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Democracy

in Decline ?
EDITED BY LARRY DIAMOND AND MARC F. PLATTNER

Foreword by Condoleezza Rice

Johns Hopkins University Press  • Baltimore


© 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press
and the National Endowment for Democracy
All rights reserved. Published 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Democracy in decline? / edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner ;


foreword by Condoleezza Rice.
pages cm. — (A journal of democracy book)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1‑4214‑1818‑6 (hardback) — ISBN 978‑1‑4214‑1819‑3
(electronic) — ISBN 1‑4214‑1818‑5 (hardcover) 1. Democracy.
2. Democratization. 3. World politics—21st century.
I. Diamond, Larry Jay. II. Plattner, Marc F., 1945–
JC423.D43988 2015
321.8—dc23  2015006239

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6

Facing Up to the
Democratic Recession
Larry Diamond

The year 2014 marked the fortieth anniversary of Portugal’s Revo-


lution of the Carnations, which inaugurated what Samuel P. Hun-
tington dubbed the “third wave” of global democratization. Any
assessment of the state of global democracy today must begin by
recognizing—​even marveling at—​the durability of this historic
transformation. When the third wave began in 1974, only about
30 percent of the world’s independent states met the criteria of
electoral democracy—​a system in which citizens, through universal
suffrage, can choose and replace their leaders in regular, free, fair,
and meaningful elections.1 At that time, there were only about 46
democracies in the world. Most of those were the liberal democra-
cies of the rich West, along with a number of small island states that
had been British colonies. Only a few other developing democracies
existed—​principally, India, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Colombia, Vene-
zuela, Israel, and Turkey.
In the subsequent three decades, democracy had a remarkable

98
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 99

global run, as the number of democracies essentially held steady or


expanded every year from 1975 until 2007. Nothing like this contin-
uous growth in democracy had ever been seen before in the history
of the world. While a number of these new “democracies” were
quite illiberal—​in some cases, so much so that Steven Levitsky and
Lucan Way regard them as “competitive authoritarian” regimes2—​
the positive three-​decade trend was paralleled by a similarly steady
and significant expansion in levels of freedom (political rights and
civil liberties, as measured annually by Freedom House). In 1974,
the average level of freedom in the world stood at 4.38 (on the two
7-​point scales, where 1 is most free and 7 is most repressive). It then
gradually improved during the 1970s and 1980s, though it did not
cross below the 4.0 midpoint until the fall of the Berlin Wall, after
which it improved to 3.85 in 1990. In 25 of the 32 years between 1974
and 2005, average freedom levels improved in the world, peaking
at 3.22 in 2005.
And then, around 2006, the expansion of freedom and democ-
racy in the world came to a prolonged halt. Since 2006, there has
been no net expansion in the number of electoral democracies,
which has oscillated between 114 and 119 (about 60 percent of the
world’s states). As we see in figure 1, the number of both electoral
and liberal democracies began to decline after 2006 and then flat-
tened out.3 Since 2006, the average level of freedom in the world
has also deteriorated slightly, leveling off at about 3.30.
There are two ways to view these empirical trends. One is to see
them as constituting a period of equilibrium—​freedom and democ-
racy have not continued gaining, but neither have they experienced
net declines. One could even celebrate this as an expression of the
remarkable and unexpected durability of the democratic wave.
Given that democracy expanded to a number of countries where
the objective conditions for sustaining it are unfavorable, due either
to poverty (for example, in Liberia, Malawi, and Sierra Leone) or
to strategic pressures (for example, in Georgia and Mongolia), it is
impressive that reasonably open and competitive political systems
have survived (or revived) in so many places. As a variant of this
100 Larry Diamond

