Elected Leaders Are Making the World Less Democratic

Lately, voters in established democracies seem eager to shake things up.

Brexit revealed underlying cracks in the European Union. An anti-immigration backlash led to a wave of right-wing populist victories in Europe. And U.S. voters elected President Donald Trump, who has lavished praise on several strongmen leaders. Last week, he sided with Russia President Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence community (he later said he misspoke—and then walked back his walk-back).

On the surface, these shifts in governments show precisely what a functioning democracy is capable of—voters dictate what they want at the ballot box.

But not all elections are equal. While voters in Hungary, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela went to the polls this year, their votes didn’t count for much. Incumbent leaders in those countries only consolidated power. More elected leaders are starting to take note, implementing their own sweeping changes to weaken checks on executive power.

Organizations that monitor the health of democracies are converging around a similar idea: On average, the world is becoming less democratic for the first time in several decades. The surprising twist is that it’s happening as more and more countries hold elections.

The extent of the recent decline in V-Dem’s scores is more striking when you consider that, in total, most of the world’s countries have at least slightly lower democracy scores than they did in 2012.

Would-be autocrats are taking note of the tools other leaders have implemented to tighten their grip on power. Emboldened leaders have contributed to the steep drop in democracy scores in many countries.

Just earlier this month, Poland’s governing Law and Justice party forced the retirement of a third of the country’s supreme court judges, including the top justice, in the party’s latest move to consolidate control.

Abolishing the institutions and norms of a thriving liberal democracy “took a little under a decade in Hungary, and Poland is now able to emulate a very similar course of action in the course of a year or two, because the government can basically just copy the playbook Viktor Orban and others have written for it,” said Yascha Mounk, a Harvard lecturer who has written extensively on the decline of democracy and populism’s rise.

In contrast to military coups or violent revolutions in the 20th century or the foreign invasions that toppled democracies ahead of World War II, most countries that are now experiencing a democratic decline have elected leaders. The integrity of those elections has been called into question at times, but citizens in many countries have gravitated toward these strongmen in the first place. And once elected, leaders keep up regular elections.

“What happened over time was that authoritarian regimes learned elections were actually a very useful tool to control their populations, to divide the opposition and to maintain power,” said Brian Klaas, fellow in global politics at the London School of Economics and author of books on democracy, authoritarianism and election-rigging. Klaas added that he found “authoritarian leaders who hold elections are more stable and more likely to stay in power than those who don’t.”

Polling suggests the election of more strongmen leaders around the world is more than just a fluke—people born in recent decades, particularly those in many established democracies, say they’re more open to strong leaders than people born in decades influenced by World War II or the Cold War.

“When you have gridlock in many countries, growing partisanship, a failure to deliver on the basic goods and services that citizens want, it’s not surprising that some citizens start to say perhaps this system isn’t delivering properly,” said Mounk.

After World War II, many democracies experienced a rapid improvement of living standards.

“If you wanted to have liberty, if you wanted to have collective self-rule, but also if you wanted to be affluent and powerful, it was pretty clear that you wanted to live in a democracy,” Mounk said, “because democracies were the most successful at creating a thriving middle class, the most successful at having military power in the world.”

But in the past several years, other states such as China and the United Arab Emirates have offered alternate models of prosperity and global power, while many established democratic nations have backed away from democracy-building in other countries and saw periods of economic stagnation.

The concept of autocratic regimes pretending to be democracies has also taken a toll on democracy’s brand around the world.

“You ask people, ‘Do you think you live in a democracy?’ and a lot of people in some very authoritarian states say yes, because they hold elections,” Klaas said. “Then you ask them, ‘Do you support democracy?’ and they say no. That’s not surprising, right? If you live in the Democratic Republic of Congo and you’re mired in extreme poverty and constant violence, and you think that’s what democracy is? You wouldn’t want it either.”

And while social media on one hand has facilitated pro-democracy protests, Mounk said, “it also allows people who have very hateful views, people who want to spread false information to bypass gatekeepers, especially at a moment when a lot of citizens are otherwise frustrated with the ability of their government to deliver for them. That becomes a very dangerous cocktail.”

Some leaders have built so much momentum from a confluence of these forces that they’ve been able to clear the term limits—a fundamental democratic tool to ensure frequent turnover in leadership—set in their countries’ laws. Often—as in the case of President Nguesso of the Republic of Congo or Rwandan President Kagame—they’re able to do so through popular referendum and claim to enact the peoples’ will while simultaneously making it more difficult for opposition voices to gain ground.

With the quality of many global democracies sinking, the question remains: Will leaders of more countries embrace brash authoritarian moves?

“We don’t know whether this is a long but mild recession that got worse before it finally started improving or whether we are on the cusp of something much more dangerous and long-lasting,” said Larry Diamond, co-founder of the Journal of Democracy. “I’m not good at the future, but I can tell you that if we don’t get very resolute and very smart about improving our own institutional defects in the United States and Europe, and defending democrats and democratic principles worldwide, I have little doubt that this will get worse.”