot of people about the health of democracy globally. When you step back and look at the history of the world, up to the mid-1970s, there were only about 30 democratic countries. After the fall of communism, a wave of democratization brought that number up from 30 to almost 100. It’s true that in the past 25 years, the number of democracies globally has fallen—but it’s only fallen from the high 90s to the low 90s. That’s nothing like a return to the vastly undemocratic world that existed until fairly recently.”

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