more benign interpretation, Levitsky and Way argue in Chapter


Four of this volume that democracy never actually expanded as
widely as Freedom House perceived in the first place. Thus, they
contend, many of the seeming failures of democracy in the last ten
to fifteen years were really deteriorations or hardenings of what
had been from the beginning authoritarian regimes, however
competitive.
Alternatively, one can view the last decade as a period of at least
incipient decline in democracy. To make this case, we need to exam-
ine not only the instability and stagnation of democracies but also
the incremental decline of democracy in what Thomas Carothers
has termed the “gray zone” countries (which defy easy classification
as to whether or not they are democracies),4 the deepening author-
itarianism in the nondemocracies, and the decline in the function-
ing and self-​confidence of the world’s established, rich democracies.
This will be my approach in what follows.
The debate about whether there has been a decline in democ-
racy turns to some extent on how we count it. It is one of the great
and probably inescapable ironies of scholarly research that the
boom in comparative democratic studies has been accompanied
by significant disagreement over how to define and measure de-
mocracy. I have never felt that there was—​or could be—​one right
and consensual answer to this eternal conceptual challenge. Most
scholars of democracy have agreed that it makes sense to classify
regimes categorically—​and thus to determine which regimes are
democracies and which are not. But democracy is in many ways a
continuous variable. Its key components—​such as freedom of mul-
tiple parties and candidates to campaign and contest, opposition
access to mass media and campaign finance, inclusiveness of suf-
frage, fairness and neutrality of electoral administration, and the
extent to which electoral victors have meaningful power to rule—​
vary on a continuum (as do other dimensions of the quality of de-
mocracy, such as civil liberties, rule of law, control of corruption,
vigor of civil society, and so on). This continuous variation forces
coders to make difficult judgments about how to classify regimes
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 101

that fall into the gray zone of ambiguity, where multiparty electoral
competition is genuine and vigorous but flawed in some notable
ways. No system of multiparty competition is perfectly fair and
open. Some multiparty electoral systems clearly do not meet the
test of democracy. Others have serious defects that nevertheless do
not negate their overall democratic character. Thus hard decisions
must often be made about how to weight imperfections and where
to draw the line.

FIGURE 1. The growth of democracies in the world, 1974–2013


70%
61%
57% 58% 59%
60%

50% 45%

37%
40%
34%
41%
29% 40%
30% 35%
33%
30%
26%
20%
24%
21%
10%

0%
74
76
78
19 980

3
85
87
89
91
93
95
97
99
01
03
05
07
09
11
13
/8
19
19
19

19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20
20
20
20
20
20
20
82
1

Liberal Democracies Electoral Democracies

Most approaches to classifying regimes (as democracies or not)


rely on continuous measurement of key variables (such as political
rights, in the case of the Polity scale, or both political rights and civil
liberties, in the case of Freedom House), along with a somewhat
arbitrary cutoff point for separating democracies from nondemo-
cracies.5 My own method has been to accept the Freedom House
coding decisions except where I find persuasive contradictory evi-
dence. This has led to my counting two to five fewer democracies
102 Larry Diamond

than Freedom House does for most years since 1989; for some years,
the discrepancy is much larger.6

THE DEMOCRATIC RECESSION: BREAKDOWNS AND EROSIONS

The world has been in a mild but protracted democratic recession


since about 2006. Beyond the lack of improvement or modest ero-
sion of global levels of democracy and freedom, there have been
several other causes for concern. First, there has been a significant
and, in fact, accelerating rate of democratic breakdown. Second, the
quality or stability of democracy has been declining in a number
of large and strategically important emerging-​market countries,
which I call “swing states.” Third, authoritarianism has been deep-
ening, including in big and strategically important countries. And
fourth, the established democracies, beginning with the United
States, increasingly seem to be performing poorly and to lack the
will and self-​confidence to promote democracy effectively abroad.
I explore each of these in turn.
First, let us look at rates of democratic breakdown. Between 1974
and the end of 2014, 29 percent of all the democracies in the world
broke down (among non-​Western democracies, the rate was 35 per-
cent). In the first decade and a half of this new century, the failure
rate (17.6 percent) has been substantially higher than in the preceding
fifteen-​year period (12.7 percent). Alternatively, if we break the third
wave up into its four component decades, we see a rising incidence of
democratic failure per decade since the mid-​1980s. The rate of dem-
ocratic failure, which had been 16 percent in the first decade of the
third wave (1974–83), fell to 8 percent in the second decade (1984–93),
but then climbed to 11 percent in the third decade (1994–2003), and
most recently to 14 percent (2004–13). (If we include the three failures
of 2014, the rate rises to over 16 percent.)
Since 2000, I count 25 breakdowns of democracy in the world—​
not only through blatant military or executive coups, but also
through subtle and incremental degradations of democratic rights
and procedures that finally push a democratic system over the
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 103

