Are Countries Sliding Back to Authoritarianism?

Over the last 17 years, the number of countries that receive a score of 0 out of 4 on the media freedom indicator has ballooned from 14 to 33.

The media freedom is coming under pressure in at least 157 countries.

New coups destabilized Burkina Faso, Tunisia, Peru, and Brazil.

Previous years’ coups and ongoing repression continued to diminish basic liberties in Guinea, Turkey, Myanmar, and Thailand. 

"A wide definition of democracy is that it is a political system in which those who rule have been obliged to seek consent from those they govern through some sort of council or assembly."

But political rulers try to rule as autocrats. Democracy is only valuable as an institutional constraint—that is, to build and maintain a limited state with a wide margin of individual liberty. The most serious setbacks for freedom and democracy were the result of war, coups, and attacks on democratic institutions by illiberal incumbents.

Governments used violence and other means to destroy cultures and change the ethnic composition of populations in 21 countries and territories, including Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Myanmar.

Modern democracy leaves individuals powerless before the overwhelming power of a state claiming to represent everyone. The anti-federalists argued that giving the federal government, the power to levy taxes risks resulting in tyranny. Compared to early democracy, modern democracy feels more dictatorial.

Politicians who aim to consolidate power in the hands of their parties frequently work to enact changes that would let them rule with the fewest checks possible.

 Deterioration of judicial independence

Disempowering or capturing the judiciary is a key part of those attempts. The attempts to politicize judicial institutions and undercut the rule of law frequently lead to a deterioration of judicial independence. The number of nations with declining judicial independence has stayed at an all-time high.

The government in Poland has gradually chipped away at the independence of the judiciary since 2015. It changed the rules governing several courts in a manner that is designed to give the ruling party more opportunities to appoint judges and more control over who those judges will be.

During the pandemic, several Latin American countries have been rocked by conflicts between judicial institutions, parliaments, and governments, as well as between legal authorities, legislatures, and governments.

In Guatemala's flimsy democracy, the pandemic has made the conflicts worse, putting Guatemala on the verge of a constitutional crisis. The legislature has tried in various ways to remove the Constitutional Court justices' immunity from civil lawsuits, prevent their appointment, and impeach them. These conflicts have severely undermined the capacity of the judiciary to combat corruption. The country ranks among the top 25% of countries with the highest levels of corruption in the world.

Even high-performing democracies in Western Europe have faced challenges ensuring judicial independence during the pandemic. In Spain, the government initially passed but then withdrew a bill that would have made the appointment process for judges easier and subject to less scrutiny. 

The American model is no longer perceived as the most successful model of democracy.

The United States was a strong proponent of democratisation in the 1970s and 1980s. But democracy promotion had not consistently been a top focus in American foreign policy. The justification for supporting anti-communist tyrants have disappeared with the end of the Cold War and the ideological rivalry with the Soviet Union.

But it also has diminished the incentives for any substantial American involvement in the Third World. The American commitment to advancing democracy is not holding up. On the other hand, the Americans' capacity to do so and its ability to deploy resources to shape events abroad is now constrained by trade and budget deficits.

The nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and East Asia that were most receptive to American influence have, with a few exceptions, already transitioned to democracy. Africa, the Middle East, and mainland Asia's autocratic nations are less vulnerable to American influence.

The people all over the world regards America as a waning power plagued by political inaction, poor economic performance, and social unrest. Therefore, the democratic ideals are losing some of their attraction as a result of its perceived failings.

The regional powers are establishing the norm in their individual territories, while the democratic powerhouse US loses influence internationally. It should come as no surprise that dictatorships are more prevalent in the regions around Russia, China's frontiers (North Korea, Burma, and Thailand), and the Middle East, where long-standing authoritarian traditions have, for the most part, resisted the challenge of public upheavals.

Rising authoritarianism is threating gender equality.

At a social meeting held in May 2021, Hungary and Poland pushed for the phrase "gender equality" to be dropped from the EU declaration on fostering social cohesion post-pandemic.

