This article appears in the Witness section of the spring 2020 issue of the New Humanist. Subscribe today.
In recent years, parties and politicians running on “anti-system” platforms have triumphed in elections in the US, France, Italy, Spain and Greece, to name but a few. That trend could be explained by new research which shows an alarming rise in dissatisfaction not just with the results of democratic processes, but with the processes themselves.
Researchers at Cambridge University’s Centre for the Future of Democracy analysed the biggest global dataset on attitudes towards democracy, based on four million people in 3,500 surveys. The findings, published in January, make sobering reading. Across the world, a record 58 per cent of people are now dissatisfied with democracy. This is particularly acute in developed countries, with 61 per cent of people in the UK expressing dissatisfaction.
The study has tracked views on democracy since 1995 but has data for some countries going all the way back to the 1970s. The long-term picture is of a steady increase in satisfaction with democracy through to the end of the 20th century – and then a shift towards rising dissatisfaction over the last decade. The figures undermine the once popular idea that faith in democracy will inevitably grow over time. As James Miller, author of Can Democracy Work? told New Humanist in an interview in late 2018: “After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a lot of people also assumed that liberal democracy is the logical end of political history, and that the world was on the right political path. Those assumptions were obviously mistaken.”
The Cambridge study was not directly concerned with identifying causes, but the researchers suggest that short-term crises, notably “economic shocks, corruption scandals and policy crises”, had “an immediately observable effect upon average levels of civic dissatisfaction”. Looking specifically at the UK, the authors cite the Iraq war, the MPs’ expenses scandal and the Brexit stalemate. The 2008 financial crisis was highlighted as a major global factor. The study warns that the global rise of populism is a symptom rather than a cause of lost faith in democracy.
Democracy is not an abstract ideal but a system, and institutions need to work for citizens. As Miller said in 2018: “The modern faith in democracy is sometimes otiose, even perverse. It should be tempered by a certain humility, and sense of ‘the enigma of life’, as Vaclav Havel once put it. We shouldn’t let democracy be turned into a pseudo-scientific utopia.” No matter how unpalatable the outcomes might sometimes be, democracy remains the best system we’ve got. These findings remind us that it cannot be taken for granted.
