My journey through this Year of Elections began with a lesson in real democracy in a place where I had not expected to find one. I then witnessed world-changing national votes whose results, despite being relatively fair and free, contributed to the mounting global decline of democratic freedoms. And the year is ending with a sobering realization that we have misunderstood the root causes of this distressing trend.
Five weeks into 2024, I happened to be in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where a very undemocratic national election was set to take place. I had planned to pay it little attention. That might seem surprising, since it was near the beginning of a record-breaking year of ballots – 2024 had been billed as the “year of the vote” since, for the first time in history, half the world’s adults, in about 70 countries, would have the chance to cast a ballot in a national vote.
But elections alone are not democracy, and some of those votes were elections in name only.
The one in Pakistan in early February, much like the one in Russia a month later, had a preordained outcome, tightly controlled by the uniformed autocrats who’d recently been running the country. The most popular party leader, Imran Khan, had been imprisoned by Pakistan’s interim military rulers after criticizing them, and the name of his party and its symbols had been banned from appearing on ballots.
Yet in Rawalpindi that day I watched hundreds of people cluster in the streets and huddle around market stalls, sharing notes and passing along tips on which “independent” candidates were actually from Mr. Khan’s party, and how to vote for them.
This word-of-mouth information spread across the country, and by early evening the military had shut off the country’s internet (it would stay down for days) and halted vote counts in an apparent effort to prevent a majority.
In the days after Pakistan's election in February, Imran Khan supporters – whose candidate of choice was left off the ballot – took to the streets, demanding a free and fair process.Source image: Fayaz Aziz/Reuters
Victory would eventually be handed to a more military-friendly party, its legitimacy hampered by the nationwide knowledge that someone else probably won (in fact, large protests in support of Mr. Khan broke out this month).
Those Pakistanis had somehow found a way to do what voters in almost every country with an election did this year: Vote against whoever happened to be in power.
That global anti-incumbent mood, and the general spirit of popular anger and distrust behind it, has mystified many analysts and wreaked havoc in formerly stable democracies. In many ways its origins and causes are the central question of our time.
But it’s worth remembering, amid the fear and gloom, that the anti-incumbent spirit did produce some surprisingly democratic results in a handful of countries this year, as their people rose against long-entrenched regimes and rulers, sometimes replacing them.
This was especially true in the four countries of the Indian subcontinent. While Pakistani voters sent a message without achieving change, in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh the people dramatically disposed of long-entrenched ruling families who’d effectively shut down democratic opposition; in India, voters forced an increasingly autocratic Prime Minister Narendra Modi to share power with opposition parties in a minority government.
Similar acts of voter resistance against entrenched and autocratic forces were witnessed in Belarus and Botswana, and appear to be looming this month in Georgia.
However inspirational they may eventually prove to be, however, we all know that those flashes of democratic recovery are not what the elections of 2024 will be remembered for.
This was Vladimir Putin's 24th year in power, and the outcome of March's Russian elections – which independent monitors denounced as fraudulent – were a foregone conclusion.Ria Novosti/Reuters
The Nov. 5 U.S. election marked a turning point in world history, and not only for Americans. Autocratic-minded leaders and parties of intolerance across Europe, the Americas and Asia gained immediate credibility – and are likely to find active support and endorsement – after the modern world’s oldest and wealthiest democracy freely elected a notorious figure who has already stacked courts, subverted democratic institutions and attempted an insurrection to maintain power.
The only foreign leader president-elect Donald Trump mentioned positively during his campaign was Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, another leader inspired and supported by Russian President Vladimir Putin and one notorious for having transformed his country’s courts, its constitution and its media into instruments of his perpetual control, and who also won elections by campaigning on fears of imaginary “invaders” coming across the border.
But the American vote was not a singular event. It marked the culmination of almost 15 years during which the amount and quality of democracy in the world has declined every year, after decades of growth – and has declined most sharply not in countries that have experienced coups and revolutions, but in ones where voters have more or less freely chosen an anti-democratic strongman figure.
