When Democracy Breaks: Final Thoughts with Archon Fung, David Moss and Arne Westad

Well, I love this book, because it really touches on one of the big themes that this podcast has really centered around, which is the idea of democratic breakdown and the real question of when we move beyond democratic backsliding to when democracy actually does break. The book is called When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse from Ancient Athens to the Present Day. It touches on so many different cases of democratic breakdown throughout history.

So just to kick off and get started, I’d like to ask each one of you if there was a case that really surprised you or caught you off guard in terms of how democracy broke, because I’m sure that you guys were familiar with most of the cases. I mean, some of them are very famous, like Germany, but was there one that really stood out to you that made you think differently about democratic erosion and democratic breakdown?

I think for me in many ways, Justin, the most surprising one was the one on Weimar Germany. Not because I don’t know the background of the collapse of Weimar Germany, most historians think they know something about that. But because of the way in which it was set up and structured. So, it’s Weitz who was the one who wrote that chapter and underlined the ongoing, almost continuous attacks on democratic institutions and maybe especially on the institutions that were set to handle the difficulties that most people in Weimar Germany knew that the new republic was going to face.

Over time, those attacks, both on the left and the right, ended up eroding most of the belief that had existed in the early years with regard to those institutions. It then took an acute crisis, the economic and financial crisis of the late 1920s, to overturn the whole system. But the preparation for all of that had happened beforehand through the attack on the institutions of the Republic.

Obviously, it has changed over time and each of these cases are individual cases in a way that is connected to the historical situation around the time in which you face a democratic breakdown. But I think our view is that you can still learn a lot from the discussion that contrasts the different cases, even though they are set at very different moments in time. I do think there are some things that they have in common. The one that I mentioned earlier about the attack on the institutions – if you don’t want to call it democracy, at least there’s some institutions that preserve some degree of pluralism, both within society and within the state – that’s something that you see, albeit at different degrees and in different ways, in most of these cases.

Another aspect that struck me in all the cases, I don’t think every single one, was how rapid rises in social inequality contributed to some of the tensions that brought about the collapse of democracy, but not in a very simple way, not in a very straightforward way. Those who believe that there are necessarily distinct social causes in an immediate sense for all of these events are probably wrong. It helped to destroy the common approach to the value of these institutions and the value of participatory democracy itself. On that, I think, there is very little doubt.

A lot of people, a lot of different settings, were asking what does this system actually do for me? What is the value for me, both in ethical, moral, political, but also in economic and financial terms for me to come out and actually defend that system? If you are in a situation where you feel that your situation compared to others in social and economic terms is getting consistently worse, then your willingness to not necessarily act against the system, but help protect the system, is greatly reduced.

I think it’s hard to put a quantitative ranking on difference versus similarity because they’re different places in different times, but also different countries. They’re really quite dramatically different in so many ways. Yet there are some commonalities. You asked about change over time, maybe some of the most striking changes, I think, is just in the 21st century, which is we’ve seen a different kind of breakdown, what’s often called illiberal democracy. So more of a reliance on majoritarianism, but not the liberal protections of minority rights and the right to dissent.

Often in the past, there’s been a distinction between fast and slow breakdown. Fast like Weimar, Germany where you see a rapid seizure of power and collapse of democracy. Whereas in Venezuela in the early 21st century, you see a slow breakdown. It’s hard to say what day, what month, even what year democracy broke down because there was a majority picked president. But then the president chipped away at liberal protections, chipped away at minority rights, chipped away at the rights of the opposition, chipped away at all the constraints on presidential power, such that democracy as we know it disappears. So, what day and what year, what month, it disappears is hard to say. I think that a slower, more gradual breakdown, sort of the illiberal democracy that’s characteristic of the 21st century so far is quite distinct from the 20th century and before.

That said one of the things we found is that across every example, we looked at 11 episodes of breakdown and across everyone, whether it was fast like Weimar or slow like early 21st century Venezuela where there was this significant period of democratic erosion, there was quite a long period of democratic erosion, as Arne was giving an example of, that preceded every breakdown. So, in a certain way, every one of them was slow. You can see this long period and maybe most striking, there are really very clear warning signs for a long period of time. Tragically, in so many cases, we will fail to address them or overlook them or don’t even see them. But in retrospect, they’re certainly there.

