For this reason, elected authoritarians who wish to consolidate control typically win not by flashy displays of might, but by convincing a critical mass of people that they’re just a normal politician — no threat to democracy at all.
That means the survival of democracy depends, to an extent not fully appreciated, on perceptions and narratives. In three recent countries where a democracy survived an incumbent government bent on destroying it — Brazil, South Korea, and Poland — the belief among elites, the public, and the opposition that democracy was at stake played a critical role in motivating pushback.
On both your and daychilde’s comments here…
The system gets rigged when there are fewer people invested in the democratic process, when there are fewer people actually pursuing and participating in a democratic system. The more we outsource our democratic agency to others, the more likely those others are going to be corrupt. One of the main points of the article is that democratic backsliding is a global trend. This doesn’t mean that particular countries are democratically electing dictators, democratic backsliding means that across the world, incrementally, small policy changes are adding up to a less democratic world. These policies may have nothing to do with democracy in their discourse, but act to weaken the democratic process.
As an example, where I am from every school district has a set of trustees who are democratically elected in municipal elections and are tasked with ensuring that the local school board is following the Ministry of Education guidelines as they relate to the needs of the local community. Currently the state government is in the process of eliminating all trustees and appointing a single state ‘administrator’ to take on the role of the trustees for all districts in the state. Literally dozens of locally elected representatives are being replaced with a single state appointed administrator.
The discourse around this issue is troubling, essentially revolving around the notion that trustees are inefficient, don’t know how to properly use public education dollars and are costing taxpayers more while adding no value to the education system itself. While there most certainly is an argument to be made about efficient use of tax dollars with respect to trustees, the point that a functioning democratic institution is being replaced with a centralized authoritarian ruler is completely ignored.
The point of this story is that it is significantly easier to corrupt the democratic process, whether through a rigged election, or through manipulation, or gerrymandering, or whatever, when there are fewer people engaged in the voting process. In my state the average voter turnout for municipal elections is well below 40%. The reason people aren’t interested in the democratic backsliding that is caused by getting rid of trustees is because it is only a minority of people in the state who even bother to elect trustees in the first place.
Another important point that is being made in the article is that one way to effectively fight against threats to democracy is to call out those threats as they are. Getting rid of trustees may actually produce better outcomes in terms of efficiency, but we all have to acknowledge that getting rid of trustees is a direct threat to our democracy. An autocratic state is always going to be way worse for everyone than having some inefficiencies in the school board trustee system.
If there are more people engaged in the democratic process than there are more people who are able to critically scrutinize the democratic process. It is only when we are engaged in the democratic process that we can actually hold it accountable to us. The more people who believe in democracy, the deeper and stronger that democracy becomes.
The voting system may very well be rigged, but that doesn’t mean you have to give up on democracy entirely. In reality, it is only when a majority of people give up on democracy that any voting system can be rigged. When the majority of people believe centralized efficiency is better than local representation, for example, democracy dies. In any case, the more people participate in the democratic process the stronger that process becomes. Just always vote. That is by far the most important and effective action you can take to prevent democratic elections from becoming rigged.