By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How to End the Democratic Recession

On August 5, following weeks of mass student protests, a dictator fell in the world’s eighth most populous country. Amid wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the escalating danger of a wider conflict in the Middle East, and the twists and turns of the U.S. presidential race, the sudden resignation and flight into exile of Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, drew slight global attention. But the significance of her ouster could prove substantial. Hasina, the daughter of the independence leader and first president of Bangladesh, first served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and was elected to the office again in 2008. In three successive terms over the next 15 years, she ruled with mounting ruthlessness and resolution. She asserted personal control over the courts, prosecutors, government agencies, and the police, using them to silence the media, persecute her opponents, cow private business, and subvert the institutions and traditions that previously allowed for reasonably free and fair elections. By the time Bangladeshis voted again, in 2014, Hasina had so trampled on constitutional norms that most opposition parties chose to boycott the election, accelerating the country’s descent into autocracy and misrule.

Yet Bangladesh’s civil society refused to remain silent in the face of a rising tide of arrests and disappearances. In January 2024, as Hasina prepared to glide into a fourth consecutive term in another unfair election (which also was boycotted by the opposition), popular protest intensified. In June, the dam burst. The trigger was a seemingly modest issue: the reinstatement of a quota system for government jobs that was seen to favor Hasina’s political base. Bangladeshi university students took to the streets, angered by the prospect of a spoils system. Hasina responded with repression: her party’s shock troops joined the fray, and she sent in the police and the military. Over the next two months, hundreds of civilians were killed, more than 20,000 injured, and more than 10,000 arrested. The government’s brutality turned a limited protest movement into a nationwide civil disobedience campaign against tyranny and corruption. In the end, after losing the support of the military, Hasina fled to India.

One could argue that bringing down a dictator was an easier job in Bangladesh than it would be elsewhere. No Bangladeshi party or movement had institutionalized ideological and political control over the state, security apparatus, and economy the way revolutionary communist parties had in China, Cuba, and Vietnam, the ayatollahs had in Iran, or, to a lesser extent, Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian socialist” movement had in Venezuela. However many of the autocratic regimes that have emerged in the past decade have followed a path similar to Bangladesh’s. Corrupt leaders have hollowed out democratic institutions and established authoritarian rule behind the façade of multiparty elections. Following a common playbook, they wholly dismantled democracy in El Salvador, Hungary, Nicaragua, Serbia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Venezuela. Elsewhere, similar tools have been used to degrade democracy. However, whether those countries crossed the line into autocracy is debatable: recent examples include Georgia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Illiberal practices have also eroded the quality of democracy and the public’s support for it in Botswana and Mauritius, Africa’s oldest multiparty systems. Corrupt and domineering ruling parties in Mongolia and South Africa have overseen democratic declines, although recent elections dealt severe setbacks to both. In Mexico, by contrast, a move by Andrés Manuel López Obrador as outgoing president could further erode the country’s precarious rule of law. A new constitutional amendment requires all judges to be popularly elected, undermining the independence of the judiciary and putting the future of the country’s democracy at risk.

Most of these countries are not full-blown dictatorships. Rather, they have joined (or gravitated toward) the ranks of what the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way term “competitive authoritarian” regimes. The description encompasses a core contradiction. The ruling elites will not commit to the constitutional norms that allow for free elections and government accountability, but the people will not tolerate the complete elimination of individual freedoms, civic pluralism, multiparty elections, and at least the possibility of parties alternating in power. Many countries, such as Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania, have lingered in this halfway house for some time. Others, such as Pakistan and Thailand, do so with the added complication of militaries that hold political veto power.