I think one of the continuities running across, and maybe this is almost tautological, is that when democracy breaks, it doesn’t have very many or enough defenders of democracy. We don’t settle the debate in the book on democratic erosion or breakdown studies about whether it’s primarily an elite phenomenon or a mass phenomenon that is the thing that keeps democracy going, leaders who are committed to losing when they lose elections, or something that is much more of a mass phenomenon. I think we do pay quite a bit of attention to the importance of a democratic culture and a widespread commitment to democracy. Gregorz Eikert, a colleague here who studies Europe, said recently in a talk that there’s no democracy without democrats. I believe that to be true. You can’t have a stable democracy unless many, many people in society are committed to constitutional values and democratic values.

In a lot of cases, people lose that commitment over time. It might be for the reason that Arne just highlighted: socioeconomic inequality. People lose that commitment, because democratic institutions aren’t delivering for them anymore. I think almost all of our cases also have social and political polarization associated with them. Part of what polarization means is that the stakes of losing an election or other democratic contest become much, much higher. So, the stress on maintaining your fidelity to democratic governance means that almost always everybody loses once in a while, so that stress becomes extreme in a context of polarization.

My general view is that this has a lot to do with the times that these people lived in. You have to think about it in relative terms and in terms of where this kind of quality is situated relative to others. I think there were almost none of the political systems that we are looking at that would really qualify for what most of us today would think about as participatory democracy, not in constitutional terms and not in political terms.

But even so, they stood out for their time and in their region as being more pluralistic and democratic, both in terms of participation and in terms of institutions than the ones that surrounded them. I think that’s one of the backgrounds, at least for me, that we chose to operate with, even though we are very much aware that by today’s standards, these are at best, very imperfect as democracies.

I think also there is a question of whether we can learn from them. If you want to look back in history and say, nobody meets current standards, then history is irrelevant. I think it’s very hard to learn. Of course, Athens was not remotely a democracy by modern standards. Only men could vote. Foreigners, including foreign slaves, of course, couldn’t vote. Women couldn’t vote. It wasn’t a democracy by modern standards. However, when you go through and you see what Federica and Josh did with that case and when you read about Ancient Athens in general, there’s resonance to it. You can see patterns that feel very modern. So, the question is, can we learn from the case? Is it a modern democracy? No. Was the antebellum South a democracy by modern standards? Not even close. But can we learn from it?

Can we learn from quasi-democracy, maybe, or you can pick your words, certainly not a democracy, but can we learn from it? I think the answer is yes. As Arne said, again, almost none of the cases, if you could go back in time, would meet our current standards. So, then we have to ask, do we want to wipe out history? I think as long as we’re careful to recognize the differences, to recognize they’re not democracies by modern standards. Yet there are some commonalities. There is a commitment to majoritarianism among some group, a commitment to minority rights among some group. If those are there, I think we can learn from and that was, I think, basically the standard for how to select cases here.

I think as a theorist, the starting off the gate question for me is to look at any society and see how it settles its deep disagreements about who God is, about whether women have a right to choose, many, many questions that any society is riven by absolutely. You know that it’s less of a democracy if one person or a very small number of people, a junta or an oligarchy or a hereditary aristocracy, gets to settle those questions for everybody else. It’s a little bit more of a democracy to the extent that it’s plural and a larger number of people get to contest in some fair process to settle those deep questions about where society should go and how we should be organized.

The democratically significant thing about the founding of the United States is that it’s true that only propertied men could participate in the political process, but that circle is much, much wider than what was going on in Europe at the time. It was just a fundamentally different idea about how we should settle these deep disagreements in society and organize ourselves moving forward. Then hopefully over time that circle becomes wider and wider until eventually, we’re still pretty far from that now functionally, it’s a universal franchise.

