Dictators and even voters can turn elections into mere pageantry.
The greatest paradox of modern politics is that there are more elections than ever before in human history, and yet the world is becoming less democratic.
Voting will take place in more than 60 countries this year—an unprecedented number—containing roughly half of the global population. But even with all this voting, democracy is under severe threat, endangered by predatory politicians who rig elections and disgruntled voters willing to hand over power to autocratic leaders. The most pivotal election will take place in November, when the world’s most powerful democracy decides whether to turn itself over to an avowedly authoritarian demagogue.
To make sense of this paradox requires understanding why democracy is on the decline. Recent shifts in geopolitics, technology, and economics, alongside the rise of authoritarian populism and innovative election-rigging techniques, have created a tsunami that threatens to sink democracies across the globe.
Read: The dictator myth that refuses to die
After World War II, democracy was scarce and deeply flawed. Most democracies were in Western Europe and North America, and they weren’t fully democratic (many political scientists don’t consider the United States a full democracy until the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Much of Latin America moved toward democracy in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, in the 1990s, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe began to hold multiparty elections for the first time.
That democratic surge took place largely because the Soviet Union collapsed. During the Cold War, developing nations were treated like interchangeable pawns on a global chessboard, where their value was tied to whom they supported, not how they governed. The United States professed a passionate ideological defense of democracy but routinely supported grotesquely undemocratic regimes, so long as they sided with Washington over Moscow. Sometimes, the U.S. even toppled democratic regimes to replace elected foes with despotic friends. The threat of defection from West to East was ever present, and when democratic push came to geopolitical shove, geopolitics often won out.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States abruptly dominated a unipolar world, in which it was the sole superpower. Suddenly, there was only one game in town—shaped predominantly by the United States. No rival came close. (China’s GDP in 1991 was just $413 billion, 43 times smaller than it is today.) As a result, America no longer faced geopolitical trade-offs between standing up for democratic ideals and losing potential allies. At the same time, popular anger against corrupt autocrats crested, and the number of elections soared. Democracy had won, and a new international norm emerged in a blink: The path to legitimacy now required holding elections. In the span of a few years, virtually every country held some form of an election, even if many of them—as in Iraq or Turkmenistan—were merely “election-style events” aimed at legitimizing a dictator.
The astonishing shifts of the 1990s seduced many into believing that democracy was inexorably on the march and that the days of dictators and corrupt crooks were numbered. Washington was seduced. The “end of history” had arrived. Formally, this illusion became known as the transition paradigm: the assumption that all undemocratic countries were simply in the midst of a transition, moving slowly but steadily toward democratic governance.
If only. According to multiple indices, democracy has been eroding for more than a decade, and Freedom House data show a consistent decline from 2006 to 2021. Every year, the number of countries moving toward democracy has been smaller than the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, not democracy, is on the march.
That decline of democracy—formally known by political scientists as “democratic backsliding”—has obliterated the transition paradigm. Now an ever-growing typology of terms describes regimes that are edging between dictatorship and democracy: competitive authoritarian, electoral authoritarian, anocracy, to name a few. (They don’t exactly roll off the tongue and are rarely heard outside of political-science conferences.) My own term is counterfeit democracy. A key feature of these regimes is that they adorn themselves with the trappings of democracy and pretend to be something they aren’t, hoping to fool not just their citizens but also the international community. The goal is to appear democratic, while ensuring that elections are not contests so much as pageantry. By design, the opposition will lose.
After the Cold War, most countries became counterfeit democracies—authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes masquerading as something they weren’t, with quasi-democratic institutions. The 1990s surge of elections also brought the swift education of the dictators, despots, and their henchmen who sought to rig them. As autocrats figured out how to manipulate voting and bend seemingly democratic institutions to their whims, incumbents held elections but rarely lost. Russia’s upcoming vote, in which Vladimir Putin will again sail to a rigged victory, is not an election, but an election-style event.
Some rigging innovations have been ingenious, others laughably brazen. In one municipal election in Russia, two men with the same name as the incumbent candidate—Oleg Sergeyev—were enticed to put their name on the ballot, ensuring that the incumbent’s supporters would be unsure which of three boxes to tick and therefore split their vote three ways. These days, some Russian jurisdictions seek to make name duplicates less effective by putting photos of the candidates on the ballot. No matter! Just find people who look like the candidate and get them to change their name. In 2021, in St. Petersburg, voters were presented with three look-alikes, all named Boris Vishnevsky.
