Signs that democracy is under siege seem to be everywhere. Start with populists and far-right politicians. From the Philippines to Brazil, from Italy to the UK, they are clearly on the rise, when not already in power. Leading the populist surge, President Trump has given up the role of torchbearer of democratic values the United States had assumed since WWII. His country’s political institutions appear to have become dysfunctional, eroded by a dangerous cocktail of patronage politics and ideological polarisation. On the other side of the Atlantic, in Hungary and Poland, two countries that are part of the European Union, populist governments harass political opponents while seeking to restrict press freedom and judicial independence. Then are the unpredictable forces that social media and the free – and less free – internet have unleashed. For good, but also for bad, online forums have displaced more traditional sources of news and political information. Not only established figures of intellectual authority, such as academics and experts, but the very concept of truth – truth as correspondence to facts – believed to lie at the heart of democratic deliberation ever since the invention of democratic rule in ancient Athens are under attack. At the same time, authoritarian regimes – chief among them China and Russia – are seeking to fill the void left by divided and inward-looking democracies. Supporting dictators and strongmen from Central Asia to Venezuela, they are happy, at least in the case of Russia, to cheer on and even subsidize far-right parties.
To be sure, in a non-deterministic world, very few things in the long run are absolutely certain and it is possible to concoct a plausible argument that rejects Cassandras’ stories about the imminent demise of democracy as unwarranted. After all, close to two-thirds of the world’s population live in a democracy and, at least by some accounts, more countries are governed democratically now than at any point in human history. Moreover, rather than as a sign of weakness, the populist wave may be interpreted as a manifestation of the strength of democratic institutions. The ballot box does not only allow voters to try new ideas but also to learn and to correct their mistakes when these ideas fail. Nor are populist movements necessarily bad for democracy. As political scientist Philippe Schmitter once argued, one virtue of populism is to give a voice to the “losers” – whether from globalisation, technological progress or social change – who cannot find a place within established partisan structures. Ultimately, as voters learn who is an effective decision maker and who is not, the ideas that cannot pass the test of reality will be winnowed out in the following electoral cycle and democratic institutions will emerge intact, if not stronger.
This scenario sounds reassuring and is sufficiently credible to give supporters of democracy hope. Yet I want to invite all constitutional scholars and supporters of democracy to conduct a pre-mortem analysis. A pre-mortem is a managerial strategy devised to reduce the optimism bias of project managers. In a pre-mortem exercise the project team imagines that the project has failed and then works backwards to establish the most likely reasons of its failure. I suggest the same should be done for democracy. In the case of democracy, even a small measure of optimism bias could have disastrous consequences if it makes us more complacent than we ought to be. Democrats must imagine the death of their own project better to understand the dangers that may threaten its existence. Democracy may reveal itself as more fragile and, therefore, as in greater of support and protection than we had assumed. No less important, the exercise may focus minds and point out what the priorities should be for those who wish to save democracy from its enemies. It may also lead constitutional scholars to reassess the parameters and prevailing assumptions of their discipline.
A pre-mortem is a managerial strategy devised to reduce the optimism bias of project managers. In a pre-mortem exercise the project team imagines that the project has failed and then works backwards to establish the most likely reasons of its failure.
Democracy as a project has several components. Some, such as a directly elected head of state or a written bill of rights, are optional. But others, such as free and fair elections, a free press and an independent judiciary, are mandatory. Where these components are absent there is simply no democracy. Now imagine that, thirty years from now, democracy thus defined has disappeared from the surface of the earth. What would have been the most likely cause? Such backward causal questions are, no doubt, challenging. To make the problem more tracatable, it is possible to distinguish exogenous and endogenous factors of democratic mortality. Exogenous causes would be events external to the democratic regimes, like global warming or a military invasion by a non-democratic state. Endogenous factors, by contrast, are events internal to the democratic regime such as coups or revolutions. If we first attend to possible exogenous causes, many can be readily ruled out. Military invasions are unlikely to be the cause of mass democratic extinction. Democratic countries are still among the world’s dominant military powers and, while the global balance of powers may change with the rise of China, it won’t be enough to make democracies vulnerable to military attacks. Other external events like global warming or mass migrations from poor, undemocratic countries to richer, democratic ones would more serious candidate causes. However, even if such events can be connected to democratic mortality, it will be via some endogenous, internal dynamics. So, ultimately, an examination of the causes of democratic death should point to self-destruction as the most likely mechanism.
