A democratic recession has been sweeping the globe for more than two decades, and it’s picking up steam. What explains this alarming decline? Is democracy’s failure to deliver pushing voters to embrace authoritarian candidates? Or have democratic guardrails become too weak to contain power-hungry leaders bent on subverting the democratic rules of the game?
In the April issue of the Journal of Democracy, leading scholars debate the root causes of democratic backsliding, and what can be done to stop it. Read free for a limited time.
Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter
Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability.
Francis Fukuyama, Chris Dann, and Beatriz MagaloniBeyond Performance: Why Leaders Still Matter
Delivery matters, but so do leaders’ actions. Why have so many, in both strong and weak economies, been pushing against democratic constraints on their power, and why have those constraints failed to contain them?
Thomas Carothers and Brendan HartnettPlus the essay that sparked the debate:
Misunderstanding Democratic Backsliding
If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all.
Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett
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