TABLE. Breakdowns of democracy, 2000–2014

Year of Year of
Breakdown Country Return Type of Breakdown

2000 Fiji — Military coup


2000 Russia — Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
2001 Central Af. Rep. — Military rebellion, violence, human rights abuses
2002 Guinea-Bissau 2005 Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
(military coup the following year)
2002 Nepal 2013 Rising political instability, monarchical coup
2004 Venezuela — Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
2005 Thailand 2011 Military coup, then military constraint
2006 Solomon Islands — Decline of democratic process
2007 Bangladesh 2008 Military “soft coup”
2007 Philippines 2010 Executive degradation
2007 Kenya — Electoral fraud and executive abuse
2008 Georgia 2012 Electoral fraud and executive abuse
2009 Honduras 2013 Military intervention
2009 Madagascar — Unconstitutional assumption of power by opposi-
tion; suspension of elected parliament
2009 Niger 2011 Presidential dissolution of Constitutional Court and
National Assembly to extend presidential rule
2010 Burundi — Electoral fraud, opposition boycott, political closure
2010 Sri Lanka — Executive degradation
2010 Guinea-Bissau — Military intervention, weakening civilian control,
deteriorating rule of law
2012 Maldives — Forcible removal of democratically elected president
2012 Mali 2014 Military coup
2011 Nicaragua — Executive degradation
2012 Ukraine 2014 Electoral fraud (parliamentary elections), executive
abuse
2014 Turkey — Executive degradation, violation of opposition rights
2014 Bangladesh — Breakdown of electoral process
2014 Thailand — Military coup

threshold into competitive authoritarianism (see table). Some of


these breakdowns occurred in quite low-​quality democracies; yet in
each case, a system of reasonably free and fair multiparty electoral
104 Larry Diamond

competition was either displaced or degraded to a point well below


the minimal standards of democracy.
One methodological challenge in tracking democratic break-
downs is to determine a precise date or year for a democratic failure
that results from a long secular process of systemic deterioration
and executive strangulation of political rights, civil liberties, and the
rule of law. No serious scholar would consider Russia today a de-
mocracy. But many believe that it was an electoral democracy (how-
ever rough and illiberal) under Boris Yeltsin. If we score 1993 as the
year when democracy emerged in Russia (as Freedom House does),
then what year do we identify as marking the end of democracy? In
this case (and many others), there is no single obvious event—​like
Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori’s 1992 autogolpe, dissolving
Congress and seizing unconstitutional powers—​to guide the scor-
ing decision. I postulate that Russia’s political system fell below the
minimum conditions of electoral democracy during the year 2000,
as signaled by the electoral fraud that gave Vladimir Putin a dubious
first-​ballot victory and the executive degradation of political and
civic pluralism that quickly followed. (Freedom House dates the
failure to 2005.)
The problem has continuing and quite contemporary rele-
vance. For a number of years now, Turkey’s ruling Justice and
Development Party (AKP) has been gradually eroding democratic
pluralism and freedom in the country. The overall political trends
have been hard to characterize, because some of the AKP’s changes
have made Turkey more democratic by removing the military as
an autonomous veto player in politics, extending civilian control
over the military, and making it harder to ban political parties that
offend the “deep state” structures associated with the intensely
secularist legacy of Kemal Atatürk. But the AKP has gradually en-
trenched its own political hegemony, extending partisan control
over the judiciary and the bureaucracy, arresting journalists and in-
timidating dissenters in the press and academia, threatening busi-
nesses with retaliation if they fund opposition parties, and using
arrests and prosecutions in cases connected to alleged coup plots
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 105

to jail and remove from public life an implausibly large number of


accused plotters.
This has coincided with a stunning and increasingly audacious
concentration of personal power by Turkey’s longtime prime min-
ister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was elected president in August
2014. The abuse and personalization of power and the constric-
tion of competitive space and freedom in Turkey have been subtle
and incremental, moving with nothing like the speed of Putin in
the early 2000s. But by now, these trends appear to have crossed
a threshold, pushing the country below the minimum standards
of democracy. If this has happened, when did it happen? Was it in
2014, when the AKP further consolidated its hegemonic grip on
power in the March local-​government elections and the August
presidential election? Or was it, as some liberal Turks insist, several
years before, as media freedoms were visibly diminishing and an
ever-​wider circle of alleged coup plotters was being targeted in the
highly politicized Ergenekon trials?
A similar problem exists for Botswana, where a president (Ian
Khama) with a career military background evinces an intolerance of
opposition and distaste for civil society beyond anything seen pre-
viously from the long-​ruling Botswana Democratic Party (BDP). In-
creasing political violence and intimidation—​including assaults on
opposition politicians, the possible murder of a leading opposition
candidate three months before the October 2014 parliamentary
elections, and the apparent involvement of the intelligence appa-
ratus in the bullying and coercion of the political opposition—​have
been moving the political system in a more authoritarian direction.
Escalating pressure on the independent media, the brazen misuse
of state television by the BDP, and the growing personalization and
centralization of power by President Khama (as he advances his
own narrow circle of family and friends while splitting the ruling
party) are further signs of the deterioration, if not crisis, of democ-
racy in Botswana.7 Again, Levitsky and Way had argued a number
of years ago that Botswana was not a genuine democracy in the first
place.8 Nevertheless, whatever kind of system it has been in recent
106 Larry Diamond