According to the 2024 annual report of the Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, only a quarter of countries today are becoming more democratic, while almost half have become less so. In almost a fifth of elections in recent years, a losing candidate or party has rejected the electoral outcome.
In every year this past decade, the amount of democracy in the world has declined, despite record numbers of elections. That is, if you measure democracy by the full suite of things that give us a free society: Rule of law, equal rights, a healthy opposition, a free and critical media, a peaceful transfer of power.
Another Sweden-based organization, the Varieties of Democracy Institute, concludes in its annual report that the level of democracy “enjoyed by the average person in the world” has now fallen to 1985 levels. There were 42 countries – 31 of which held elections this year – undergoing what they call “episodes of autocratization,” and 28 of them started out as full-fledged democracies. And those reports were published midway through the year, before the United States and several other countries held votes.
Most alarmingly, the fastest-growing group are those countries known as electoral autocracies, or sometimes illiberal democracies – that is, where a candidate or party has managed to win an election, and then has begun a process of manipulating and shutting down democratic institutions, stacking courts and ignoring or altering constitutions, disenfranchising opposition parties and disempowering critical media outlets, and rejecting the results of elections.
This process was described as “democratic backsliding” in an influential 2016 paper by Oxford University political scientist Nancy Bermeo. She observed that, while there are many ways democracies can become less democratic, two methods have been most prevalent in the past decade. The first she calls “Executive aggrandizement,” which occurs “when elected executives weaken checks on executive power one by one, undertaking a series of institutional changes that hamper the power of opposition forces,” including stacking courts and altering laws and constitutions to favour those in power.
The second she calls “Strategic election manipulation”: actions intended to ensure that the opposition can’t win, including “hampering media access, using government funds for incumbent campaigns, keeping opposition candidates off the ballot, hampering voter registration, packing electoral commissions, changing electoral rules to favour incumbents, and harassing opponents.”
A third characteristic also tends to unite these leaders: The targeting of some population, usually a minority or an immigrant group, as “invaders” or threats to safety or livelihoods.
That combination of anti-democratic strongman tactics with an angry politics of intolerance and exclusion has resonances from the last time elected parties caused such a slide away from democracy, in the 1930s.
This modern democratic-backsliding recipe first gained prominence when deployed in full by Mr. Putin in the mid-2000s. (He has expanded those techniques to include eliminating elections at the state level and murdering opposition leaders and journalists.)
In 2012, thousands of Russians defied the police to protest against Mr. Putin's return to the presidency. More than a decade later, freedom to dissent in this way is even more restricted.Andrey Smirnov/AFP via Getty Images
Various combinations of those ingredients have since been used to cement authoritarian-style power by figures including Mr. Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Mr. Modi of India and the Law and Justice party of Poland (which lost power last year but remains in control of the presidency and many institutions) – an often mutually supportive circle.
Late this year, this group was joined by South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, a devoted imitator of illiberal-right figures such as Mr. Trump, who briefly declared martial law in an attempt to remove power from the democratic opposition parties in the National Assembly, which, after the military stepped back, voted to impeach him.
Those entrenched authoritarians were joined this year by a dozen political parties in Europe including France’s National Rally and the very far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) – parties that haven’t attained power but won record numbers of seats, both nationally and in the European Parliament, enough to constrict the options for conventional political parties in several major European countries.
What this means is that hundreds of millions of people have recently chosen to vote for candidates and parties far outside the range of “normal” politics – and that the social stigma against casting a ballot for ultra-nationalist extremists, a strong taboo in families and communities in most countries during the postwar decades, has ceased to be a constraining force.
Contrary to one popular media narrative, this doesn’t mean politics have become polarized. Conventional liberal, social-democratic, green and pragmatic parties in Western countries have not generally moved to the left – in fact, the Democrats under Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Britain’s Labour Party under Keir Starmer went to exhaustive efforts to keep leftward factions and messages out of their party’s leadership and campaigns. The lone left-wing example of an elected authoritarian today is Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, who has adopted almost all of these anti-democratic strategies, including his refusal this summer to give up power after losing a second election, from a nominally far-left perspective.