The global outlook for democracy is clouded, if not downright disheartening. Political extremism, polarization, and distrust have been on the rise even in long-established liberal democracies, and doubt about the democratic commitment of one of the two major-party candidates is a major issue in the U.S. presidential race this year. But there are glimpses of sun behind the clouds. Bangladesh is not the only example. The struggle for freedom escalated in Venezuela after a stolen election in July, with the opposition presenting overwhelming evidence of its landslide victory. Thailand’s military-backed regime has faced a deepening crisis of legitimacy since courts blocked the winner of the May 2023 parliamentary elections from taking power. Turkey’s electoral autocracy looks increasingly worn and fragile, with the country’s long-ruling strongman, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, barely eking out a victory over a colorless opponent in the May 2023 presidential vote. Last year as well, stunning opposition victories in national elections brought a restoration of democratic practices in Poland and a historic opportunity in Guatemala to move past the country’s troubled history of autocracy and corruption. And the past two election cycles in Malaysia suggest a shift toward democracy after six decades of what seemed a stable competitive authoritarian regime: a makeshift coalition ended the six-decade rule of the Barisan Nasional coalition in 2018, and voters then made the principal opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, prime minister in 2022.

In other words, today’s autocrats are not invincible. Many rely on elections, albeit deeply flawed ones, to maintain an air of legitimacy. But this means they can be defeated. Determined domestic opposition fronts, backed by the larger community of liberal democracies, can reverse the trend of global democratic backsliding. To be successful, they will need to grapple with the drivers of the antidemocratic trend, weaken the pillars that prop up the fake democracy of authoritarian populism, and apply the lessons of previous successful campaigns against authoritarian rulers. Just as autocrats employ a common set of tools to acquire and maintain power, their opponents must start following the playbook for democratic change.

 

Democracy In Retreat

Democracy’s global momentum peaked soon after the end of the Cold War. For the first time in history, systems in which people could choose and replace their leaders in free and fair elections became the predominant form of government. By 2006, about three-fifths of all countries met this standard. Since then, democracy and freedom have been in steady retreat. For 18 consecutive years, the nonprofit group Freedom House—which tracks changes in political rights, civil liberties, and the rule of law and assigns countries and territories an annual “freedom score” on a scale of zero to 100—has counted more countries losing freedom than gaining it. Often, the difference is a two-to-one ratio or worse. The Swedish-based project V-Dem has identified a similar but somewhat more recent unfavorable trend.

The decline has been global. Average levels of democracy, as measured by Freedom House, V-Dem, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, have dropped in every region of the world since 2006. The changes have not always been disastrous, but they have been remarkably broad and persistent. Of the 22 sub-Saharan countries that shifted significantly on democracy scales during this period, 18 underwent declines, and of the four that improved, three—Angola, Gambia, and Zimbabwe—simply became less abusive autocracies. Globally, those three are outliers; most autocracies, including Cambodia, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Myanmar, and Russia, have become significantly more repressive.

The euphoria that attended the heady expansion of democracy from the mid-1970s to the first few years of the twenty-first century—the “third wave” of democratization—now seems a distant memory. A few places, such as Armenia, Bhutan, Colombia, Malaysia, Moldova, and Taiwan, have seen notable gains in recent years, but genuine democratic breakthroughs have been few and far between. Iran’s government crushed one popular rising, the Green Movement, in 2009 and another, the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, in 2022. All the Arab Spring uprisings were ultimately suppressed save for the one in Tunisia, where a fledgling democracy stumbled on until the president moved to dismiss parliament and the prime minister in 2021. The same year, Myanmar’s military ended an experiment in semi-democracy when it overturned the results of the country’s 2020 elections, closed parliament, and arrested senior civilian officials, plunging Myanmar into a bloody conflict.

 

Autocratic Enablers

What sent the world spinning toward autocracy? The answer varies from country to country, but certain factors stand out. To some extent, a course correction may have been inevitable as democracy spread to many countries that lacked the economic base and rule-of-law institutions to control corruption and deliver sustained progress. Yet this does not explain every case of backsliding; some very poor countries, such as Liberia and Malawi, have largely managed to keep their democratic gains.

Another driver is the series of reputational blows that liberal democracy suffered in the first decade of the twenty-first century. First, the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq tarnished the idea of promoting democracy by linking it to the use of military power to force regime change—to disastrous effect. Then, only a few years later, a global financial crisis destabilized many governments, including democratic ones. It had originated in the United States, a supposed model democracy, when the country’s mortgage industry came crashing down after a decade of government failure to rein in predatory practices.