President Erdogan withdrew Turkey from the legally obligatory Council of Europe Istanbul Convention, which addresses violence against women, in March 2021. In 2019, Hungary did so.

In an effort to keep women out of politics, the Azerbaijani government has waged a smear campaign against women's rights activists.

India's Prime Minister Modi has battled against making marital rape a crime.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has cut back on a number of domestic violence laws.

Afghanistan’s Taliban regime barred girls from receiving an education in the midst of an ongoing economic and humanitarian crisis.

Female Representation

Global female parliamentary representation remains low, at approximately 26% of total seats in national legislatures.

Only six legislatures in the world - New Zealand, Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Rwanda, and the United Arab Emirates - are made up of more than 50% women, and except New Zealand, none of them are democracies.

Micronesia, Papua New Guinea, and Vanuatu are the three countries in the world without women legislators.

Female representation in other spheres of public life and in the private sector globally is even lower, with only 2% of women in the executive branch and only 5% of corporate boards chaired by women.

 Acts of sabotage against the democratic system

Black African men and women in England had COVID-19 death rates that were nearly twice as high as those of white people.

The voting and voter registration regulations of various states in the United States have a disproportionately negative impact on minorities.

In India, the government has used anti-conversion and anti-cow-slaughter laws to target Muslims, and sedition and counter-terrorism laws to target academics, student activists, human rights advocates, and other detractors.

In Britain this year, instead of protecting the right to vote, the Conservatives have gone out of their way to undermine it. Since they took power, the number of people who have fallen off the electoral roll has risen to more than nine million.

Democracy needs public consent to flourish but the Conservatives have let electoral numbers fall because they know those not registered would be likely to vote against them. At the same time, they have drawn up a list of acceptable photo IDs that favours older voters – those more likely to vote Tory.

The Tories have also put-up new barriers to voting with a law requiring people to show photo ID at the polling station.

These acts of sabotage against the democratic system will deny millions a voice.

Who is growth meant to benefit?

Authoritarian regimes thrive on the narrative that authoritarian governance is more effective for economic prosperity and development.

The case of China seems to support such an authoritarian justification. Gross domestic product is higher in China. Vast internal markets with developed transportation and communication networks and relatively unrestricted trade are frequently advantageous to large authoritarian empires.

But who is growth meant to benefit?

Growth is worthless as an imperfect gauge of overall welfare if the commodities and services that make up GDP are produced primarily for the political or bureaucratic class and aggregated with nonmarket pricing as a weight.

The kind of prosperity that is promoted by a strong authoritarian state will only benefit the ruling class and its allied classes. Economic growth satisfies personal desires only when preferences are freely and impersonally stated on markets. 

Democracy needs new imagination.

History tells us that the so-called democratic political system does not guarantee the improvement of democratic society.

Karl Mannheim was an advocate of social education (a concept similar to citizenship education today), which is meant to make the attitudes and behaviours of both common people and elites more democratic.

Karl Mannheim, who studied mass society in the age of fascism, worried about an irrational democracy of emotions.

For Mannheim and some of his contemporaries like John Dewey, B.R. Ambedkar, T.S. Eliot and A.D. Lindsay, democracy is not only a political system but also a way of life.

 Citizenship education is not only a matter of school education but also of people’s social practises in their everyday lives. Far from saying "democracy is dying," we need to say that "now is the time for democracy to be lived."

There must be no obvious inequalities in society for democracy to function properly. There must not be an oppressed class. There must not be a suppressed class. In cases of inequity, the intervention of the state is required.

The right to be treated as an equal must precede the right to equal treatment as a state policy.  Equality of opportunity is a misleading term. There should be an opportunity for equality, unalienable rights such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Democracy, after all, is not merely about elections and their outcomes. Democracy operates in and through a living world, permeable to various social forces that constitute what democracy itself comes to mean.

Democracy is an ongoing project. Democracy needs constant institution-building. If democracy is to thrive in the twenty-first century, it will require imagination and practical energy. Today, it needs a new institutional imagination. 

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