Nor have all right-leaning parties fallen to the illiberal-democracy wave – Britain’s Conservative Party, for instance, had some decidedly far-right leaders this past decade but none who seriously tried to manipulate the democratic system or ally themselves with Europe’s authoritarian-Putinist right (less mainstream British parties such as Reform have done that). In general, the elected autocrats aren’t emerging from conventional conservatism – they have typically overthrown regular conservatives like an invading force, taking over hapless parties or launching their own in a frenzied bid for angry votes.
Donald Trump returns to the U.S. presidency in January after an election that his opponents, first Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris, said would be a make-or-break test of American democracy.Brian Snyder/Reuters
That flood of votes has given extra urgency to the big question of our time: Why are so many people in successful and prosperous democracies choosing to vote for candidates who are antithetical to the fundamental values of their country and community, and usually harmful to their own interests?
When the democratic backslide began a decade ago, it seemed natural to many observers that it must be voters responding to negative changes in their circumstances. After all, the most famous electoral shift to authoritarianism, in the 1930s, was widely thought to have been a response to the hardships of the Great Depression.
A number of authors and scholars in the mid-2010s promoted the notion that these votes were coming from the “left-behinds,” those who had been thrust into poverty and unemployment by globalization and technological progress, their jobs threatened by immigration. Tellingly, some of the most popular books of the 2010s on the supposedly far-right motives of the “left-behinds” were written by figures who went on to become players in the authoritarian right themselves – including J.D. Vance, whose 2016 work Hillbilly Elegy popularized the “left-behinds” thesis in North America and who is now Mr. Trump’s vice-president-elect.
But the past eight years have sharply contradicted that thesis. The 2008 economic crisis and its immediate aftermath did not cause a rash of far-right votes – more countries went in the opposite direction during that period – but the buoyant moment of low interest rates and recovering consumer spending eight years later did. The economic devastation of the peak pandemic years caused a mass voter shift away from populist-right parties and toward the mainstream in Europe and North America in 2020 and 2021 (Mr. Biden’s and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s victories occurred during this rush to the safety of the centre).
But the biggest upsurge in illiberal-right victories has been during the current two-year boom in living standards, employment and equality – and the people doing the voting are not disproportionately poor or unemployed.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the United States, which in 2024 was experiencing full employment while its incomes and living standards had risen far faster and further than inflation – especially among low-income earners, who saw their inflation-adjusted earnings rise by 13.2 per cent between 2019 and 2023 (and probably even more in 2024). That caused several years of sharply declining income inequality in the U.S., driven mainly by increases at the bottom, giving low-income voters their highest living standards and purchasing power in decades. The Democrats could have truthfully run on the 1950s campaign slogan of British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: “You’ve never had it so good.”
But they still would have lost. Polls show that Americans voted for Mr. Trump not out of economic hardship, but out of a counterfactual belief that something must be wrong with the economy, or with illegal immigration (which ceased to be a significant phenomenon in 2024), or with the world in general. The voter response was not economic but cultural – and it was driven not by reality but by the fictions of the leading candidate.
Under a slogan of 'Trump will fix it,' Mr. Trump rallied his supporters at New York's Madison Square Garden in late October, where one speaker denounced Ms. Harris as 'the Antichrist' and a comedian likened Puerto Rico to a floating island of garbage.Andrew Kelly/Reuters/Reuters
This shift to cultural beliefs and narratives and away from economic self-interest, unfortunately, is not only the case in the United States.
A major new data-analysis study by Thomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace looks at changing measures of economy and equality in 12 countries that have experienced democratic backsliding – including the United States – to test the claim that “democracies are failing to deliver adequate socioeconomic goods to their citizens, leading voters to forsake democracy and embrace antidemocratic politicians.”
Their data show that in nine of those 12 countries, poverty, unemployment and inequality were declining, and citizens were experiencing growth in after-inflation income and living standards, in the five-year period before the “backsliding” election. In only three – Brazil, Hungary and Tunisia – was there an economic downturn capable of producing voter anger in the pre-election years.