The title of the book and the subtitle of the book bring up two different ways to think about democracy. When I think about democracy breaking, I think of there being kind of a dichotomy, like there’s democracy and there’s autocracy, or at the very least, there’s democracy and non-democracy. The idea of democratic erosion is a little bit different. It thinks of democracy as more of a continuum. You can be more democratic and less democratic like Freedom House or V-Dem, where you’ve got a continuum where a country can be entirely undemocratic or it can be near the top of the spectrum, where it’s nearly fully democratic. A lot of countries fall somewhere in between.

The idea of democracy breaking still gives the indication that there’s a moment where democracy moves into something that is not democracy. What is the line that would represent the moment when you move from democratic breakdown? I mean, can we actually identify that moment? Does it matter to identify the exact precise moment when a country moves from democracy to autocracy?

I think that this idea that something being broken is binary isn’t actually quite right, not only with regard to democracy, but really almost anything else. If you think about whether your car is broken, if it doesn’t move at all and doesn’t start at all, it’s broken. But what about if it only starts 1/10th of the time or what about if it moves, but it only goes about three miles an hour? Or what about if sometimes the brake works and sometimes the brakes don’t work? Different people are going to say that that car is broken depending on some configuration. But we might take a vote or something to decide whether it’s broken. Different people are going to think different things. Certainly, when it doesn’t work at all, there are binary elements.

But I think as with anything, there are elements that are not binary. We can look at a democracy and we can say not every feature is working. But a lot of features are working and broadly do we see a commitment to majoritarianism in decisions? Broadly, do we see protection of minority rights and the right to contest? If we say yes, we say it’s a working democracy. As those begin to break down, especially those protections on dissent, on opposition, on running a competitive election as a member of the opposition, especially as those weaken different people at different times will say it’s broken and they may backtrack. They may say, wait, it seemed broken. Now it’s actually working a little better.

I don’t think it’s a complete binary, even with the word broken, which sometimes might feel like it’s binary. That’s one of the things that you’re pointing out and that we struggle with in the book. Different people are going to see it differently, but I would say we did all decide on these cases that, ultimately, even if we can’t name the exact moment in time, there was a breakdown. The car – in this case, the democracy, wasn’t working.

Specifically with regard to Turkey, I think it is difficult because no one would argue that there are no forms of competitive democracy in today’s Turkey. But at the same time, as David alluded to earlier on in this conversation, I think it’s pretty clear that for a very large number of Turkish people, they have lost faith in much of the promise that democracy seemed to hold out to them when it was restored from authoritarian rule in the late 20th century. So, there is a trajectory here, but the key for us, at least the key for me, is this depends very much on who you ask. When you get a system in which almost everyone feels that the system somehow does not work for them, that’s one element of the system.

In Turkey, be it the Kemalist institutions that were put in place in the early 20th century or the way of rule that President Erdogan has developed that doesn’t work for them, it’s not part of their vision of what a democracy should be. Then you know that there is trouble. Then you know there are significant weaknesses in terms of the political system that would not be recognized by many people who live under it as being democratic. I think this is one of the most important issues for me in terms of thinking about what we can learn from these cases is that all of those approaches would be different. I mean, those are situational. Those are based on historical and cultural and political differences that come out in the case.

Justin, to the Turkey case and then associated cases that we don’t really write about like Hungary and maybe even India and other places, this goes to maybe the changing form of autocracy rather than the changing form of democracy. John Keane points out in his book, The New Despotism, that the new despots, unlike the old ones, have to conduct these quasi-democratic rituals as part of their own legitimation. One of them is elections. Another is public polling. This makes them very nervous because they think that they’ll probably win and in Putin’s Russia, almost certainly he would win.

But there’s a little bit of insecurity there because sometimes they don’t go your way and they know this. So, it may be a permanent democratic opening in the way that the new despotisms work. It seems like there has to be that minimum doorway to some minimum contestability in which things could go bad for the despot in a way that wasn’t quite true in prior eras of autocracy.

