Last week, in Democracy Diary 2024.2, I discussed the Crazy Eight - symptoms of dysfunction in the U.S. that keep me up at night - including authoritarian drift, election risks and antimajoritarian institutions. You might be wondering whether there is any evidence, rooted in data, that democracy is really in peril. If so, this post is for you.
It’s an election year and all (ok, many) eyes are on the economy. Will there be a recession? S&P Global Ratings U.S. chief economist Satyam Panday quoted in the Wall Street Journal on Friday noted that while the risk of inflation is lower than it was last year, it remains “elevated”. “Conflicts in the Middle East and a potential resurgence in inflation that would threaten the Federal Reserve’s expected monetary easing” are key risk factors.1
With apologies for the bait and switch, what if I told you that my biggest concern is not an economic recession but a democracy recession?2 What the heck is that and how would you even measure it?
It turns out there are several well-respected measures of democracy. V-Dem3, Freedom House4, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)5 all regularly publish democracy indices.
Spoiler alert: the news is not good. Two major concerns emerge from these reports:
The first is that worldwide, democracy is in…well, recession. EIU’s most recent report was headlined “Democracy in the Doldrums”. V-Dem, in its 2023 report found “global levels of democracy sliding back and advances made over the past 35 years diminishing.”6 And Freedom House’s 2023 report states plainly that “global freedom declined for the 17th consecutive year.” This should worry us all in a year when “a record-breaking 40-plus countries, representing more than 40% of the world’s population and an outsized chunk of global GDP, are due to hold national elections.”7
The second disturbing trend is the erosion of U.S. democracy relative to the rest of the world. Freedom House now scores the U.S. as only “partly free”, ranking behind Latvia, Greece, Argentina and Mongolia. V-Dem rates us as one of only 11 countries in their top 90 that have undergone “significant autocratization” in the last 10 years. EIU’s latest index shows the U.S. sinking 4 spots in 2022 to 30th out of 167, below Greece, Estonia and Israel and just above Slovenia and Botswana. Over the last 16 years, EIU has downgraded the U.S. from a full to flawed democracy and the chart below shows our decline vs. peers.
Economist Intelligence Unit 2022 Democracy Index Scores
The stakes couldn’t be higher. A Politico piece a few weeks ago titled Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy, summarizes conversations with foreign diplomats: “America’s poisonous politics” they say, “are hurting its security, its economy, its friends and its standing as a pillar of democracy and global stability.” As the U.S. goes, so goes both world stability and democracy and ambassadors quoted in the article were “worried because America’s state of being affects their countries, too.”
There are also reference points internationally that once democracy erodes, it is very hard to restore. The voters of Poland clawed their democracy back at the polls in 2023 after the eight-year rule of the authoritarian-leaning Law and Justice party, a very hopeful sign. But there is still work ahead. “Entrenched state capture within key institutions such as Poland’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Tribunal, coupled with an egregiously slanted media landscape, presents a formidable challenge for the opposition as it transitions to governing.”8 It’s an uphill battle and the attempt to restore abortion rights in the country is a test case for the challenges facing pro-democracy forces.9
But it CAN be done. “Since 2000, nine countries have transitioned back to democracy after an authoritarian spell.” In the U.S. many experts and leaders are working on reversing our democratic deterioration. We’ve done it before. After the corruption and political violence of the Gilded Age, “many Americans with different interests brought about social and political reforms that revitalized the social contract and enabled the so-called American Century of the 1900s. Unfinished work from that set of democratic changes led to the Civil Rights Movement.”
In the next few posts, I’ll highlight some organizations I admire that are focused on renewing democracy, and opportunities for action that any of us can take to contribute to the effort.
What impact will the economy have on the 2024 election? I’ll tackle that in an upcoming blog post. In the meantime, here is a roundup of other sources showing a range of perspectives on whether the country is headed for a recession:
CNBC | 12.26.2023 | The U.S. avoided a recession in 2023. What’s the outlook for 2024? Here’s what experts are predicting
Yahoo Finance | 12.27.2023 | Recession will hit the US in 2024 – so get ready for massive interest-rate cuts, UBS says
Reuters | 1.25.2024 | US economy brushes aside recession fear mongering with strong Q4 performance
Credit to Stanford Professor Larry Diamond for coining and characterizing the term “democracy recession”. Larry is also a Leadership Now Project Academic Advisor (I am an Advisor to The Leadership Now Project).
“V-Dem characterizes electoral democracy as a political system in which political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed.” For more on how V-Dem assesses democratic health and what is included in its scoring - click here.
Freedom House assesses the real-world rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals by taking a deep dive into a range of 10 political rights indicators and 15 civil liberties indicators. More here.
EIU’s Democracy Index is based on 60 indicators across five categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. More here.
Additional sobering detail from the V-Dem report: “Most of the drastic changes have taken place within the last ten years…This year registers a new record of 42 autocratizing countries. This is up by nine from the 33 reported in last year’s Democracy Report that then set a historical record.”
The Guardian has a great piece on this from which this quote was taken: Democracy’s Super Bowl: 40 elections that will shape global politics in 2024 and Katie Harbath writes an excellent newsletter, Anchor Change on elections, democracy and technology
Center for American Progress | 11.14.2023 | Poland’s Democratic Resurgence: From Backsliding to Beacon
Washington Post | 1.27.2024 | Poland shows the difficulties of trying to reverse an abortion ban