Political scientists, legal analysts and policymakers warned about weaknesses in global democracy at a virtual panel event Sept. 25.
Sanford J. Ungar, director of the Free Speech Project, moderated the panel, titled, “Is Democracy a Democratic Form of Government?” to evaluate the challenges that democratic ideals face worldwide from authoritarian regimes and populist rulers. The panel, co-sponsored by Georgetown’s Free Speech Project and the Future of the Humanities Project, a collaboration between Georgetown and Oxford University that examines humanities in public life, featured two researchers and two members of the United Kingdom’s House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament in the United Kingdom, as panelists.
Adrian Shahbaz, the vice president of research and analysis at Freedom House, a nonprofit nonpartisan pro-democracy organization; Ronald Krotoszynski, director of the Program in Constitutional Studies & Initiative for Civic Engagement at the University of Alabama School of Law; and Shami Chakrabarti and William Wallace, members of the House of Lords, served as panelists.
Shahbaz said democracy’s advancement has stalled and even begun to reverse throughout the past 18 years due primarily to authoritarian crackdowns on political dissent worldwide.
“The one indicator that has driven the decline in global freedom is a decline in freedom of expression,” Shahbaz said during the panel. “It’s been a certainly gloomy trend.”
Shahbaz said democratic backsliding in existing democracies typically begins with restrictions on civil liberties.
“There’s a legal component of this where it’s almost a gradual heightening of laws and regulations to restrict or even criminalize parts of civil society,” Shahbaz said.
Chakrabarti said this decline also comes from pervasive inequality, as the concentration of wealth takes power away from the people and vests it in billionaires and corporations.
“The new imperium is not the British Empire or the American empire, or even China,” Chakrabarti said at the event. “The new imperium is an imperium of billionaires who are so wealthy that they are wealthier than countries. They can buy and sell politicians. They can influence elections. They can incite riots.”
Wallace said developing nations often bend rules to encourage business, leading to this wealth concentration.
“Democracy has to be nationally based, and when you see government beginning to bend regulation to favor people they want to give contracts to, you are beginning to weaken democracy,” Wallace said.
Chakrabarti said populist leaders pose a political risk to democracies by sowing division rather than democratic institutions.
“For me, the definition of somebody who is a populist threat to democracy is someone who does not believe in those institutions, does not believe in the rules of the game, does not take a bipartisan approach,” Chakrabarti said.
Shahbaz said the dangers of populism include ethnic nationalism, which asserts the identity of the majority over that of the minority. He pointed to examples of Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary; Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India; and former U.S. president Donald Trump as leaders who incite tensions and threaten the rights of minorities.
“It’s essentially a backlash against pluralism,” Shahbaz said. “They’re trying to shift the idea of democracy away from liberal democracy, the idea of balancing majoritarian rights with minority rights. Instead, it’s full-on majoritarianism.”
Krotoszynski said the proliferation of disinformation and misinformation has created distrust in democratic institutions and discouraged dialogue, bolstering these leaders.
“People in the U.S. don’t engage,” Krotoszynski said at the event. “They’re in tribes and polarization is off the charts.”
Krotoszynski said this dynamic means populist politicians have no incentive to educate voters and instead continue to manipulate truth.
“How do we operate democracy in a marketplace of political ideas that’s full of sewage?” Krotoszynski said.
Wallace said the influence of anti-democratic forces is particularly dangerous because democratic institutions are fragile.
“Working to hold up democratic standards and democratic culture is a constant thing we have to work on, otherwise it slips away,” Wallace said.