The Athenian chapter is interesting because it emphasizes not just democratic erosion and democratic breakdown, but also democratic recovery. But if we look at all of the different historical cases, any of the cases that date back to the 70s or earlier, they all eventually became thriving democracies later on. It makes me wonder whether when you suffer democratic erosion, if there’s really a point where democratic breakdown becomes almost inevitable. That to create democratic recovery, it needs to recover almost out of a complete breakdown, almost tabula rasa, if you will.

That’s one of the thoughts in my mind that I’d like to pose to you guys is whether democratic erosion, once it hits a certain point, does it become almost like a whirlpool where it just sucks you in to eventual breakdown or can you recover your democracy at any point of the backsliding episode? Is it possible to recover from severe democratic erosion right at the point of democratic breakdown?

I think there’s no way really to know. Certainly, in this book, we only looked at cases where they ended in breakdown. We can’t say if a country might’ve had a large amount of erosion and then it recovered. We’re not looking at those examples and beyond that it’s hard to put a number on it. We haven’t yet figured out how to do it, but it’d be great. V-DEM is trying and they have their method and others are trying. It’s hard, especially historically to have a lot of confidence in a number. So, it’s a little bit hard to say this one has more erosion than the other in very fine-grained ways. I’m not sure if we know the answer to that. That said I know the US example a little better than some of the others.

If you look at the US there was always a great deal of what I would call political hypochondria. People always thought the democracy was breaking. From 1800 forward, they thought the Republic was breaking and except for in the case of the Civil War, they were always wrong. If you think about the restrictions, for example, just to give one very notable example, on black voting rights in the post-bellum period up through the 1960s, this is a very significant degree of political erosion and the country takes an awful long time, but is able to begin to rectify that particularly with respect to voting. So, I think you can have significant degrees of erosion.

If you look back again in the antebellum period in the United States, one of the reasons for the push for public education was the belief that small-d democratic values were eroding and that public education was necessary to correct that. Now, there was also a lot of bigotry associated with public education and a Catholic-Protestant fight and lots of things going on. There was this sense that there was erosion and here’s an institution that can help address it. I don’t know how you measure in the fine grained way you’re talking about and we don’t know if a country that’s had significant erosion can come back without the breakdown, but I would tend to think that the possibility may be there.

In the spirit of David’s comment, I think the chapters in the book are consistent with the view that democracy has all of these social institutions and political institutions and practices associated with it. What erosion is is peeling those back like an onion. I don’t know whether there’s some inflection point at which you peel away three quarters of it and it’s very difficult to build back. I just don’t know. I think for the U S case, you look at the instances that David’s just discussed or my colleague, Alex Keyssar’s book, The Right to Vote, and it goes back and forth. There’s erosion and then there’s people building it back up in all of these different ways. The India case is the one chapter in which the breakdown – well, Athens too – is relatively brief and then people come back.

I think you could say maybe it’s consistent with what I just said that in India, the emergency was a peeling back of a couple of layers, but the commitment to Indian constitutionalism across all of society was very, very thick. So, there were plenty of layers of the onion left. In the breakdown in Germany after Weimar, most of the layers got peeled away quite rapidly after the erosion period.

I also think that it has a lot to do with what the regime that takes over has to put in the place, not just of the democratic institutions, but what we touched on earlier on with regard to social and economic conditions overall for the country which we are looking at. So, in many cases, authoritarian regimes that come in and take over and do not have any solutions to their ongoing problems, in many ways, are more symptoms than solutions to the problems that democratic institutions had suffered earlier on. In those cases, I think there is always the potential for people, including people who have been stakeholders in the earlier, more democratic systems, to be able to come back. But there are other situations and we cover some of them.

Of course, what happens after Weimar is the most striking of these where regimes come in that in spite of their illiberalism and racism and their approach to rule of law, too many people seem to deliver on some of the things that had been most problematic for them before the democratic breakdown takes place. In that case, it’s that you can have these new forms of authoritarianism lasting for quite a long time, because democracy, in the minds of at least some of the people we are talking about, are associated with exactly those social and economic ills that they wanted to break away from.

