Source: https://v-dem.net/documents/44/v-dem_dr2024_highres.pdf page 7
This data is not beautiful.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2024
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This data is depressing u_u
Yeah, I need more than two samples. If we went with 1976 and 2000 I'm guessing it would be reversed.
Unfortunately this is legit. Pretty much every democracy index such as the EIU’s find similar results, with democracy peaking somewhere between on or two decades ago, and consistently deteriorating since. I wrote my bachelors thesis (a decent while ago) about this very phenomenon. (Democratic backsliding).
The powerful few are currently winning
It's happened more than once though, right?
I think the big thing we're all worrying about is whether this is a blip, or this is a French-revolution-style turning point. At least, that's where my mind goes. It sounds like you're qualified to help clear it up a bit.
Well last time it happened for such a prolonged period was 1930-1945, so the precedent isn’t great.
Fun. Fun fun fun. /s
Please vote, Americans; we all have a guess who Wiemar Germany is this time around.
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This is not a fun one
The first step is to identify the problem
Theres only one world pie, its deteriorating, and a tiny fraction of people own more than half of it?
The size of the pie depends on how you measure it (there's less dodos now, but more water mains, which are also nice), but sure, roughly correct.
That's kind of a separate problem, though, isn't it? The democracies of the world all have wealth inequality too. It's not as bad as in most autocracies, and I hope eventually we'll get classlessness, but we're not there yet.
(Autocracies with low wealth inequality were a thing for a while, too, but they haven't lasted, and weren't really supposed to be autocracies in the first place)
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Neoliberalism broke democracy.
People are willing to vote for someone, anyone, who promises to make things better because they're tired of bootlicking milquetoast corporatists that'll give a tax break to a billionaire but will charge you user fees for breathing.
We need to vote for politicians that will actually improve things, instead of either rainbow-bench-painting wage-thieves or protofascist grifters.
Saying "broke" implies that liberal democracy previously worked, but now doesn't. I doubt that's what you meant. The two main camps are that it still works, albeit less, and that it never worked, and either there never was a democracy or the USSR was the real democracy.
What happens when democracy itself becomes a partisan issue? What happens when Democratic Values don't correspond with continuous economic growth (or, at least, the appearance of it as reported by your news outlet of choice)? What happens when democracy becomes unpopular and demagogues are seen as a social good?
It's a paradox of sorts. If a savvy enough media campaign or a cynical set of bureaucrats can turn people against the mechanisms of self-representation, how can a democracy survive?
John Locke would tell you it can't.
People largely don't deserve democracy. They tend to choose kings, so long as they don't remember being ruled by one.
They tend to choose kings
I don't think people have a lot of agency in a liberal democracy. In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
Popular views are poorly represented, but the avenues for opposition are walled in by State and private police forces.
This sours people on what feels increasingly like a farce, and poisons popular opinion against the idea of a true functional democratic system.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
And you have no idea what you will get with an autocrat, they change over time, they make new enemies out of you, what is good for some is bad for others...
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established "mafias" vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
They also knew that a bad autocracy will always be worse than a bad democracy.
Autocracy is good for the cronies. The theory of Democracy is that you make everyone a potential crony and create political incentive for a broad egalitarian base of support.
So democracy is not just about giving people what they want or representing their views, it is about damage limitation between all the established “mafias” vying for power and a ruleset for peaceful evolution.
But in practice, this doesn't work. Cartels are an effective tool to undermine democracy via Divide and Conquer of the natural social subunits.
Mafias build strong bonds of trust and shared economic advantage at the expense of their neighbors. They form internal patronage networks that promise more than a fair share of reward for compromised ideology and ethics. They also foment superstition and FUD that polarize people against one another.
To make it worse, some modern societies hide de facto autocracy or oligarchy under democracy, which may sour you towards democracy.
The perception of hidden selfish cartels operating underneath broad egalitarian institutions is what ultimately undermine them.
