What’s gone wrong with
democracy
Democracy was the most
successful political idea of the 20th century. Why has it run into trouble, and
what can be done to revive it?
THE protesters who have overturned the politics of Ukraine
have many aspirations for their country. Their placards called for closer
relations with the European Union (EU), an end to Russian intervention in
Ukraine’s politics and the establishment of a clean government to replace the
kleptocracy of President Viktor Yanukovych. But their fundamental demand is one
that has motivated people over many decades to take a stand against corrupt,
abusive and autocratic governments. They want a rules-based democracy.
It is easy to understand why. Democracies are on average
richer than non-democracies, are less likely to go to war and have a better
record of fighting corruption. More fundamentally, democracy lets people speak
their minds and shape their own and their children’s futures. That so many
people in so many different parts of the world are prepared to risk so much for
this idea is testimony to its enduring appeal.
Yet these days the exhilaration generated by events like
those in Kiev is mixed with anxiety, for a troubling pattern has repeated
itself in capital after capital. The people mass in the main square.
Regime-sanctioned thugs try to fight back but lose their nerve in the face of
popular intransigence and global news coverage. The world applauds the collapse
of the regime and offers to help build a democracy. But turfing out an autocrat
turns out to be much easier than setting up a viable democratic government. The
new regime stumbles, the economy flounders and the country finds itself in a
state at least as bad as it was before. This is what happened in much of the
Arab spring, and also in Ukraine’s Orange revolution a decade ago. In 2004 Mr
Yanukovych was ousted from office by vast street protests, only to be re-elected
to the presidency (with the help of huge amounts of Russian money) in 2010,
after the opposition politicians who replaced him turned out to be just as
hopeless.
Democracy is going through a difficult time. Where autocrats
have been driven out of office, their opponents have mostly failed to create
viable democratic regimes. Even in established democracies, flaws in the system
have become worryingly visible and disillusion with politics is rife. Yet just
a few years ago democracy looked as though it would dominate the world.
In the second half of the 20th century, democracies had
taken root in the most difficult circumstances possible—in Germany, which had
been traumatised by Nazism, in India, which had the world’s largest population
of poor people, and, in the 1990s, in South Africa, which had been disfigured
by apartheid. Decolonialisation created a host of new democracies in Africa and
Asia, and autocratic regimes gave way to democracy in Greece (1974), Spain
(1975), Argentina (1983), Brazil (1985) and Chile (1989). The collapse of the
Soviet Union created many fledgling democracies in central Europe. By 2000
Freedom House, an American think-tank, classified 120 countries, or 63% of the
world total, as democracies.
Representatives of more than 100 countries gathered at the
World Forum on Democracy in Warsaw that year to proclaim that “the will of the
people” was “the basis of the authority of government”. A report issued by
America’s State Department declared that having seen off “failed experiments”
with authoritarian and totalitarian forms of government, “it seems that now, at
long last, democracy is triumphant.”
Such hubris was surely understandable after such a run of
successes. But stand farther back and the triumph of democracy looks rather
less inevitable. After the fall of Athens, where it was first developed, the
political model had lain dormant until the Enlightenment more than 2,000 years
later. In the 18th century only the American revolution produced a sustainable
democracy. During the 19th century monarchists fought a prolonged rearguard
action against democratic forces. In the first half of the 20th century nascent
democracies collapsed in Germany, Spain and Italy. By 1941 there were only 11
democracies left, and Franklin Roosevelt worried that it might not be possible
to shield “the great flame of democracy from the blackout of barbarism”.
The progress seen in the late 20th century has stalled in
the 21st. Even though around 40% of the world’s population, more people than
ever before, live in countries that will hold free and fair elections this
year, democracy’s global advance has come to a halt, and may even have gone
into reverse. Freedom House reckons that 2013 was the eighth consecutive year
in which global freedom declined, and that its forward march peaked around the
beginning of the century. Between 1980 and 2000 the cause of democracy
experienced only a few setbacks, but since 2000 there have been many. And democracy’s
problems run deeper than mere numbers suggest. Many nominal democracies have
slid towards autocracy, maintaining the outward appearance of democracy through
elections, but without the rights and institutions that are equally important
aspects of a functioning democratic system.