I think it’s very important to think about this, as Archon said earlier on, in terms of a timeline, but a timeline that doesn’t necessarily point in one direction or the other direction, but where everything that has happened in the past, and especially in the very recent past is brought to bear on people’s thinking.

I think that’s true in terms of the arguments that have come up against democratic practices and democratic institutions. The reason for that, I think, is that all democracies are necessarily imperfect. One of the things that we point out in discussing these different cases, very much along the lines of your great question, is that there are aspects of democratic institutions, democratic practices, democratic participation that probably does go back to the constitutional moment, if we call it that, for setting up these democracies. But then we’re also aware that all democracies are imperfect. So, at the point when these come under pressure, it’s usually not all that difficult to find imperfections of the past, constitutional imperfections and all those practical imperfections that to some people is a reminder that this is not just imperfect democracy, but it might be a political system that is turned against their interests.

In my view, this is connected to what I said right at the beginning. This happens when, for other reasons, parts of the population, significant parts of the population feel that the system is not working. But it’s not necessarily true that all through that period, these imperfections of democracy would at least in reality, as David said a moment ago, be held up as real evidence that democracy is not working. I mean, all democracies are imperfect to a bigger or smaller degree. I think that’s one of the lessons that I draw from the cases.

You know, especially when you think about the US case, not just the chapter, but the rest of US history, it does seem to go back to a deep imperfection at the founding. In some of these other cases, it might be more forward looking and have to do with bets about what kind of regime is going to perform better for you or for us. You can see this a little bit in the chapter on Athens and then more in some of Josh Ober’s other work. Athens is the case in which you look back and it’s had more democratic to authoritarian switches than most of the other cases that are available to us.

It’s a caricature of Josh’s deep, deep work, but it’s as if they’re having this recurring debate in Athens. They have this democracy. There are all these problems with it. They get into wars. They lose some of those wars, so wouldn’t autocracy be better. This is essentially Plato’s argument. So, they go for autocracy. Repeatedly, that turns out to perform much, much worse than the democracy that preceded that. That explains some of the switching in which at least sometimes the autocratic grass looks greener when you’re on the democratic side. But when you finally get there, maybe it’s not so great.

In the book, one of the big points that you make is that it’s not just about the rules and the constitution. It’s about the formal way that we do democracy. It’s also about the democratic culture. There’s this line where you write, “The written rules are insufficient to protect against tyranny.” You go on to emphasize that democratic culture is necessary to protect against tyranny. It’s important to have a spirit of democracy. We’ve even said during this conversation that you need democrats to be able to preserve democracy.

At the same time, it feels like a Herculean task to ask individual people who might believe in democracy to be the ones to step up and revitalize a democratic culture when the culture feels like it’s working against them. So, David, in your mind, what do you think can be done to help rejuvenate a democratic culture when it feels like it’s in decline?

So first, let me just come back to that point you made. It’s a Herculean task to ask people to revitalize democratic culture when they feel they’re on the losing end. It’s true it’s a Herculean task. It’s not true that it can’t be done. The preeminent example is the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement helped to rebuild and strengthen American democracy and the culture of democracy. It was pushed forward by those who were losing the most. So, I think actually it was a Herculean task. I wouldn’t disagree with that, but it could be done. It’s an example. I think that there are a number of ways to strengthen the culture of democracy. To go back to Arne’s emphasis on whether democracy delivering from me, I think that a strong culture of democracy allows you to get over temporary weaknesses in answering that question.

So, if you look at the Great Depression, it hits many countries, it actually hits the US harder than many other countries. And yet in some countries like Germany, you see democracy break, whereas in the United States, you see the government change, but through electoral means. Democracy holds. There’s a big shock and certainly many people would say, I’m sure in 1933, the system doesn’t seem to be working. They have enough faith in democracy. I don’t think it would have been infinite if the depression had gone on for generations. It’s hard to believe it would have been infinite, but it’s long enough to take you over that period.