It was not just democracies that sullied their own image; illiberal actors helped them along. China used its growing wealth, propaganda, technology, and mechanisms of covert influence to promote its authoritarian governance model and dim the attractions of open societies. The Russian government worked in similar ways to denigrate democracy and destabilize democratic institutions, such as by intervening in elections. After taking office in 2010, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban crafted a deeply illiberal pseudo-democracy that appealed to far-right anti-immigrant and nationalistic forces around the world.

At first, social media enabled citizens to circumvent autocratic states’ control of information and organize for democratic change. Although online platforms are still used for these purposes, their positive role has been overshadowed by the advance of authoritarian means of digital surveillance and repression and by the polarizing effects of social media algorithms, which autocracies can exploit to divide and demoralize democratic societies. Artificial intelligence is now beginning to supercharge these efforts.

The digital technology boom joined a snowballing set of global trends that undermined popular support for democracy and created fertile ground for the rise of illiberal populist parties. Dramatic increases in income inequality in both advanced and emerging economies meant soaring wealth for a small fraction of top income earners and economic stress for much of the middle and lower classes, which became pessimistic about the future and cynical about the parties and politicians who had failed them. Inequality then fed into political polarization, which was further intensified by the accelerating movement of diverse people, ideas, and cultures across borders and by campaigns for gender and racial equality that upset long-settled hierarchies of social status. To exploit the public backlash, politicians in many advanced democracies, particularly in Europe and the United States, framed large waves of immigration as a threat to economic health, social stability, and national character. Their rhetoric severely distorted reality, but it played to people’s fears.

These trends coincided with a historic shift in global power. From 1960 to 1990, the U.S. share of global economic output declined from two-fifths to around one-quarter, where it remains, and Europe’s share has shrunk since 1960 by roughly half. At its peak in the early 1990s, Japan accounted for nearly one-fifth of global GDP; now its share is just three percent. Meanwhile, China has risen to become the world’s second-largest economy, ranking behind only the United States, and India’s economy is now closing in on Germany’s and Japan’s. China and Russia have used corruption, coercion, and propaganda to sway and subvert open societies, and their militaries have cast long, alarming shadows in their respective neighborhoods. In sum, while Beijing and Moscow (and Tehran) bully their way into reshaping world politics, the advanced democracies, with their diminished economic and geopolitical standing, have a weakened hand and are playing it cautiously. The “unipolar moment” immediately after the Cold War, when autocrats made political decisions under the shadow of American power, is long past.

At a rally in Dhaka, Bangladesh, September 2024

Then there is the human factor. Restraint in the exercise of power is not a natural tendency. This is why the framers of the first constitutional democracy, the United States, understood the need to check and balance power, following the Madisonian principle that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” “If you want to test a man’s character,” goes one aphorism, “give him power.” Unencumbered by strong constitutional guardrails, most men—and, like Sheikh Hasina and Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi before her, some women—who get the opportunity fail the test.

Over the past two decades, critical constraints on human behavior have lifted. Ambitious politicians have observed the rhetoric and methods their peers abroad have used to dismantle democracy, piece by piece. These aspiring autocrats have learned from examples of success and acted on those lessons, emboldened by the inability of domestic and international actors to restrain them. Once, the diffusion of political ideas helped foster democratic transitions. Today, it facilitates democratic backsliding.

Furthermore, constitutions restrain rulers only if they are enforced. When these documents are embedded in norms, incentives, and expectations, violations are rare and tend to fail because powerful actors rise to reaffirm the constitutional order out of both conviction and self-interest in sustaining the rules of the game. But when severe political polarization generates a sense of existential risk—a fear that losing an election could mean the permanent loss of political power and even one’s livelihood and freedom—these dynamics change. A politician with sufficient skill and will to override constitutional norms can embark on the road to autocracy.

 

Exposing the Fraud

Today’s autocrats mainly come to power at the ballot box, and they remain in power while maintaining a façade of competitive elections. Of the roughly 30 countries that have lost their democracies since 2006, all but three (the Sahelian coup countries—Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger) have followed this pattern. Holding votes gives autocrats a claim to legitimacy, but it also makes them vulnerable. The elections they stage may be deeply unfair, but the incumbent autocrat can still lose and be compelled to leave office. To restore democracy through elections, however, domestic defenders of democracy and their supporters abroad must be able to identify authoritarian populism and understand how it works.