Faith in democracy flares up in moments of triumph, such as
the overthrow of unpopular regimes in Cairo or Kiev, only to sputter out once
again. Outside the West, democracy often advances only to collapse. And within
the West, democracy has too often become associated with debt and dysfunction
at home and overreach abroad. Democracy has always had its critics, but now old
doubts are being treated with renewed respect as the weaknesses of democracy in
its Western strongholds, and the fragility of its influence elsewhere, have
become increasingly apparent. Why has democracy lost its forward momentum?
The return of history
THE two main reasons are the financial crisis of 2007-08 and
the rise of China. The damage the crisis did was psychological as well as
financial. It revealed fundamental weaknesses in the West’s political systems,
undermining the self-confidence that had been one of their great assets.
Governments had steadily extended entitlements over decades, allowing dangerous
levels of debt to develop, and politicians came to believe that they had
abolished boom-bust cycles and tamed risk. Many people became disillusioned
with the workings of their political systems—particularly when governments
bailed out bankers with taxpayers’ money and then stood by impotently as financiers
continued to pay themselves huge bonuses. The crisis turned the Washington
consensus into a term of reproach across the emerging world.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has broken the
democratic world’s monopoly on economic progress. Larry Summers, of Harvard
University, observes that when America was growing fastest, it doubled living
standards roughly every 30 years. China has been doubling living standards
roughly every decade for the past 30 years. The Chinese elite argue that their
model—tight control by the Communist Party, coupled with a relentless effort to
recruit talented people into its upper ranks—is more efficient than democracy
and less susceptible to gridlock. The political leadership changes every decade
or so, and there is a constant supply of fresh talent as party cadres are
promoted based on their ability to hit targets.
China’s critics rightly condemn the government for
controlling public opinion in all sorts of ways, from imprisoning dissidents to
censoring internet discussions. Yet the regime’s obsession with control
paradoxically means it pays close attention to public opinion. At the same time
China’s leaders have been able to tackle some of the big problems of
state-building that can take decades to deal with in a democracy. In just two
years China has extended pension coverage to an extra 240m rural dwellers, for
example—far more than the total number of people covered by America’s
public-pension system.
Many Chinese are prepared to put up with their system if it
delivers growth. The 2013 Pew Survey of Global Attitudes showed that 85% of
Chinese were “very satisfied” with their country’s direction, compared with 31%
of Americans. Some Chinese intellectuals have become positively boastful. Zhang
Weiwei of Fudan University argues that democracy is destroying the West, and
particularly America, because it institutionalises gridlock, trivialises
decision-making and throws up second-rate presidents like George Bush junior.
Yu Keping of Beijing University argues that democracy makes simple things
“overly complicated and frivolous” and allows “certain sweet-talking
politicians to mislead the people”. Wang Jisi, also of Beijing University, has
observed that “many developing countries that have introduced Western values
and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos” and that China
offers an alternative model. Countries from Africa (Rwanda) to the Middle East
(Dubai) to South-East Asia (Vietnam) are taking this advice seriously.
China’s advance is all the more potent in the context of a
series of disappointments for democrats since 2000. The first great setback was
in Russia. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the democratisation of the
old Soviet Union seemed inevitable. In the 1990s Russia took a few drunken
steps in that direction under Boris Yeltsin. But at the end of 1999 he resigned
and handed power to Vladimir Putin, a former KGB operative who has since been
both prime minister and president twice. This postmodern tsar has destroyed the
substance of democracy in Russia, muzzling the press and imprisoning his
opponents, while preserving the show—everyone can vote, so long as Mr Putin
wins. Autocratic leaders in Venezuela, Ukraine, Argentina and elsewhere have
followed suit, perpetuating a perverted simulacrum of democracy rather than
doing away with it altogether, and thus discrediting it further.
The next big setback was the Iraq war. When Saddam Hussein’s
fabled weapons of mass destruction failed to materialise after the American-led
invasion of 2003, Mr Bush switched instead to justifying the war as a fight for
freedom and democracy. “The concerted effort of free nations to promote
democracy is a prelude to our enemies’ defeat,” he argued in his second
inaugural address. This was more than mere opportunism: Mr Bush sincerely
believed that the Middle East would remain a breeding ground for terrorism so
long as it was dominated by dictators. But it did the democratic cause great
harm. Left-wingers regarded it as proof that democracy was just a figleaf for
American imperialism. Foreign-policy realists took Iraq’s growing chaos as
proof that American-led promotion of democratisation was a recipe for
instability. And disillusioned neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama, an
American political scientist, saw it as proof that democracy cannot put down
roots in stony ground.
