Diamond Democratic Recession
Diamond Democratic Recession
Diamond Democratic Recession
in Decline ?
EDITED BY LARRY DIAMOND AND MARC F. PLATTNER
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Facing Up to the
Democratic Recession
Larry Diamond
98
Facing Up to the Democratic Recession 99
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.
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
than Freedom House does for most years since 1989; for some years,
the discrepancy is much larger.6
Year of Year of
Breakdown Country Return Type of Breakdown
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
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
0.55
0.53 0.53 0.52 0.52
0.51 0.50 0.51
0.50 0.49
0.50
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
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
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
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/.