More people are voting this year than ever before, in what the Economist called the “biggest election year in history” — with at least 64 countries (and the European Union) holding elections, including 6 of the 10 most populous nations. It is yet unclear how these elections will change the world, but with half the year remaining, we went to political scientists, country watchers and others to get a report card, look at which countries are trending toward or away from democracy, and just what it means for the United States of America.
Just this summer, there are parliamentary elections being held in Bulgaria (June 22), the United Kingdom (July 4) and Guinea-Bissau (July 15); presidential elections in Chad (June 26) and Mauritania (June), and other elections in Ethiopia (June 28), Mongolia (June 29) and Rwanda (July 28). That’s coming off of the past week with South Africa, India and Mexico completing their historic elections.
More than simply transitional, Indian politician Derek O’Brien calls this “the conflict year” since so many people are voting in countries “ruptured by conflicting ideologies.” The shocking number of Mexican candidates who were killed this past election cycle (37 total, plus one female mayor murdered the day after the election) — a country which just named it’s first-ever female president — is illustrative of the real challenges that exist even for established democracies.
“Will they slip further into illiberalism, or start climbing to freedom?” asked Canadian writer Doug Saunders about the many voting countries. Al Jazeera journalists have called this “democracy’s biggest test ever,” citing political sociologist Andrew Perrin of Johns Hopkins University who called this a “watershed year” for democracy itself.
It’s “not just an election year,” wrote Koh Ewe for Time magazine. “It’s perhaps the election year.”
Halfway through 2024, what’s happened so far? While some see evidence of an almost unstoppable populist dominance, others reject that conclusion and believe there’s more to the story, including plenty of reasons to be encouraged.
Populism on the march?
Much has been said in recent years about the rise of populism around the world, which New York Times columnist David Brooks argues is “the dominant global movement.”
Brigham Young University professor Kirk Hawkins leads a global scholarly network studying populism’s causes and consequences. As defined by this ground-breaking project, populists “tend to frame politics as a battle between the virtuous ‘ordinary’ masses and a nefarious or corrupt elite — and insist that the general will of the people must always triumph.”
This dark mindset can integrate with various ideologies, and shows up on both sides of the political spectrum (a popular quiz they created helps anyone see “how populist are you?”).
In his own mid-year grade of the 2024 elections so far, Brooks concludes that “populists have thrived in election after election.” In addition to the reelection of incumbent populist leaders in India and Indonesia and the strength of populist parties in Portugal, Slovakia and the Netherlands, Brooks observes that European elites are “bracing” for the upcoming European Parliament elections (which start this week).
“If the polls are to be believed,” this columnist predicts the parliament is about to “shift sharply to the right,” with populist parties likely to triumph in nine member states: France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland and Slovakia.
“We could be in one of those magnetic years in world history,” Brooks suggests, similar to 1848 and 1989, when “events in different countries seem to build on one another, when you get sweeping cascades that bring similar changes to different nations, when the global consciousness seems to shift.”
Yet compared with earlier pivotal moments which heralded a growth of global democracy, Brooks believes “this year we’re likely to see all those widely in retreat.”
Democratic glimmers
Brigham Young University political scientist Darin Self argues these “wave of populism” fears can be overstated. Drawing on his own study of democracy and authoritarianism, he offers a more encouraging assessment of recent elections: “Established parties have held off anti-system challengers repeatedly. Labour is going to make strong gains in the U.K., (Narendra) Modi just lost his majority in India, elections in Taiwan went smoothly without any major shifts, the ANC in South Africa continues to bleed support, and pro-democracy coalitions have had success recently in Turkey and Poland.”
In short, there is evidence throughout the world of people voting in a way that shifts the balance of power in their respective countries. Rather than the status quo continuing an unstoppable momentum, these systems — however imperfect — are demonstrating their ability to give their citizens a say in how things should change.
University of Utah professor John Francis, an expert in European politics, likewise points toward evidence of “democratic competition” that is “lively and making a difference” in various countries. Along with voters forcing coalition governments in both India and South Africa, he points to Taiwan’s “very lively democracy,” which cast courageous votes recently — along with the fact that Mexico’s people chose to elect a Jewish female president in a place where Judaism represents a “small religious minority in that country.”