A third serious setback was Egypt. The collapse of Hosni
Mubarak’s regime in 2011, amid giant protests, raised hopes that democracy
would spread in the Middle East. But the euphoria soon turned to despair.
Egypt’s ensuing elections were won not by liberal activists (who were
hopelessly divided into a myriad of Pythonesque parties) but by Muhammad
Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Morsi treated democracy as a winner-takes-all
system, packing the state with Brothers, granting himself almost unlimited
powers and creating an upper house with a permanent Islamic majority. In July
2013 the army stepped in, arresting Egypt’s first democratically elected
president, imprisoning leading members of the Brotherhood and killing hundreds
of demonstrators. Along with war in Syria and anarchy in Libya, this has dashed
the hope that the Arab spring would lead to a flowering of democracy across the
Middle East.
Meanwhile some recent recruits to the democratic camp have
lost their lustre. Since the introduction of democracy in 1994 South Africa has
been ruled by the same party, the African National Congress, which has become
progressively more self-serving. Turkey, which once seemed to combine moderate
Islam with prosperity and democracy, is descending into corruption and
autocracy. In Bangladesh, Thailand and Cambodia, opposition parties have
boycotted recent elections or refused to accept their results.
All this has demonstrated that building the institutions
needed to sustain democracy is very slow work indeed, and has dispelled the
once-popular notion that democracy will blossom rapidly and spontaneously once
the seed is planted. Although democracy may be a “universal aspiration”, as Mr
Bush and Tony Blair insisted, it is a culturally rooted practice. Western
countries almost all extended the right to vote long after the establishment of
sophisticated political systems, with powerful civil services and entrenched
constitutional rights, in societies that cherished the notions of individual
rights and independent judiciaries.
Yet in recent years the very institutions that are meant to
provide models for new democracies have come to seem outdated and dysfunctional
in established ones. The United States has become a byword for gridlock, so
obsessed with partisan point-scoring that it has come to the verge of
defaulting on its debts twice in the past two years. Its democracy is also
corrupted by gerrymandering, the practice of drawing constituency boundaries to
entrench the power of incumbents. This encourages extremism, because
politicians have to appeal only to the party faithful, and in effect
disenfranchises large numbers of voters. And money talks louder than ever in
American politics. Thousands of lobbyists (more than 20 for every member of
Congress) add to the length and complexity of legislation, the better to
smuggle in special privileges. All this creates the impression that American
democracy is for sale and that the rich have more power than the poor, even as
lobbyists and donors insist that political expenditure is an exercise in free
speech. The result is that America’s image—and by extension that of democracy
itself—has taken a terrible battering.
Nor is the EU a paragon of democracy. The decision to
introduce the euro in 1999 was taken largely by technocrats; only two
countries, Denmark and Sweden, held referendums on the matter (both said no).
Efforts to win popular approval for the Lisbon Treaty, which consolidated power
in Brussels, were abandoned when people started voting the wrong way. During
the darkest days of the euro crisis the euro-elite forced Italy and Greece to
replace democratically elected leaders with technocrats. The European
Parliament, an unsuccessful attempt to fix Europe’s democratic deficit, is both
ignored and despised. The EU has become a breeding ground for populist parties,
such as Geert Wilders’s Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and Marine Le
Pen’s National Front in France, which claim to defend ordinary people against
an arrogant and incompetent elite. Greece’s Golden Dawn is testing how far
democracies can tolerate Nazi-style parties. A project designed to tame the beast
of European populism is instead poking it back into life.
The democratic distemper
EVEN in its heartland, democracy is clearly suffering from
serious structural problems, rather than a few isolated ailments. Since the
dawn of the modern democratic era in the late 19th century, democracy has
expressed itself through nation-states and national parliaments. People elect
representatives who pull the levers of national power for a fixed period. But
this arrangement is now under assault from both above and below.
From above, globalisation has changed national politics
profoundly. National politicians have surrendered ever more power, for example
over trade and financial flows, to global markets and supranational bodies, and
may thus find that they are unable to keep promises they have made to voters.
International organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World
Trade Organisation and the European Union have extended their influence. There
is a compelling logic to much of this: how can a single country deal with
problems like climate change or tax evasion? National politicians have also
responded to globalisation by limiting their discretion and handing power to
unelected technocrats in some areas. The number of countries with independent
central banks, for example, has increased from about 20 in 1980 to more than 160
today.