First, authoritarian populists purport to defend “the people”—the true, virtuous majority—against a corrupt establishment that has hijacked power and exploited them. In this narrative, there are not just good and bad policies; there are good and evil people. The ruling elites and their allies are morally bankrupt and must be vanquished, even as some of those allies, especially in the business community, opportunistically throw in their lot with the populists. Drawing so stark a divide enables the populist contender to claim a mandate to persecute opponents and purge the civil service on coming to power. Resorting to that tactic explains another key feature: populists are anti-institutional. They disparage the existing economic and political institutions, even the constitution itself, as the rotten structures of a rotten elite. Then they dismantle institutional safeguards and weaponize state power.

On a societal level, populists reject pluralism. They see no need to make space for multiple ways of thinking and believing. The country has one identity, and people who are different—by faith or ideology or national origin or sexual identity—are deviant and dangerous. They must be watched, controlled, or removed. Finally, populism is personalistic and hegemonic. Since leaders are the saviors of their countries against evil forces, they must be granted extraordinary unfettered power. Elections are no longer instruments of political accountability and constraint but rather plebiscites to revalidate leaders and their political monopolies.

Inevitably, an authoritarian populist regime becomes intolerant, xenophobic, and corrupt. More than its bigotry—perhaps even more than its violation of democratic norms—this corruption, drawn from a sense of moral entitlement to gorge on public resources, is its Achilles’ heel.

The key to defeating authoritarian populism is to expose its vanity, duplicity, and venality, to show it to be not a defense of the people but a fraud upon the people. This requires independent reporting to reveal corruption. It requires using, whenever possible, countervailing institutions—regulatory bodies, auditing agencies, the judiciary, the police, the civil service, and, if there is a significant opposition presence, the legislature—to disclose and curtail abuses of the public trust. Elements of civil society, such as bar associations, trade unions, student groups, and other professional and civic organizations, can be important allies in this cause. Resistance is more effective when mobilized early; the longer populist authoritarians hold on to power, the more they chip away at institutional constraints. One reason illiberal parties did not fully subvert democracy in Poland or, at first, in Mexico, unlike in Hungary, Turkey, or Venezuela, is that they did not win sufficient majorities in parliament or through a direct vote to amend the constitution. Enough judicial and other institutional independence remained to limit the authoritarian slide. That constraint was lifted in Mexico with the June election when López Obrador’s party won enough seats in Congress to push through constitutional change.

 

Turning the Tide

Once the authoritarian project conquers the country’s institutions, resistance from within the state is no longer possible. Mass mobilization is required to defeat it. Success is much more likely if the democratic movement is peaceful and operates within legitimate institutional boundaries. Demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of nonviolent civil resistance may slow or halt the descent into authoritarianism—or even force an autocrat to flee, as seen in Bangladesh this year and in Ukraine after the Euromaidan protests of 2014. But the most promising route is still through the ballot box. Repeatedly over the past decade, in countries as diverse as Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Guatemala, Poland, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Zambia, and—yes—the United States, democratic elections and the enforcement of term limits have curtailed an authoritarian drift. In India in May, they eroded the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s iron grip on the parliament, which might diminish the party’s readiness to abuse power to stifle dissent. In Belarus, Hungary, Turkey, and Zimbabwe, opposition campaigns fell short, unable to overcome the obstacles posed by entrenched authoritarian regimes to free and fair elections. But the progress they made is notable. In Belarus’s case, the opposition candidate for president likely won the 2020 election, but the dictator Alexander Lukashenko declared patently false results.

Opposition mobilization has worked in earlier eras, too. Globally, the third wave of democratization was driven in part by opposition movements that overcame repression and fraud by documenting their electoral victories through independent vote tabulation at polling stations and by rallying mass protests. The first successful “color revolution” to bring about a democratic transition after a disputed election unfolded in the Philippines in 1986, followed by Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004–5, and Kyrgyzstan in 2005. In a few other cases, ruling autocrats were stunned by their electoral defeats but accepted the outcome and ceded power without the need for mass protests.