“Backsliding is less a result of democracies failing to deliver,” they conclude, “than of democracies failing to constrain the predatory political ambitions and methods of certain elected leaders.”
Democratic-minded parties shouldn’t be searching their souls to find out where they went wrong with voters – they should be fighting to put up better security fences to protect the constitution and prevent authoritarian-minded demagogues from seizing control of their parties and undermining their core values with angry fictions.
That effect is described by Pippa Norris, a Harvard University political scientist known for her big-data analyses of voter decisions around the world, in the introduction to her forthcoming book The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.
“First, societal modernization triggers cultural shifts that threaten traditional social conservatives,” she concludes. “Second, authoritarian populist parties and leaders exploit this resentment to gain power and dismantle formal institutional checks and balances.”
Democratic backsliding occurs, she writes, “where states have formal democratic constitutions, but informal governance norms have gradually eroded among elites and citizens, loosening constraints [against] the abuse of executive powers by strongman leaders.”
In other words, we need to stop blaming the voters and leaning on sociological explanations involving immigration, inequality or economic marginalization; instead, we need to see what has gone wrong with political parties – especially once-moderate conservative parties – and their inability to defend themselves against exploitative extremists.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban has followed Mr. Putin's example to get Hungary's public institutions, courts and news media under the control of his party.Reuters
Democracy Erodes From the Top.
That succinct conclusion, summarizing observations in dozens of countries, is the title of the most informative recent book on the crisis in democracy, published last year by Larry Bartels of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Vanderbilt University.
His research, focused on Europe but equally applicable to North America, finds not only that the actual experiences of voters have little to do with the shift to the anti-democratic right, but that voters themselves have not really shifted away from democratic normalcy.
Voters in Europe, his research finds, “are no less trusting of their politicians and parliaments than they were two decades ago, no less enthusiastic about European integration, and no less satisfied with the workings of democracy. Anti-immigrant sentiment has waned. Electoral support for right-wing populist parties has increased only modestly, reflecting the idiosyncratic successes of populist entrepreneurs, the failures of mainstream parties, and media hype.”
There is scant evidence that masses of voters have actively become supportive of anti-democratic politics. Core beliefs have changed little – in fact, there is considerable evidence in Europe and the United States that median voters have actually become more progressive. In countries where anti-democratic strongmen have cemented themselves into power – Dr. Bartels points to Hungary today and Poland until the end of 2023 – it occurred “not because voters wanted authoritarianism but because conventional conservative parties, once elected, seized opportunities to entrench themselves in power.”
Anti-government protesters mock Mr. Orban as a fascist in 2018, when he introduced a new labour code increasing the maximum amount of overtime for workers. Mr. Orban's party returned for another term in 2022, and will next face a general election is in 2026.Marko Drobnjakovic/The Associated Press
The worldwide wave of anti-incumbent anger experienced this year appears to have been rooted in the experiences of the pandemic, when citizens of most democracies endured a frightening period of genuine economic insecurity and, sometimes for the first time in their life, being explicitly told what to do by their governments, which then cut off aid during the recovery. Government public-health actions saved hundreds of millions of lives but seem to have turned large blocs of citizens, around the world, against whoever was in power. And it has been the power-seeking demagogues of the far right, in many countries, who have exploited that worldwide mood.
Voters are casting ballots for whoever is not in power, not specifically for extremists. But situations like the coming German election (triggered by a Dec. 16 non-confidence vote), which is very likely to put both major mainstream parties in power in yet another “grand coalition,” leave nothing but the angry fringe as an alternative for many voters. The demagogues, in that view, are merely surfers atop the anti-incumbency wave.
The conclusions of those scholars – that democracy is eroding from the top, that our fellow citizens have not become antidemocratic extremists, even if they were persuaded vote for them in 2024 – provide a small measure of hope at this dark moment.
So do those voters in Pakistan I met early this year. They, and the citizens of other countries that overthrew the elected autocrats, showed me what we might hope for in the next years – the electoral system, exploited by power-hungry opportunists to undermine democracy, might later be seized by millions of citizens to restore it.