Ultimately, an examination of the causes of democratic death should point to self-destruction as the most likely mechanism.
What would cause the self-destruction of the democratic project? Democracy is not a logistically unfeasible project. We have seen it at work for more almost two centuries (at least if we equate the beginning of democracy with the introduction of universal male suffrage). Logistically feasible projects, though, often fail because the project lacks commitment or incentives to support it. Who is the team in charge of the democratic project? The most straightforward answer is the middle class. While India may be an exception, democracy seems to require a middle class sufficiently numerous to spurn more elitist forms of government but yet sufficiently well-off to have some interest in preserving democratic rule.
That a supporting middle class constitutes a precondition for democratic government is an old argument. Economic prosperity does not always lead to democratization (look at China). But economic hardship makes middle class voters less committed to the status quo. For that reason, when the middle class suffers, so too does democracy. Hyperinflation is often said to have precipitated the fall of the Weimar Republic. And it is no mystery that the current populist wave came on the heels of the financial crisis— in the West, the most severe economic recession since the 1930s. Yet behavioural psychology suggests that it is both deeper and more complex than surface familiarity suggests. What drives middle class support for the democratic project is the belief that regime change would make middle class people less well off. However, whether change is experienced as a gain or as a loss depends on what is taken to be the reference point. As long as the reference point is what mum and dad earned and middle class incomes keep going up, democracy faces little threat. Where difficulties arise is when the economy stalls or growth becomes less widely shared. Yet this would pose less of a danger for democratic institutions if humans were not loss averse. Humans respond more strongly to losses than to gains. So it takes three percentage points of economic growth to offset the effect a one percent recession on self-reported well-being. This asymmetry makes democracy vulnerable because economic booms raise the reference point. As a result, any contraction can be experienced as an intense loss. Research further shows that losses make us more willing to take risks as we seek to recoup them. This behavioural tendency can be observed in the casino as well as in the stock market. But we have good reasons to think it is also at work in elections. The financial crisis has made middle class voters more open to risky options. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Jair Bolsonaro and their ilk are in that sense the electoral equivalent of a lottery ticket – that is, a low probability of a very large reward.
Humans respond more strongly to losses than to gains.
For multiple reasons, which surely include exhaustible natural resources, we cannot reasonably envision continuous, infinite economic growth. Moreover, demographic pressures mean more people potentially have a claim over our scarce resources – world population reached three billion in 1960 but our planet is now home to 7.7 billion humans. Add to this all the challenges arising from global warming, automation and, especially in Western democracies, aging and you get a full set of potential shocks to middle class well-being. Two or three of these shocks could be enough to kill democracy if they lead middle class voters to embrace autocrats and demagogues who promise easy solutions to these vast problems.
The extinction scenarios that I’ve just pointed to imply that defending democracy could turn out to be a formidable task. Also, the most effective strategy to defend democratic rule may not be the one that scholars have often advanced in the last sixty years, when politics (at least, the domestic sort) was predictable and reassuringly boring. Courts and constitutional charters, in particular, may not represent the reliable institutional safeguards that some had hoped for. The recent Supreme Court rulings on gerrymandering illustrates why, in a deeply polarized society, we should not expect courts to protect the rules of the democratic game. Just as other actors and institutions, courts and judges can be part and even contribute to polarization. Judge Learned Hand was wise when he said that liberty “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
Judge Learned Hand was wise when he said that liberty “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it; no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”
In the arc of human history, democracy is, so far, just a 150 years blip. What is more, large swathes of the world (first and foremost China) have never experienced free and fair elections. This is a world with enough large rocks to sink the democratic ship for centuries if not millenia. To decode and speak to the hearts of the men and women who will decide the future of their preferred form of governments, this pre-mortem suggests that democrats and constitutionalists have their work cut out.