Both the earlier and more recent electoral victories for democracy share other  important features. Opposition forces united behind a single electoral platform or, as in Poland last year, coordinated their parliamentary campaigns to avoid dividing the vote. In each case, the authoritarian ruling party was deeply unpopular, internally divided, or both. In some cases, external pressure from liberal democracies raised the costs of repression and encouraged defections by the elite. And the incumbents’ ability to cling to power by using blatant falsehoods and blunt force was constrained by independent media, divisions within the security forces, or the latter’s unwillingness to fire on their own people.

Successful campaigns against authoritarian populists have shared some basic messaging strategies. They craft broad political appeals to mobilize the largest possible electoral base, even courting voters who supported the autocrat in the past. They seek to unify the country, not divide it. Authoritarian populists thrive on and excel at polarization; their democratic opponents must undercut that cynical strategy. They must show empathy and humility, welcoming culturally, ethnically, and ideologically diverse segments of society to join the democratic cause. In Turkey, for example, the opposition’s astonishingly successful municipal election campaigns in 2019 and 2024 pursued a strategy of “radical love”—an explicit rejection of the ruling Justice and Development Party’s rhetoric of hate and division. Democratic aspirants, moreover, must call out the incumbent’s failures and must foreground issues that matter to ordinary voters, such as improving the country’s economic performance, ending corruption, and delivering services that will improve people’s lives. Their campaigns should recapture patriotism, emphasizing pride in the nation as a democracy. They should not be dour but rather present a confident vision of a better future. They should not be boring, either. A successful campaign is one infused with creativity, energy, passion, and even joy. Finally, as the political scientist Steven Fish has urged, those seeking to unseat an autocrat cannot be weak. They must project conviction, with forceful appeals to voters’ interests and values. They must show that strongman rule is not the only form of strong leadership.

Voting in Diyarbakir, Turkey, March 2024

External support is also critical. Lately, however, liberal democracies have been sitting on the sidelines as China and Russia stand behind autocrats who rig and terrorize their way to electoral victory, such as Lukashenko in Belarus in 2020, Emmerson Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe last year, and Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in July, or, in the case of Pakistan, as the military barred former Prime Minister Imran Khan from running for parliament in the February election. Amid heightened strategic competition with an emerging axis of autocracies that includes China, Russia, and Iran, powerful democracies, particularly the United States and major European countries, are hesitant to use all the diplomatic, informational, and economic tools at their disposal to support democratic change.

To reverse the global democratic slide, the liberal democracies must get back in the game. A test of their resolve is already underway in Venezuela, where the opposition has compiled official tallies from over 80 percent of polling stations to demonstrate that its candidate, Edmundo González, defeated Maduro in a landslide in the July presidential election. With the backing of China, Russia, and Cuba, as well as the loyalty of the country’s military and security establishment, Maduro has brutally repressed protests demanding that he acknowledge the results and peacefully transfer power. Ending Venezuela’s authoritarian nightmare, which has already prompted more than a fifth of the population, some eight million people, to flee the country over the past decade, now requires an intense diplomatic effort. Brazil, the United States, and democracies in Latin America and Europe need to coordinate their efforts to persuade Maduro and his allies to accept the opposition’s offer of immunity from prosecution in exchange for a transfer of power. Negotiations require carrots and sticks. An international coalition must not only prepare to make painful concessions on amnesty (including shielding members of the Venezuelan regime from prosecution in the United States and assuring them safe passage abroad) but also threaten the elite with punishing sanctions on their foreign assets and with blocking family visas if they continue to resist the will of the Venezuelan people.

It is rare to encounter such a glaring and well-documented example of an autocrat facing electoral defeat and a broad, passionate societal aspiration for change. Venezuela is ripe for a democratic transition, and the world’s liberal democracies must do all they can to help it along.