Many, if not most, elections these days are of low or middling quality, as despots have gotten better at using the appearance of democracy to tighten their grip on power. Making matters worse, Cold War dynamics are back, as China now credibly threatens Western dominance of the international order. In strategically important countries such as Thailand, the West—and the United States in particular—can push for democracy only so hard before recalcitrant rulers start to see China as the more alluring ally. Therefore, democracy has once again fallen down the priority list when Europe and the U.S. make hard-nosed calculations of realpolitik.
The authoritarian poison is not just contaminating weak and fragile counterfeit democracies, but also spreading to places that once seemed like robust bastions of democratic governance. Authoritarian populists have surged in popularity and power across Europe, from Hungary and Poland to Italy and the Netherlands, and, since 2016, in the United States.
The problem in these rich democracies is not election rigging. (Notwithstanding Donald Trump’s lies about a “stolen election,” American elections are exceptionally accurate with vote tabulation, though they are manipulated through gerrymandering and voter suppression.) Rather, it’s a toxic cycle: Governance is dysfunctional, so politicians fail to deliver for voters—and voters respond to those failures by contemplating whether authoritarian rule might be better.
Surveys have shown a worrying decline in Americans’ commitment to democracy. In 2006, 94 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that democracy “is better than any other form of government.” By 2019, that same figure was down to just 71 percent. Similarly, in 1995, 75 percent of Americans found the notion of having a “strong leader who does not have to bother with Congress and elections” undesirable. In 2017, just 62 percent rejected that possibility. The number of authoritarian voters is growing—in the United States and around the world.
The trend coincides with the breakdown of reliable information pipelines to voters—and their replacement with a splintered media space where malevolent conspiracists and polarizing fools can develop enormous followings and amplify their lies. A third of Americans believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. One in four Americans believes that January 6 was an “inside job.” Those lies matter because they lead people to misidentify who the authoritarians are, such that those who are subverting democracy wrongly imagine that they are saving it.
Unfortunately, the erosion of democracy in the United States will accelerate the decline of democracy globally. In the 1990s, U.S. democracy was imperfect, but Washington wielded enormous soft power, and countless countries sought to emulate the success of the American system. Now the aspirational power of the United States has been decimated by years of political chaos and incipient violence. Who looks at the past decade of Washington politics and thinks to themselves, If only we could import that system?
Despots also understandably doubt whether Washington really believes its own bromides about democracy. President Joe Biden has reiterated America’s commitment to democracy—and has twice held a Summit for Democracy to showcase it—but the damage has already been done.
Read: In America’s competition with China, democracy could lose
Former President Trump made a habit of praising dictators and expressing support for their abuses. In 2017, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey held a referendum that allowed him to consolidate power and weaken democratic constraints. International observers raised serious doubts about the legitimacy of the election, but Trump called Erdoğan to congratulate him on his successful attempt to tighten his grip on power. Then Saudi Arabia murdered Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist employed by an American newspaper, and Trump criticized Riyadh not for the murder, but for botching it: “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the cover-up was one of the worst in the history of cover-ups,” he said. After that, when asked about Khashoggi, he routinely responded by pointing to the volume of weapons that the Saudi monarchy buys from the United States. Other despots surely heard the message loud and clear, as they did when Trump bizarrely boasted about swapping love letters with Kim Jong Un.
That leaves the global order with two superpowers: an authoritarian regime in Beijing that perpetrates severe human-rights abuses, and a dysfunctional democracy in Washington that is flirting with returning an authoritarian populist to power this year. The two are not the same—China actively and enthusiastically supports authoritarianism. But the United States isn’t in much of a position to inspire, or chastise, countries that slide away from democracy. If Trump wins in November, the geopolitical headwinds against democracy will grow much stronger.
Billions of ordinary people around the world will vote this year. Some will cast meaningless ballots in sham election-style events. Others have real power and will determine not just who leads, but whether democracy has a future. If they make the wrong choice, 2024 may be remembered as the year the world embraced elections without democracy.
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