decades, “respect for the rule of law and for established institutions
and processes” began to diminish in 1998, when Khama ascended
to the vice-​presidency, and it has continued to decline since 2008,
when the former military commander “automatically succeeded to
the presidency.”9
There are no easy and obvious answers to the conundrum of
how to classify regimes in the gray zone. One can argue about
whether these ambiguous regimes are still democracies—​or even
if they ever really were. Those who accept that a democratic break-
down has occurred can argue about when it took place. But what is
beyond argument is that there is a class of regimes that in the last
decade or so have experienced significant erosion in electoral fair-
ness, political pluralism, and civic space for opposition and dissent,
typically as a result of abusive executives intent upon concentrat-
ing their personal power and entrenching ruling-​party hegemony.
The best-​known cases of this since 1999 have been Russia and
Venezuela, where populist former military officer Hugo Chávez
(1999–2013) gradually suffocated democratic pluralism during the
first decade of this century. After Daniel Ortega returned to the
presidency in Nicaragua in 2007, he borrowed many pages from
Chávez’s authoritarian playbook, and left-​populist authoritarian
presidents Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador
have been moving in a similar direction. In the January 2015 issue of
the Journal of Democracy, Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-​Liñán
assert that democratic erosion has occurred since 2000 in all four
of these Latin American countries (Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia,
and Ecuador) as well as in Honduras, with Bolivia, Ecuador, and
Honduras now limping along as “semidemocracies.”
Of the 25 breakdowns since 2000 listed in the table, 18 occurred
after 2005. Only 8 of these 25 breakdowns came as a result of mili-
tary intervention (and of those 8, only 4 took the form of a conven-
tional, blatant military coup, as happened twice in Thailand). Two
other cases (Nepal and Madagascar) saw democratically elected
rulers pushed out of power by other nondemocratic forces (the
monarch and the political opposition, respectively). The majority of
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 107

the breakdowns—​thirteen—​resulted from the abuse of power and


the desecration of democratic institutions and practices by demo-
cratically elected rulers. Four of these took the form of widespread
electoral fraud or, in the recent case of Bangladesh, a unilateral
change in the rules of electoral administration (the elimination of
the practice of a caretaker government before the election) that
tilted the electoral playing field and triggered an opposition boy-
cott. The other 9 failures by executive abuse involved the more
gradual suffocation of democracy by democratically elected execu-
tives (though that too was occurring in several of the instances of
electoral fraud, such as Ukraine under President Viktor Yanukovych
[2010–14]). Overall, nearly 1 in every 5 democracies since the turn of
this century has failed.

THE DECLINE OF FREEDOM AND THE RULE OF LAW

Separate and apart from democratic failure, there has also been a
trend of declining freedom in a number of countries and regions
since 2005. The most often cited statistic in this regard is the Free-
dom House finding that, in each of the eight consecutive years from
2006 through 2013, more countries declined in freedom than im-
proved. In fact, after a post–Cold War period in which the balance
was almost always highly favorable—​with improvers outstripping
the decliners by a ratio of two to one (or greater)—​the balance simply
inverted beginning in 2006. But this does not tell the whole story.
Two important elements are noteworthy, and they are both
especially visible in Africa. First, the declines have tended to crys-
tallize over time. Thus, if we compare freedom scores at the end
of 2005 and the end of 2013, we see that 29 of the 49 sub-​Saharan
African states (almost 60 percent) declined in freedom, while only
15 (30 percent) improved and 5 remained unchanged. Moreover, 20
states in the region saw a decline in political rights, civil liberties,
or both that was substantial enough to register a change on the
7-​point scales (while only 11 states saw such a visible improvement).
The larger states in sub-​Saharan Africa (those with a population
108 Larry Diamond