From below come equally powerful challenges: from would-be
breakaway nations, such as the Catalans and the Scots, from Indian states, from
American city mayors. All are trying to reclaim power from national
governments. There are also a host of what Moisés Naim, of the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace, calls “micro-powers”, such as NGOs and
lobbyists, which are disrupting traditional politics and making life harder for
democratic and autocratic leaders alike. The internet makes it easier to
organise and agitate; in a world where people can participate in reality-TV
votes every week, or support a petition with the click of a mouse, the
machinery and institutions of parliamentary democracy, where elections happen
only every few years, look increasingly anachronistic. Douglas Carswell, a
British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of
British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to
calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular
digital music-streaming service.
The biggest challenge to democracy, however, comes neither
from above nor below but from within—from the voters themselves. Plato’s great
worry about democracy, that citizens would “live from day to day, indulging the
pleasure of the moment”, has proved prescient. Democratic governments got into
the habit of running big structural deficits as a matter of course, borrowing
to give voters what they wanted in the short term, while neglecting long-term
investment. France and Italy have not balanced their budgets for more than 30
years. The financial crisis starkly exposed the unsustainability of such
debt-financed democracy.
With the post-crisis stimulus winding down, politicians must
now confront the difficult trade-offs they avoided during years of steady
growth and easy credit. But persuading voters to adapt to a new age of
austerity will not prove popular at the ballot box. Slow growth and tight
budgets will provoke conflict as interest groups compete for limited resources.
To make matters worse, this competition is taking place as Western populations
are ageing. Older people have always been better at getting their voices heard
than younger ones, voting in greater numbers and organising pressure groups
like America’s mighty AARP. They will increasingly have absolute numbers on
their side. Many democracies now face a fight between past and future, between
inherited entitlements and future investment.
Adjusting to hard times will be made even more difficult by
a growing cynicism towards politics. Party membership is declining across the
developed world: only 1% of Britons are now members of political parties
compared with 20% in 1950. Voter turnout is falling, too: a study of 49
democracies found that it had declined by 10 percentage points between 1980-84
and 2007-13. A
survey of seven European countries in 2012 found that more than half of voters
“had no trust in government” whatsoever. A YouGov opinion poll of British
voters in the same year found that 62% of those polled agreed that “politicians
tell lies all the time”.
Meanwhile the border between poking fun and launching
protest campaigns is fast eroding. In 2010 Iceland’s Best Party, promising to
be openly corrupt, won enough votes to co-run Reykjavik’s city council. And in 2013 a quarter of Italians
voted for a party founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian. All this popular
cynicism about politics might be healthy if people demanded little from their
governments, but they continue to want a great deal. The result can be a toxic
and unstable mixture: dependency on government on the one hand, and disdain for
it on the other. The dependency forces government to overexpand and overburden
itself, while the disdain robs it of its legitimacy. Democratic dysfunction
goes hand in hand with democratic distemper.
Democracy’s problems in its heartland help explain its
setbacks elsewhere. Democracy did well in the 20th century in part because of
American hegemony: other countries naturally wanted to emulate the world’s
leading power. But as China’s influence has grown, America and Europe have lost
their appeal as role models and their appetite for spreading democracy. The
Obama administration now seems paralysed by the fear that democracy will
produce rogue regimes or empower jihadists. And why should developing countries
regard democracy as the ideal form of government when the American government
cannot even pass a budget, let alone plan for the future? Why should autocrats
listen to lectures on democracy from Europe, when the euro-elite sacks elected
leaders who get in the way of fiscal orthodoxy?
At the same time, democracies in the emerging world have
encountered the same problems as those in the rich world. They too have
overindulged in short-term spending rather than long-term investment. Brazil
allows public-sector workers to retire at 53 but has done little to create a
modern airport system. India pays off vast numbers of client groups but invests
too little in infrastructure. Political systems have been captured by interest
groups and undermined by anti-democratic habits. Patrick French, a British
historian, notes that every member of India’s lower house under the age of 30
is a member of a political dynasty. Even within the capitalist elite, support
for democracy is fraying: Indian business moguls constantly complain that
India’s chaotic democracy produces rotten infrastructure while China’s
authoritarian system produces highways, gleaming airports and high-speed
trains.
Democracy has been on the back foot before. In the 1920s and
1930s communism and fascism looked like the coming things: when Spain
temporarily restored its parliamentary government in 1931, Benito Mussolini
likened it to returning to oil lamps in the age of electricity. In the
mid-1970s Willy Brandt, a former German chancellor, pronounced that “western
Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will
slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship”.