So, what makes a strong culture of democracy? I think, you know, if you look in the US, I’ve already referenced public education, civic education. It has to be done well, not poorly. Right now, I think most students say civic education is their least favorite thing and they find it the most boring. So, we have to make sure we can make that exciting and relevant to people’s lives. But I guess I also think beyond education, one of the challenges we have is that if you look historically in the United States, it was the movement from limited suffrage to near universal adult suffrage. Those suffrage movements were like grand civics lessons.

It’s an irony that when we finally do, by say the early 1970s, reach something that looks close to universal adult suffrage, there are no more mass suffrage movements. That’s a great thing. That’s a great achievement on the one hand, and yet, it’s also a problem, because those suffrage movements were helping to revitalize the culture of democracy, like the civil rights movement in the 1960s, but also for women and moving from property holders in the early 19th century to all males. As you go across time, there’s a back and forth, but these movements are important. So, the question is whether there are alternatives.

One alternative, I think, in the past has been the push for constitutional amendments. The fight over a constitutional amendment is often a period when you see a revitalization of the culture of democracy. We haven’t had a constitutional amendment in a long, long time. Nothing seems to be able to get through Congress anymore. I don’t know if it’s the longest period in American History, but if not, it’s close. I think one other thing I guess I’d highlight is when you look at where confidence in government is greatest in the United States, tends to be at the local and state level. That also tends to be where there are the most extensive democratic institutions. If you look at how many elected offices there are, they’re largely at the local and state level.

They’re very narrow at the federal level. There was never an assumption the federal government would be as extensive as it is. Maybe we need to think a little bit. Does there need to be a greater dose of democratic participation? There are various ways to do that, both constitutional and more norm based. I think if we can think in different ways about how to get people engaged, whether educationally, whether in terms of mass movements like a constitutional amendment or a suffrage movement, or in the way people participate, particularly at the federal level, to maybe look at the state and local as more of a model. Maybe those are some ways to begin to strengthen the culture of democracy.

I think it’s definitely true that the sense of an outside threat or foreign threat has a lot to do with the potential for trying to find some kind of cohesion around common participatory institutions of various sorts. It’s the picture of what the other side does that reminds people that there might be something to defend in their own institutions. But I just wanted to come back briefly to David’s point about learning. I think that’s a really, really important one. Like all other practices in life, democracy, participation is something that has to be learned. One of the weaknesses I find with much of our discussions, particularly perhaps, Archon, about the theory of democracy is that this is not taken into consideration enough.

There is almost an idea that there is almost always a regression or a line towards democracy over time, which I think is one of the biggest misunderstandings of the 20th century. Democracy has to be learned like all other practices. It has to be learned and emphasized in schools. It has to be emphasized in other contexts. First and foremost, as David said, it has to be learned through participation and almost always that participation starts at the local level. So, it starts with democratic practices as they develop, as they evolve over time within the local setting.

So, in this discussion, I’m participating from Switzerland. Switzerland is one of the best examples of how forms of democracy are not always ideal, even from the perspective of the Swiss, but how they have developed is they have been learned at the local level, at the very, very local level. That’s also contributed to the strength of Swiss democratic institutions over time. So many people participate in one form or another in that learning process that local democracy is.

You know, one gift to me of this collaboration of working with historians and then my friend Alex Keyssar is historians repudiate the idea that the progress to democracy is a one-way ratchet that some of us want to believe. It is just absolutely not that. One thing that’s been lost a little bit in the field’s focus on democratic fragility and erosion and breakdown and backsliding is that oftentimes we think of that in institutional and electoral terms. There’s a focus on parties and campaigns and elites and leaders and to Arne and David’s point, much of the history of democracy has been struggling with the problem about how people learn to be citizens.

So, Tocqueville’s school of democracy was civic associations and for Carole Pateman, it was participatory democracy in workplaces. So where do we learn these skills of democracy – working out our differences at the micro level without having an autocrat or going to war with each other and then project that upward? I do think a fair amount of that has been lost. Civic education is a very important component, but then doing democracy in these different spaces is, many people have thought, absolutely essential to creating citizens.

