Future of Democracies Far From Assured
WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.
His research suggests otherwise: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of decline.
Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard University, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, gathered and analyzed data on the strength of liberal democracies and are to publish their conclusion in the January issue of The Journal of Democracy. Right now, Mr. Mounk said, “the warning signs are flashing red.”
Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.
For decades, global events seemed to support that idea. Data from Freedom House, a watchdog organization, shows that the number of countries classified as “free” rose steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. But since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year.
Mr. Mounk and Mr. Foa developed a three-factor formula to detect that a democracy is ill before it develops full-blown symptoms.
The first factor was public support: How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic? The second was public openness to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule. And the third factor was whether “antisystem parties and movements” were gaining support.
If support for democracy was falling while the other two measures were rising, the researchers marked that country “deconsolidating,” the political equivalent of a low-grade fever that arrives the day before the flu.
Venezuela, for instance, enjoyed the highest possible scores on Freedom House’s measures of political rights and democracy in the 1980s. But during that apparent period of stability, Venezuela already scored as deconsolidating on the MounkFoa test.
In 1992, a faction of the Venezue- lan military loyal to Hugo Chávez attempted a coup against the democratically elected government. Mr. Chávez was elected president in 1998 on a wave of populist support, and he immediately passed a new constitution that consolidated his power. His government cracked down on dissent, imprisoned political opponents and shredded the country’s economy with a series of economic overhauls.
According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.
Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.
Support for autocratic alterna-
Warning signs with parallels in Venezuela.
tives is rising, too. The researchers found that the share of Americans who say that army rule would be a “good” or “very good” thing had risen to 1 in 6 in 2014, compared with 1 in 16 in 1995. In a previously published paper, the researchers calculated that 43 percent of older Americans believed it was illegitimate for the military to take over if the government were incompetent or failing to do its job, but only 19 percent of millennials agreed. The same divide showed up in Europe, where 53 percent of older people thought a military takeover would be illegitimate, while only 36 percent of millennials agreed.
Of course, this is just one paper and although the researchers found a relationship between deconsolidation and democratic instability, that is not the same thing as proving the root causes of either factor.
“That’s only one measure,” Mr. Mounk acknowledged. “But,” he added after a pause, “it should have us worried.”