Things are not that bad these days, but China poses a far more credible threat
than communism ever did to the idea that democracy is inherently superior and
will eventually prevail.
Yet China’s stunning advances conceal deeper problems. The
elite is becoming a self-perpetuating and self-serving clique. The 50 richest
members of the China’s National People’s Congress are collectively worth $94.7
billion—60 times as much as the 50 richest members of America’s Congress.
China’s growth rate has slowed from 10% to below 8% and is expected to fall
further—an enormous challenge for a regime whose legitimacy depends on its
ability to deliver consistent growth.
At the same time, as Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in
the 19th century, democracies always look weaker than they really are: they are
all confusion on the surface but have lots of hidden strengths. Being able to
install alternative leaders offering alternative policies makes democracies
better than autocracies at finding creative solutions to problems and rising to
existential challenges, though they often take a while to zigzag to the right
policies. But to succeed, both fledgling and established democracies must
ensure they are built on firm foundations.
Getting democracy right
THE most striking thing about the founders of modern
democracy such as James Madison and John Stuart Mill is how hard-headed they
were. They regarded democracy as a powerful but imperfect mechanism: something
that needed to be designed carefully, in order to harness human creativity but
also to check human perversity, and then kept in good working order, constantly
oiled, adjusted and worked upon.
The need for hard-headedness is particularly pressing when
establishing a nascent democracy. One reason why so many democratic experiments
have failed recently is that they put too much emphasis on elections and too
little on the other essential features of democracy. The power of the state
needs to be checked, for instance, and individual rights such as freedom of
speech and freedom to organise must be guaranteed. The most successful new
democracies have all worked in large part because they avoided the temptation of
majoritarianism—the notion that winning an election entitles the majority to do
whatever it pleases. India has survived as a democracy since 1947 (apart from a
couple of years of emergency rule) and Brazil since the mid-1980s for much the
same reason: both put limits on the power of the government and provided
guarantees for individual rights.
Robust constitutions not only promote long-term stability,
reducing the likelihood that disgruntled minorities will take against the
regime. They also bolster the struggle against corruption, the bane of
developing countries. Conversely, the first sign that a fledgling democracy is
heading for the rocks often comes when elected rulers try to erode constraints
on their power—often in the name of majority rule. Mr Morsi tried to pack
Egypt’s upper house with supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr Yanukovych
reduced the power of Ukraine’s parliament. Mr Putin has ridden roughshod over
Russia’s independent institutions in the name of the people. Several African
leaders are engaging in crude majoritarianism—removing term limits on the
presidency or expanding penalties against homosexual behaviour, as Uganda’s
president Yoweri Museveni did on February 24th.
Foreign leaders should be more willing to speak out when
rulers engage in such illiberal behaviour, even if a majority supports it. But
the people who most need to learn this lesson are the architects of new
democracies: they must recognise that robust checks and balances are just as
vital to the establishment of a healthy democracy as the right to vote.
Paradoxically even potential dictators have a lot to learn from events in Egypt
and Ukraine: Mr Morsi would not be spending his life shuttling between prison
and a glass box in an Egyptian court, and Mr Yanukovych would not be fleeing
for his life, if they had not enraged their compatriots by accumulating so much
power.
Even those lucky enough to live in mature democracies need
to pay close attention to the architecture of their political systems. The
combination of globalisation and the digital revolution has made some of
democracy’s most cherished institutions look outdated. Established democracies
need to update their own political systems both to address the problems they
face at home, and to revitalise democracy’s image abroad. Some countries have
already embarked upon this process. America’s Senate has made it harder for
senators to filibuster appointments. A few states have introduced open
primaries and handed redistricting to independent boundary commissions. Other
obvious changes would improve matters. Reform of party financing, so that the
names of all donors are made public, might reduce the influence of special
interests. The European Parliament could require its MPs to present receipts
with their expenses. Italy’s parliament has far too many members who are paid
too much, and two equally powerful chambers, which makes it difficult to get
anything done.
But reformers need to be much more ambitious. The best way
to constrain the power of special interests is to limit the number of goodies
that the state can hand out. And the best way to address popular disillusion
towards politicians is to reduce the number of promises they can make. The key
to a healthier democracy, in short, is a narrower state—an idea that dates back
to the American revolution. “In framing a government which is to be
administered by men over men”, Madison argued, “the great difficulty lies in
this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the
next place oblige it to control itself.” The notion of limited government was
also integral to the relaunch of democracy after the second world war. The
United Nations Charter (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(1948) established rights and norms that countries could not breach, even if
majorities wanted to do so.