of more than 10 million) did a bit better, but not much: Freedom
deteriorated in 13 of the 25 and improved in only 8.
Another problem is that the pace of decay in democratic in-
stitutions is not always evident to outside observers. In a number
of countries where we take democracy for granted, such as South
Africa, we should not. In fact, there is not a single country on the
African continent where democracy is firmly consolidated and
secure—​the way it is, for example, in such third-​wave democra-
cies as South Korea, Poland, and Chile. In the global democracy-​
promotion community, few actors are paying attention to the
growing signs of fragility in the more liberal developing democra-
cies, not to mention the more illiberal ones.
Why have freedom and democracy been regressing in many
countries? The most important and pervasive answer is, in brief,
bad governance. The Freedom House measures of political rights
and civil liberties both include subcategories that directly relate to
the rule of law and transparency (including corruption). If we re-
move these subcategories from the Freedom House political-​rights
and civil-​liberties scores and create a third distinct scale with the
rule-​of-​law and transparency scores, the problems become more
apparent. African states (like most others in the world) perform
considerably worse on the rule of law and transparency than on
political rights and civil liberties.10 Moreover, rule of law and po-
litical rights have both declined perceptibly across sub-​Saharan Af-
rica since 2005, while civil liberties have oscillated somewhat more.
These empirical trends are shown in figure 2, which presents the
Freedom House data for these three reconfigured scales as stan-
dardized scores, ranging from 0 to 1.11
The biggest problem for democracy in Africa is controlling cor-
ruption and abuse of power. The decay in governance has been
visible even in the best-​governed African countries, such as South
Africa, which suffered a steady decline in its score on rule of law
and transparency (from 0.79 to 0.63) between 2005 and 2013. And as
more and more African states become resource-​rich with the onset
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 109

FIGURE 2. Freedom and governance trends in Africa, 2005–13


0.60

0.55
0.53 0.53 0.52 0.52
0.51 0.50 0.51
0.50 0.49
0.50

0.49 0.49 0.49


0.45 0.47 0.47
0.46 0.46 0.46
0.46

0.40
0.41
0.40 0.40 0.39
0.35 0.37 0.37
0.37 0.36 0.36

0.30
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

Political Rights Civil Liberties Transparency


and Rule of Law

of a second African oil boom, the quality of governance will dete-


riorate further. This has already begun to happen in one of Africa’s
most liberal and important democracies, Ghana.
The problem is not unique to Africa. Every region of the world
scores worse on the standardized scale of transparency and the rule
of law than it does on either political rights or civil liberties. In fact,
transparency and the rule of law trail the other two scales even more
dramatically in Latin America, postcommunist Europe, and Asia
than they do in Africa (figure 3). Many democracies in lower-​income
and even middle-​or upper-​middle-​income countries (notably, Ar-
gentina) struggle with the resurgence of what Francis Fukuyama
calls “neo-​patrimonial” tendencies.12 Leaders who think that they
can get away with it are eroding democratic checks and balances,
hollowing out institutions of accountability, overriding term limits
and normative restraints, and accumulating power and wealth for
themselves and their families, cronies, clients, and parties.
110 Larry Diamond

FIGURE 3. Political rights, civil liberties, and transparency / rule of law, 2013


1

0.9 0.86
0.83

0.8
0.73
0.72
0.7 0.66

0.6
0.52 0.52
0.50 0.49
0.5 0.46

0.39 0.39
0.4 0.36 0.35
0.30
0.28
0.3
0.23 0.23

0.2

0.1

0
CEE LAC Asia Africa FSU Arab States
(+ Baltics) (– Baltics)

Source: Freedom House raw data for Political Rights Civil Liberties
Freedom in the World, 2013.
Transparency and Rule of Law

In the process, they demonize, intimidate, and victimize (and


occasionally even jail or murder) opponents who get in their way.
Space for opposition parties, civil society, and the media is shrink-
ing, and international support for them is drying up. Ethnic, reli-
gious, and other identity cleavages polarize many societies that lack
well-​designed democratic institutions to manage those cleavages.
State structures are too often weak and porous—​unable to secure
order, protect rights, meet the most basic social needs, or rise above
corrupt, clientelistic, and predatory impulses. Democratic institu-
tions such as parties and parliaments are often poorly developed,
and the bureaucracy lacks the policy expertise and, even more, the
independence, neutrality, and authority to effectively manage the
economy. Weak economic performance and rising inequality ex-
acerbate the problems of abuse of power, rigging of elections, and
violation of the democratic rules of the game.
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 111