That is why mass media has such a major role to play in democracy. And why privatization of media ultimately leads to a failed democracy.
Sure, a good autocracy will always be more effective and fairer than a good democracy. The greek already knew that.
The Greeks thought that. By actual empirical measures democracies do unambiguously better, beyond what can be explained by individual leaders. It comes down to autocracies never actually being one man rule, because the lower downs have their own agendas and palace intrigues, too.
The rest of my comment addresses that. The "good king" father figure does a lot of heavy lifting for autocracy in people's subconscious (even Plato's haha), but it is inevitable for a "benevolent monarch" with the mandate to "fix everything" to turn sour and abuse power, the variance of one single individual's performance and world iew is too high. Aristotle writes about some of this too.
In my experience, the politicians tend to select their voters - via gerrymander and disenfranchisement and strategic GOTV.
You're on to something, but it's more complex than that. Politicians don't get to choose shit, because they all stab each other in the back by design every election. Nobody is at the wheel. It still works better than autocracies because they have an incentive not to be openly corrupt or explicitly elitist.
Nobody is at the wheel.
There's no one single person who controls everything, but there are lots of local admins that control choke points in economy and bureaucracy.
The backstabbing is about positioning yourself. But once you're in a good spot, can extract enormous amounts of wealth with very little effort.
It still works better than autocracies
As the line between autocracy and democracy gets fuzzy, the appeal of democracy declines.
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Osama Bin Laden got what he wanted
Beyond his wildest dreams. The terrorists had the last laugh.
We had the watches, but they had the time.
Could one explanation be that democratic countries have less children, than autocratic countries?
There is a correlation but please don't draw the same conclusion as that one weird guy who has 12 children and ran out of pronounceable names that include his favorite letter.
India is like 18% of the world population, so it becoming an autocracy explains most of the population swing.
what? when did india become autocracy?
It's sliding that way, thanks to radical Hindu nationalists, but I'm not sure how it actually got recorded in this data.
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Modi is really trying his best by constructing a god-cult around his persona, building up paramilitary forces and stoking hindunationalistic pogroms. The classic autocracy/fascism setup if you will.
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It's typically not an instant thing. Below is the description from page 25 of the pdf linked by OP, from which the charts were taken; I have highlighted some mentioned timeframes. There is also a graph on page 24 showing the change over time.
India’s process of autocratization begins in earnest from 2008 and characteristically proceeded in the incremental, slow-moving fashion of the “third wave”. Over the years, India’s autocratization process has been well documented, including gradual but substantial deterioration of freedom of expression, compromising independence of the media, crackdowns on social media, harassments of journalists critical of the government, as well as attacks on civil society and intimidation of the opposition. The ruling anti-pluralist, Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with Prime Minister Modi at the helm has for example used laws on sedition, defamation, and counterterrorism to silence critics. The BJP government undermined the constitution’s commitment to secularism by amending the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) in 2019. The Modi-led government also continues to suppress the freedom of religion rights. Intimidation of political opponents and people protesting government policies, as well as silencing of dissent in academia are now prevalent. India dropped down to electoral autocracy in 2018 and remains in this category by the end of 2023.
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The more educated the people are the more likely they are to support democracy. However the fertility rate goes down with education.
Great stuff. Fuck.
How much of that can be blamed on social media?
Somewhere between none and all of it.
It would make total sense if changing the way we communicate causes a change in which social structures work, but the first theories about it (radicalising echo chambers) turned out to be empirically wrong. Now there's new theories that connect the two, but on the other hand this isn't the first episode of democratic backsliding, so it's possible they're not connected at all, or only mildly connected.
Social media is what let some people even fight back in the first place.
Yeah, the Arab spring didn't really make a huge impact in the end, but it definitely had the potential, and that was down to social media.
One of the new theories I've seen is that people, through social media, are being exposed to more viewpoints they disagree with, and radicalising in response - in other words not enough echo chambers. Using the opposite argument to support the same conclusion is suspicious as hell.
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