There’s a theorist of democracy and non-democracy named Yew Chiew Ping, who is a Chinese scholar. He was struggling with China’s efforts toward democracy and he said, ‘One of the biggest challenges is that the Chinese don’t know how to have a meeting, which is the atomic unit of democratic decision making and if you don’t have that in a broad way, you’re kind of in trouble.

So, I love the way that you are talking about democratic learning. But in a lot of ways, we’re talking about individual learning and I think a lot in terms of moving societies to become democratic in terms of almost a social form of learning as the way that the society itself learns to be more democratic. It relies a lot on things like historical memory in terms of remembering past events and learning from them and becoming increasingly democratically resilient over time as a result. What amazes me when I think about democratic breakdown is that when I think of something breaking, I usually think of it as becoming increasingly fragile, that if I break a vase, something that’s made out of glass and you glue the parts back together, it’s not more resilient. It’s actually more fragile. It’s more likely to break again.

But when we look at cases of democratic breakdown, not always, but in a large number of cases, democracy actually comes back stronger. It comes back more resilient. We can look at a case like Chile, which had severe problems in terms of its democracy before Pinochet had his coup, but Chile became one of the stars of Latin American democracy. As it democratized in the early nineties and even to this day, it’s one of the more healthy democracies within Latin America. We can think about Germany, the Weimar experiment did not go well at all, but today is an incredibly resilient and healthy democracy.

So, I guess when we think about resilience and fragility and in terms of democratic learning, Why is it that we can have democratic breakdowns that don’t make democracy increasingly fragile and make it so that people are more scared of how democracy could break down, but instead find ways to be able to make democracy better than it was previously and become more confident about their abilities to be able to preserve democracy into the future?

I think it was Winston Churchill probably – he is generally cited as the source for most good quips – who said that democracy is the worst possible system of governance until you have tried all the others. I do really think that in many cases there is something to that. So, it’s very hard to go. It’s hard in any setting, any situation, to come up with what people expect you to deliver. If you are the state, if you are the government and very often what you find is that autocracies in almost all of the historical settings that we are looking at are able to satisfy some of the demands of some of the needs that come out of the population. But not all of us.

Therefore, they end up in trouble, increasing trouble with a significant part of that population or in emphasizing other parts of their approach to governance or in their approach to life. They get into serious trouble with countries that often represent other forms of government or have a territorial conflict with the country that is authoritarian and end up losing that conflict and therefore cannot even deliver on the strong-arm authoritarian approach that they have set out as the yardstick for what they want to achieve in their own country. So, it’s important to think about those things as well. One of the things that we may not spend enough time on in is actually that transition. We are preoccupied with pointing out the weaknesses of democracies and why they get into trouble.

But, of course, we could also have written a book about how autocracies get into trouble and sometimes far more easily than what democratic systems do. So, I spent a lot of time writing and thinking about China. You know, it’s not a given to me when we look at the overall global situation today that the Chinese authoritarian government that we have at the moment will be better at resolving some of the questions of, I guess you could call it hyper modernity that China is coming up against at the moment than a more pluralistic and participatory system would be. I wouldn’t be surprised over time if a number of Chinese would ask themselves exactly that question.

I think we’ve seen democracies can be unstable. Autocracies are even more unstable. In fact, I think in general democracies live longer. When you think about performance or performance along a number of different metrics, if we just start with economic, first of all, the autocracies are in a little bit of a bind because they usually fail. So economically give them a decade and they usually fail. If they fail, then democracy looks more appealing. But if they don’t fail, if they succeed economically, they become wealthier and there is more of an appeal to many people of wanting some non-economic benefits or rights, freedoms. So, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that every rich industrial country, except for maybe Singapore, is a liberal democracy.

Part of that is democracy helps drive innovation. Certainly, if you go back to Athens, it certainly seems that way – the extraordinary performance, the extraordinary degree of innovation there. But then there’s this other catch, which again, if the autocracy performs very well, you tend to see growing demands for democracy there as well. I think there’s a reason why democracies tend to live longer and that may be one of the reasons.