THE STRATEGIC SWING STATES

A different perspective on the global state of democracy can be


gleaned from a focus not on regional or global trends but on the
weightiest emerging-​market countries. These are the ones with
large populations (say, more than 50 million) or large economies
(more than US$200 billion). I count 27 of these (including Ukraine,
which does not quite reach either measure but is of immense stra-
tegic importance). Twelve of these 27 swing states had worse aver-
age freedom scores at the end of 2013 than they did at the end of
2005. These declines took place across the board: in fairly liberal
democracies (South Korea, Taiwan, and South Africa); in less liberal
democracies (Colombia, Ukraine, Indonesia, Turkey, Mexico, and
Thailand before the 2014 military coup); and in authoritarian re-
gimes (Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia). In addition, I think
3 other countries are also less free today than they were in 2005:
Russia, where the noose of repressive authoritarianism has clearly
been tightening since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in
early 2012; Egypt, where the new military-​dominated government
under former general Abdel Fattah al-​Sisi is more murderous, con-
trolling, and intolerant than even the Mubarak regime (1981–2011);
and Bangladesh, where (as noted above) democracy broke down
early in 2014. Only two countries (Singapore and Pakistan) are
freer today (and only modestly so) than in 2005. Some other coun-
tries have at least remained stable. Chile continues to be a liberal-​
democratic success story; the Philippines has returned to robust
democracy after an authoritarian interlude under President Gloria
Macapagal-​Arroyo (2001–10); and Brazil and India have preserved
robust democracy, albeit with continuing challenges. But overall,
among the 27 (which also include China, Malaysia, Nigeria, and the
United Arab Emirates) there has been scant evidence of democratic
progress. In terms of democracy, the most important countries
outside the stable democratic West have been either stagnating or
slipping backward.
112 Larry Diamond

THE AUTHORITARIAN RESURGENCE

An important part of the story of global democratic recession has


been the deepening of authoritarianism. This has taken a number
of forms. In Russia, space for political opposition, principled dissent,
and civil society activity outside the control of the ruling authorities
has been shrinking.13 In China, human-​rights defenders and civil
society activists have faced increasing harassment and victimization.
The (mainly) postcommunist autocracies of the Shanghai Coop-
eration Organization, centered on the axis of cynical cooperation
between Russia and China, have become much more coordinated
and assertive. Both countries have been aggressively flexing their
muscles in dealing with their neighbors on territorial questions.
And increasingly they are pushing back against democratic norms
by also using instruments of soft power—​international media (such
as RT, Russia’s slick 24/7 global television “news” channel), China’s
Confucius Institutes, lavish conferences, and exchange programs—​
to try to discredit Western democracies and democracy in general,
while promoting their own models and norms.14 This is part of a
broader trend of renewed authoritarian skill and energy in using
state-​run media (both traditional and digital) to air an eclectic mix
of pro-​regime narratives, demonized images of dissenters, and il-
liberal, nationalist, and anti-​American diatribes.15
African autocrats have increasingly used China’s booming aid
and investment (and the new regional war on Islamist terrorism)
as a counterweight to Western pressure for democracy and good
governance. And they have been only too happy to point to Chi-
na’s formula of rapid state-​led development without democracy
to justify their own deepening authoritarianism. In Venezuela, the
vise of authoritarian populism has tightened and the government’s
toleration (or even organization) of criminal violence to demobilize
middle-​class opposition has risen. The Arab Spring has imploded in
almost every country that it touched save Tunisia, leaving in most
cases even more repressive states or, as in the case of Libya, hardly
a state at all.
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 113

The resurgence of authoritarianism over the past eight years has


been quickened by the diffusion of common tools and approaches.
Prominent among these have been laws to criminalize international
flows of financial and technical assistance from democracies to
democratic parties, movements, media, election monitors, and civil
society organizations in authoritarian regimes, as well as broader
restrictions on the ability of NGOs to form and operate and the cre-
ation of pseudo-​NGOs to do the bidding (domestically and interna-
tionally) of autocrats.16 One recent study of 98 countries outside the
West found that 51 of them either prohibit or restrict foreign funding
of civil society, with a clear global trend toward tightening control; as
a result, international democracy-​assistance flows are dropping pre-
cipitously where they are needed most.17 In addition, authoritarian
(and even some democratic) states are becoming more resourceful,
sophisticated, and unapologetic in suppressing Internet freedom
and using cyberspace to frustrate, subvert, and control civil society.18

