Power, Performance, and Legitimacy

Today, democracies remain in a potent and protracted recession, and they have retreated from the ideological struggle against autocracy. We can restore the world's democratic momentum through power, performance, and legitimacy. To rejuvenate the support for democracy across regions and generations, democracies must generate economic prosperity and opportunity while containing corruption, crime, and abuses of power. But we have seen that liberal democracies can be weak and in retreat; they need to flex muscles in defense of free and fair elections, independent media, and the rule of law. Democracy can never be secure anywhere in the world where dictatorships repress rights, censor information, and propagate disinformation. Every defense of democracy is a source of inspiration and instruction. We need to get serious again about promoting the values, experiences, requirements, and institutions of democracy. And we must do so on the scale, with the scope and ease of access in many languages, required to save it.

So the question is, how do we renew momentum for democracy in the world? I think there are three keys: power, performance, and legitimacy. That last is the belief, as Seymour Martin Lipset often put it, that the political system in place in a country is morally right and proper, the best form of government.

I will consider each of these keys, but first, let us consider the state of democracy around the globe today. I have argued for some time that the world entered a democratic recession around 2007, and that this recession has been deepening. People and organizations working on the ground to achieve, defend and improve democracy share this assessment, but it is contested among scholars. So, first and briefly, let us consider the evidence.

In determining whether a country is democratic or not, I ask if the people in that country choose and replace their leaders through free and fair elections. Elections are considered free when diverse parties and candidates can contest and campaign, people and groups are allowed to organize to support their candidates and are able to criticize incumbents, and there is a secret ballot with low political violence. Elections are free when they are conducted by neutral officials and courts, when there is a reasonably level playing field to access the media and other resources, and when there is universal adult suffrage and independent monitoring of the voting and the count.1 In many countries these conditions are compromised by unequal protections for civil liberties, widespread corruption, and a weak rule of law. This retreat from democracy has been especially among these illiberal democracies.

In distinguishing "liberal" democracies, I count those that have one of the two best scores — a 1 or a 2 — on both Freedom House scales, which rate countries on political rights and civil liberties, respectively.

Judgments about whether a country is an electoral democracy can be hard to make, and may be contested. Many democracies have undergone serious decline, but so long as they avoid outright constitutional rupture and continue to hold multiparty elections, it can be difficult to say at what point they no longer meet the minimum conditions for electoral democracy. For most observers, general consensus exists that Turkey, Bangladesh, Venezuela, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Benin have all become authoritarian regimes. Other cases, such as Hungary and the Philippines, remain more disputed.

Hungary is the country most frequently incorrectly classified as democratic, and its mistaken classification lends unwarranted legitimacy to what Prime Minister Viktor Orbán proudly describes as an "illiberal democracy." Orbán's big victory in his 2022 reelection bid "showed how autocrats can rig elections legally, using their parliamentary majorities to change the law to neutralize whatever strategy the opposition adopts."2 The test of democracy is not whether a regime holds political prisoners and imposes a pervasive climate of fear. It is a matter of whether the people can choose and replace their leaders in free and fair elections. Orbán and his Fidesz ruling party have taken near-total control of the mass media, while grotesquely gerrymandering electoral districts and intensely politicizing the civil service, the judiciary and other regulatory bodies. What Orbán is running is not an illiberal democracy; it is a very clever autocracy.