“Despite real challenges to democracy,” he says, there are “a number of thriving democracies to celebrate.”
Laura Gamboa, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah and an expert in Latin American politics, also points to Guatemala’s opposition party overcoming “massive obstacles to defeat an incredibly entrenched governing elite” the previous year, and a similarly surprising result in Honduras in 2022.
“Democracy is a marathon, not a sprint,” she emphasizes. “Oppositions who are able to survive ... eventually get windows of opportunities they can take advantage of to win elections and reshape institutions.”
“I don’t want to overstate the happy part of the story either,” Hawkins adds. The democratic picture around the world has “been negative for 20 years — and it’s hard to find success stories more than failure.” But he says that “mingled in there are these countries that surprise everyone — where the forces that support democracy are stronger.”
These hopeful signs complicate the picture, this professor says, so it’s not just “a straight story of democratic backsliding everywhere,” but rather, of “sliding backwards and forwards.”
“Are populist parties on the upsurge everywhere?” he asked. “No, because it goes back and forth. A populist takes power. Then the people say, ‘Well, we didn’t like that — then someone else wins the election who may be more moderate.’” For instance, he highlights evidence that the newly elected Ecuador and Mexican presidents are not as populist as their predecessors.
Something going on deeper than populism?
Hawkins points out that national commentaries tend to focus on only one kind of populism — right-leaning populism. “There are also left-wing populism,” he underscores — something that often predominates in South America.
“Are you worried about populism, or are you worried about the radical right?” he asks, pointing out that the word “populist” can sometimes be “thrown in as a pejorative” in American discourse to make a legitimate critique “sound worse.”
Even while acknowledging “there is more populism now than it was,” this international expert on populism suggests that there is perhaps something more fundamentally at play. He highlights the emergence of an “ideological and social polarization around left and right issues” wherein people have a “hard time talking about the other side without showing a certain deep kind of anger and paranoia.”
This “bigger trend” involves seeing our political opposites in “Manichean terms — as enemies and not just opponents” and as people we see as a “threat” to our “way of life.” And “there’s a little truth to that,” Hawkins pointed out, “because we have some deep issues that divide us” — serious questions about core issues that “do seem threatening” and which “stir up a lot of feelings on both sides.”
By way of illustration, one commenter on Brooks’ story recapped the concern among conservatives that the Biden administration had “opened the southern border.” As this man put it, “Americans of all stripes recoil at what appears to be a full-on invasion. Did the progressives in his administration who ushered in this policy really think there would be no backlash?”
“People are getting angry with each other over concrete issues,” Hawkins reiterates — which leads to an escalating cycle where “the more scared you get to the other side and react to them, they react to you” in a cycle that “seems to feed on itself.” Each side “becomes more radical because they feel they have to.”
All eyes on America
Against this backdrop, some have wondered whether current political dynamics in America are simply part of a global sea change, or significantly shaping these broader international dynamics.
“President Biden and Trump are being tossed about by global conditions far beyond their control,” Brooks concludes. “It’s a mistake to analyze our presidential election in America-only terms.”
For a country which has represented itself as exceptional on the world stage for many years, this columnist goes on to note the strikingly “ordinary” political attitudes showing up in American surveys of overall pessimism, hostility to elites and authoritarian tendencies, which are all roughly in line with global averages.
Instead of “standing out as the champion of democracy, as a nation that welcomes immigrants, as a perpetually youthful nation energized by its faith in the American dream,” Brooks notes that the nation is “now caught in the same sour, populist mood as pretty much everywhere else.”
And the world is watching what happens next. For instance, Gamboa of the University of Utah said that Latin America has “always paid close attention to what happens in the U.S.,” which is “very consequential for the region.”
Noting how leaders and voters in South America tend to “emulate” the United States “in many respects,” political scientist David De Micheli, who specializes in Latin American elections, said that even with the long history of populism in the region, “it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say conservatives in Brazil, for example, felt more comfortable embracing (Jair) Bolsonaro in 2018 partly because the U.S. had elected Trump.”