WESTERN DEMOCRACY IN RETREAT

Perhaps the most worrisome dimension of the democratic re-


cession has been the decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and
self-​confidence in the West, including the United States. There is
a growing sense, both domestically and internationally, that de-
mocracy in the United States has not been functioning effectively
enough to address the major challenges of governance. The dimin-
ished pace of legislation, the vanishing ability of Congress to pass a
budget, and the 2013 shutdown of the federal government are only
some of the indications of a political system (and a broader body
politic) that appears increasingly polarized and deadlocked. As a
result, both public approval of Congress and public trust in gov-
ernment are at historic lows. The ever-​mounting cost of election
campaigns, the surging role of nontransparent money in politics,
and low rates of voter participation are additional signs of dem-
ocratic ill health. Internationally, promoting democracy abroad
scores close to the bottom of the public’s foreign-​policy priorities.
114 Larry Diamond

And the international perception is that democracy promotion has


already receded as an actual priority of US foreign policy.
The world takes note of all this. Authoritarian state media glee-
fully publicize these travails of American democracy in order to
discredit democracy in general and immunize authoritarian rule
against US pressure. Even in weak states, autocrats perceive that the
pressure is now off: They can pretty much do whatever they want
to censor the media, crush the opposition, and perpetuate their
rule, and Europe and the United States will swallow it. Meek verbal
protests may ensue, but the aid will still flow and the dictators will
still be welcome at the White House and the Elysée Palace.
It is hard to overstate how important the vitality and self-​
confidence of US democracy has been to the global expansion of
democracy during the third wave. While each democratizing coun-
try made its own transition, pressure and solidarity from the United
State and Europe often generated a significant and even crucial
enabling environment that helped to tip finely balanced situations
toward democratic change, and then in some cases gradually to-
ward democratic consolidation. If this solidarity is now greatly di-
minished, so will be the near-​term global prospects for reviving and
sustaining democratic progress.

A BRIGHTER HORIZON?

Democracy has been in a global recession for most of the last de-
cade, and there is a growing danger that the recession could deepen
and tip over into something much worse. Many more democracies
could fail, not only in poor countries of marginal strategic signifi-
cance, but also in big swing states such as Indonesia and Ukraine
(again). There is little external recognition yet of the grim state of
democracy in Turkey, and there is no guarantee that democracy
will return any time soon to Thailand or Bangladesh. Apathy and
inertia in Europe and the United States could significantly lower
the barriers to new democratic reversals and to authoritarian en-
trenchments in many more states.
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 115

Yet the picture is not entirely bleak. We have not seen “a third
reverse wave.” Globally, average levels of freedom have ebbed a little
bit, but not calamitously. Most important, there has not been sig-
nificant erosion in public support for democracy. In fact, what the
Afro-​barometer has consistently shown is a gap—​in some African
countries, a chasm—​between the popular demand for democracy
and the supply of it provided by the regime. This is not based just
on some shallow, vague notion that democracy is a good thing.
Many Africans understand the importance of political account-
ability, transparency, the rule of law, and restraint of power, and
they would like to see their governments manifest these virtues.
While the performance of democracy is failing to inspire, au-
thoritarianism faces its own steep challenges. There is hardly a dic-
tatorship in the world that looks stable for the long run. The only
truly reliable source of regime stability is legitimacy, and the number
of people in the world who believe in the intrinsic legitimacy of any
form of authoritarianism is rapidly diminishing. Economic devel-
opment, globalization, and the information revolution are under-
mining all forms of authority and empowering individuals. Values
are changing, and while we should not assume any teleological path
toward a global “enlightenment,” generally the movement is toward
greater distrust of authority and more desire for accountability, free-
dom, and political choice. In the coming two decades, these trends
will challenge the nature of rule in China, Vietnam, Iran, and the
Arab states much more than they will in India, not to mention Eu-
rope and the United States. Already, democratization is visible on
the horizon of Malaysia’s increasingly competitive electoral politics,
and it will come in the next generation to Singapore as well.
The key imperative in the near term is to work to reform and
consolidate the democracies that have emerged during the third
wave—​the majority of which remain illiberal and unstable, if they
remain democratic at all. With more focused, committed, and re-
sourceful international engagement, it should be possible to help
democracy sink deeper and more enduring roots in countries such
as Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, and Ghana. It is possible
116 Larry Diamond

and urgently important to help stabilize the new democracies in


Ukraine and Tunisia (whose success could gradually generate sig-
nificant diffusion effects throughout the Arab world). It might be
possible to nudge Thailand and Bangladesh back toward electoral
democracy, though ways must be found to temper the awful lev-
els of party polarization in each country. With time, the electoral
authoritarian project in Turkey will discredit itself in the face of
mounting corruption and abuse of power, which are already grow-
ing quite serious. And the oil-​based autocracies in Iran and Vene-
zuela will face increasingly severe crises of economic performance
and political legitimacy.
It is vital that democrats in the established democracies not lose
faith. Democrats have the better set of ideas. Democracy may be
receding somewhat in practice, but it is still globally ascendant in
peoples’ values and aspirations. This creates significant new oppor-
tunities for democratic growth. If the current modest recession of
democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because those of us in
the established democracies were our own worst enemies.