 

Freedom Reborn

The challenges confronting democracy today are formidable. Authoritarian regimes have gone on the offensive to discredit and destabilize free societies. That they do so out of fear and concern for their own legitimacy does not make their actions any less dangerous. Making matters worse, hostile autocracies are increasingly acting in concert in a malevolent axis that features China, Russia, and Iran at the center, joined by Cuba, North Korea, and others. Protecting democracy against such forces will take strength, agility, and tenacity. The world’s liberal democracies must enhance their external defenses and cooperate more closely to maintain an economic, military, and technological edge that denies antidemocratic adversaries the power to dominate global politics and undercut their rivals.

At the same time, as underscored by the recent electoral gains of extremist populist forces on both the right and the left in France and Germany, democratic leaders cannot neglect their internal defenses. Emerging and mature democracies alike need strategies to counter the siren song of illiberal populism. Even a long-standing liberal democracy can turn toward autocracy if its government does not deliver effective policies to combat crime and terrorism, manage national borders, soothe societal divisions, and ensure broad access to economic opportunity and security.

In their global outreach, liberal democracies must push back against authoritarian campaigns of disinformation and covert influence. They must make bigger and better-coordinated investments in development assistance to foster economic growth and the rule of law that make countries partners for democracy rather than captives of autocracy or failed states. To win the war of ideas, they need to disseminate democratic values, lessons of success and failure, and sources of true information.

The possibility of a democratic transition cannot be written off in any country. Autocracies live in fear that what happened to seemingly impregnable one-party communist regimes in the late twentieth century will happen to them. At any time, a leader’s death or a sudden crisis can open an opportunity to sweep away an entrenched autocracy. But proponents of democracy can do more than simply wait. Competitive elections, even when they are not free and fair, are mobilizing events charged with opportunity for change. When those moments come, they must be seized not only by voters but also by other democratic countries.

Ahead of an election, democracies can provide opposition groups with the funding and training they need to conduct parallel vote tabulations. They can help political parties mount more substantive and effective campaigns. They can provide technical and financial assistance to election management bodies. They can help civil society organizations identify and counter disinformation and foreign interference on social media. They can send in independent observers during the campaign, the vote, and the vote count to fortify domestic monitoring efforts. If the opposition wins and the incumbent is reluctant to step down, democracies may need to offer concessions to the defeated autocrat in exchange for accepting the results—and potentially bring withering pressure down on the regime if it refuses.

When promising opportunities for democratization arise, as witnessed this summer in Bangladesh and Venezuela, they should command focused international attention. But the agencies and networks that support democratic transitions should also keep an eye trained on elections in the years ahead. In many countries that have edged away from democracy or have not yet fully secured it, voters will continue to face critical choices at the ballot box. Elections will provide opportunities to advance democratic progress in countries such as Armenia and Malaysia; to reverse democratic backsliding in Botswana, Georgia, India, Indonesia, Mauritius, Mongolia, the Philippines, and Serbia; to achieve meaningful democracy in Gambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Thailand; to dislodge autocracy in countries where the possibility is often dismissed, such as Zimbabwe; and to someday put countries torn apart by conflict, such as Ethiopia and Sudan, on a path to peace and political accountability.

Scholars and policymakers understand what the political scientist Terry Karl once called “the fallacy of electoralism.” A democratic election is only a beginning. Without honest and effective governance, a capable state, the rule of law, an independent judiciary, and a vigilant civil society, democracy will not deliver the economic growth, physical infrastructure, social services, public health, human rights, and safety and security that its voters expect. Helping democratically elected governments gain access to the financing, investment, training, and direct assistance they need to serve their people effectively remains a vital task of official aid agencies, such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, and of private foundations.

After a two-decade democratic retreat, the tide must now turn. Competitive elections are not the end of the story, but they provide the most promising and abundant opportunities to move in a positive direction politically. A concerted strategy of international engagement to support free elections could blunt the march of illiberal populism, strengthen civil societies, help restore democratic vitality in pivotal countries, and yield the largest harvest of democratic transitions since the global democratic recession began. Once democracy regains its momentum, even entrenched dictatorships will be under pressure. The alternative is a continued authoritarian drift toward a world of increasing polarization, repression, conflict, and violence. A world dominated by China, Russia, Iran, and lesser autocracies unburdened by concerns for human rights and the rule of law. A world hostile to the interests and values not just of the United States but of freedom-loving people everywhere.

 

 

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