These checks and balances were motivated by fear of tyranny.
But today, particularly in the West, the big dangers to democracy are harder to
spot. One is the growing size of the state. The relentless expansion of
government is reducing liberty and handing ever more power to special
interests. The other comes from government’s habit of making promises that it
cannot fulfil, either by creating entitlements it cannot pay for or by waging
wars that it cannot win, such as that on drugs. Both voters and governments
must be persuaded of the merits of accepting restraints on the state’s natural
tendency to overreach. Giving control of monetary policy to independent central
banks tamed the rampant inflation of the 1980s, for example. It is time to
apply the same principle of limited government to a broader range of policies.
Mature democracies, just like nascent ones, require appropriate checks and
balances on the power of elected government.
Governments can exercise self-restraint in several different
ways. They can put on a golden straitjacket by adopting tight fiscal rules—as
the Swedes have done by pledging to balance their budget over the economic
cycle. They can introduce “sunset clauses” that force politicians to renew laws
every ten years, say. They can ask non-partisan commissions to propose
long-term reforms. The Swedes rescued their pension system from collapse when
an independent commission suggested pragmatic reforms including greater use of
private pensions, and linking the retirement age to life-expectancy. Chile has
been particularly successful at managing the combination of the volatility of
the copper market and populist pressure to spend the surplus in good times. It
has introduced strict rules to ensure that it runs a surplus over the economic
cycle, and appointed a commission of experts to determine how to cope with
economic volatility.
Isn’t this a recipe for weakening democracy by handing more
power to the great and the good? Not necessarily. Self-denying rules can
strengthen democracy by preventing people from voting for spending policies
that produce bankruptcy and social breakdown and by protecting minorities from
persecution. But technocracy can certainly be taken too far. Power must be
delegated sparingly, in a few big areas such as monetary policy and entitlement
reform, and the process must be open and transparent.
And delegation upwards towards grandees and technocrats must
be balanced by delegation downwards, handing some decisions to ordinary people.
The trick is to harness the twin forces of globalism and localism, rather than
trying to ignore or resist them. With the right balance of these two
approaches, the same forces that threaten established democracies from above,
through globalisation, and below, through the rise of micro-powers, can
reinforce rather than undermine democracy.
Tocqueville argued that local democracy frequently
represented democracy at its best: “Town-meetings are to liberty what primary
schools are to science; they bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men
how to use and enjoy it.” City mayors regularly get twice the approval ratings
of national politicians. Modern technology can implement a modern version of
Tocqueville’s town-hall meetings to promote civic involvement and innovation.
An online hyperdemocracy where everything is put to an endless series of public
votes would play to the hand of special-interest groups. But technocracy and
direct democracy can keep each other in check: independent budget commissions
can assess the cost and feasibility of local ballot initiatives, for example.
Several places are making progress towards getting this
mixture right. The most encouraging example is California. Its system of direct
democracy allowed its citizens to vote for contradictory policies, such as
higher spending and lower taxes, while closed primaries and gerrymandered
districts institutionalised extremism. But over the past five years California
has introduced a series of reforms, thanks in part to the efforts of Nicolas
Berggruen, a philanthropist and investor. The state has introduced a “Think
Long” committee to counteract the short-term tendencies of ballot initiatives.
It has introduced open primaries and handed power to redraw boundaries to an
independent commission. And it has succeeded in balancing its budget—an
achievement which Darrell Steinberg, the leader of the California Senate,
described as “almost surreal”.
Similarly, the Finnish government has set up a non-partisan
commission to produce proposals for the future of its pension system. At the
same time it is trying to harness e-democracy: parliament is obliged to
consider any citizens’ initiative that gains 50,000 signatures. But many more
such experiments are needed—combining technocracy with direct democracy, and
upward and downward delegation—if democracy is to zigzag its way back to
health.
John Adams, America’s second president, once pronounced that
“democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There
never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” He was clearly wrong.
Democracy was the great victor of the ideological clashes of the 20th century.
But if democracy is to remain as successful in the 21st century as it was in
the 20th, it must be both assiduously nurtured when it is young—and carefully
maintained when it is mature.