Notes
The author would like to thank Erin Connors, Emmanuel Ferrario, and Lukas
Friedemann for their excellent research assistance on this essay.
1. For an elaboration of this definition, see Larry Diamond, The Spirit of
Democracy: The Struggle to Build Free Societies Throughout the World
(New York: Times Books, 2008), 20–26.
2. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid
Regimes after the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010); see also their essay in this volume.
3. I count as liberal democracies all those regimes that receive a score of
1 or 2 (out of 7) on both political rights and civil liberties.
4. Thomas Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,” Journal of
Democracy 13 (January 2002): 5–21.
5. Freedom House classifies all the world’s regimes as democracies or not
from 1989 to the present based on whether (a) they score at least 7 out
of 12 on the “electoral process” dimension of political rights; (b) they
score at least 20 out of 40 overall on the raw point scale for political
rights; (c) their most recent parliamentary and presidential elections
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 117

were reasonably free and fair; (d) there are no significant hidden
sources of power overriding the elected authorities; and (e) there are
no recent legal changes abridging future electoral freedom. In practice,
this has led to a somewhat expansive list of democracies—​rather too
generous in my view, but at least a plausible “upper limit” of the num-
ber of democracies every year. Levitsky and Way suggest in Chapter
Four of this volume that a better standard for democracy would be
the Freedom House classification of Free, which requires a minimum
average score of 2.5 on the combined scales of political rights and civil
liberties. But I think this standard excludes many genuine but illiberal
democracies.
6. My count of electoral democracies for 1998–2002 was lower than that
of Freedom House by 8 to 9 countries, and in 1999, by 11 countries. For
example, I dropped from this category Georgia in 1992–2002, Ukraine
in 1994–2004, Mozambique in 1994–2008, Nigeria in 1999–2003, Rus-
sia in 2001–4, and Venezuela in 2004–8.
7. Amy R. Poteete, “Democracy Derailed? Botswana’s Fading Halo,”
AfricaPlus, 20 October 2014, http://africaplus.wordpress.com/2014/10/20
/democracy-​derailed-​botswanas-​fading-​halo/.
8. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism, 20.
9. Kenneth Good, “The Illusion of Democracy in Botswana,” in Larry
Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds., Democratization in Africa:
Progress and Retreat, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2010), 281.
10. The comparisons here and in figure 2 are with the reconfigured
political-​rights and civil-​liberties scales, after the subscales for trans-
parency and rule of law have been removed (see note 11 below).
11. I created the scale of transparency and rule of law by drawing subscales
C2 (control of corruption) and C3 (accountability and transparency)
from the political-​rights scale and the four subscales of F (rule of law)
from the civil-​liberties scale. For the specific items in these subscales,
see the Freedom in the World methodology, www.freedomhouse.org
/report/freedom-​world-​2014/methodology#.VGww5vR4qcI.
12. Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Indus-
trial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 2014). See also his essay in this volume.
13. On Russia, see Miriam Lanskoy and Elspeth Suthers, “Putin versus
Civil Society: Outlawing the Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 24
(July 2013): 74–87.
14. See Andrew Nathan’s essay, “China’s Challenge,” on pp. 156–70 in the
twenty-​fifth anniversary issue of the Journal of Democracy.
118 Larry Diamond

15. Christopher Walker and Robert W. Orttung, “Breaking the News: The
Role of State-​Run Media,” Journal of Democracy 25 (January 2014):
71–85.
16. Carl Gershman and Michael Allen, “The Assault on Democracy Assis-
tance,” Journal of Democracy 17 (April 2006): 36–51; William J. Dobson,
The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy
(New York: Doubleday, 2012).
17. Darin Christensen and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Defunding Dissent: Re-
strictions on Aid to NGOs,” Journal of Democracy 24 (April 2013): 77–91.
18. See the essays in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, Liberation Tech-
nology: Social Media and the Struggle for Democracy (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 2012) and the ongoing trailblazing work of
the Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.org/.

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