Likewise, Chris Karpowitz, senior scholar at the Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy and a professor of political science at BYU, writes that “Europe is watching closely what happens in 2024″ — emphasizing that “the outcome is likely to have important implications for the survival of NATO, the war in Ukraine, and a host of other issues that affect Europe.”
Francis expressed the concern in Europe that “Washington’s support for Ukraine will diminish substantially if Donald Trump wins the election.” Especially if a newly elected Trump demonstrates more support of Putin and less for NATO, he predicted this “could result in a permanently fractured western alliance.”
McKay Coppins highlighted in the Atlantic this week the extent of these anxieties in Europe — citing a Polish graduate student, Agnieszka Homańska, who said, “I fear that the old United States that we all almost revere” is “now sort of self-sabotaging. And by consequence, it will jeopardize the safety and security of the entire global order.”
It’s more than just the outcome of the U.S. election’s outcome people are watching, professor Gamboa says, emphasizing international “perception of the quality of democracy in the U.S. more broadly.” Whereas the U.S. has been seen for many decades as a leading nation in democracy and an example to follow, “in the last 10 years, politics in this country has shown democratic institutions are fraught, at risk and not as strong as everyone thought they were.”
The benefit of ‘looking democratic’
Of course, in a number of these elections finished (Russia) or soon to happen (Iran, Syria), there are what Francis calls “serious concerns about the validity of the contest” — pointing to obvious signs like opposition leaders not being allowed to participate.
Soon after the recent Russian election, international news outlets sought to share results objectively. But Annie Applebaum pushed back, writing in The Atlantic, “There was no election in Russia last weekend. There was no campaign. There were no debates, which was unsurprising, because no issues could be debated.”
“Russians did line up at polling stations, but these were not actually polling stations. They were props in an elaborate piece of political theater, a months-long exercise in the projection of power and brutality.”
In such fully authoritarian regimes (including Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba), Gamboa notes, presidents are so unpopular that they couldn’t win real elections. So countries create “window-dressing elections” where the opposition is not allowed to compete — complete with “opposition parties” that are really not opposition parties, but instead spin-offs from the government or former opposition parties commandeered by the government.
Gamboa differentiates these from “competitive authoritarian regimes,” which allow an opposition to exist, but which makes it very hard for them to compete — harassing opposition actors, redistricting voters to be favorable to retaining power, and giving the opposition little access to media and resources. Yet a country like this retains some degree of civil and political liberties and widespread suffrage.
If voting is indeed a “a civic sacrament,” in the words of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, former president of the University of Notre Dame, then Applebaum calls the “elections” in the most authoritarian states a “grotesque charade” of the same. “By holding this non-election and calling it an election,” she says, a regime ultimately “mocks democracy itself.”
Still, some experts see a silver lining here, given the fact that even nations that flout democratic principles want to appear as if they aren’t. A 2023 survey by Open Society Foundations of more than 36,000 respondents from 30 countries found 80% of respondents saying they wanted to live in a democracy.
Preserving democratic ideals
“Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction,” then-Gov. Ronald Reagan said at his 1967 inauguration. “It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. And those in world history who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”
Echoes of the same sentiments were heard from these political scientists in Utah. Gamboa emphasized the unwritten agreements and “informal institutions” upon which more formal democratic structures are based — something outlined in Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq’s “How to Save a Constitutional Democracy.”
“Once these agreements are not respected by one group, there is no reason for others to respect them at all.”
“American civics understanding is at a low in my lifetime,” said Dave Kirkham, president of the International Society, noting how few people seem to be “paying attention” to the history of these democratic practices. “We haven’t been teaching our children these things.”
“This is the first time I’ve seen that there’s a rising generation that doesn’t seem to think the foundation is even important” and doesn’t understand “the constitutional principles on which we’re based.”
By this former professor’s telling, this shows up conspicuously in the lack of a common political vocabulary. “In the past, Democrats and Republicans argued with each other, but they all came from the same basis. They tried to bring about policies based on the same principles overall.”
The absence of this common ground continues to general significant challenges here and abroad. “I used to say I wish I had lived in a historical time where super interesting things were happening,” Kirkham said. “I don’t say that anymore. These are really interesting times.”