Democracy and Globalization: Anger, Fear, and Hope [1 ed.] 0367461919, 9780367461911

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“This is an enormously impressive update on what we need to know about democracy. Excellent analysis of democracy’s main problems, but also a welcome outline of why we can have hope for a better global future. Really fascinating, insightful, and inspiring.” – Arend Lijphart, former President of the American Political Science Association, Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science “A quite unusual global coverage. Particularly appreciated is the inclusion of India, incredibly misconsidered in many international comparative works on democracy.” – Piero Ignazi, University of Bologna, Italy, and SciencesPo, Paris, France “Extremely timely and relevant, and likely to remain so.” – Benjamin Reilly, University of Western Australia, Australia

DEMOCRACY AND GLOBALIZATION

As democracy is disrupted by globalization, the solution is to globalize democracy. This book explores the causes of the current crisis of democracy and advocates new ways for more representative, effective, and accountable governance in an interdependent world. Part 1 analyzes the split of the middle class and the subsequent political polarization which underlies people’s dissatisfaction with the way democracy works in developed countries. It also addresses the role of political emotions, including disappointments about unmet expectations, anger incited from opposition candidates, fear induced by government, and hope wrapping up new proposals for reform and change. In Part 2, the authors argue that a more effective governance would require reallocations of power at local, national, continental, and global levels with innovative combinations of direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, international relations, political economy, and democratic theory, as well as general readers interested in politics and current events. Josep M. Colomer is a political scientist and economist who has been a professor and researcher in his natal Barcelona, Mexico City, New York, and Washington. He is a member by election of the Academy of Europe and a life member of the American Political Science Association. Author of the reference textbook The Science of Politics and two dozen books about democratization, comparative institutions, electoral systems, European politics, and global governance. Ashley L. Beale is a policy communications and public affairs professional currently at INGO GiveDirectly. She has worked for the US Senate, UNESCO in Paris, the Indian Parliament, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign team to drive issues around democracy, governance, and international development.

DEMOCRACY AND GLOBALIZATION Anger, Fear, and Hope

Josep M. Colomer and Ashley L. Beale

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Josep M. Colomer and Ashley L. Beale The right of Josep M. Colomer and Ashley L. Beale to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-46191-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-46192-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02749-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

CONTENTS

List of illustrations Introduction: The crisis and the future of democracy

viii

1

PART 1

The Great Disruption: Anger and fear 1 It is not about development, but effectiveness

5

9

2 Less bourgeoisie, less democracy

22

3 The split of the middle class

31

4 Nationalists against the European Union

42

5 Make America divided again

55

6 India, Indonesia: Poor but delivering

63

PART 2

The global future: Hope

71

7 High effectiveness requires multiple governments

73

8 Local government thrives in an open world

80

9 National democracy needs multiparty cooperation

89

10 Continental unions prosper: America, India, Europe

104

11 Global institutions prefigure a world government

115

12 There will be more democracies, but it may take a while

123

Conclusion: Should we still call it “democracy”? Bibliography Index

136

143

157

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures

1.1 Economic performance and trust in government 7.1 Support for direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts

11 76

Boxes

1.1 Mistrust of national governments and dissatisfaction with democracy 3.1 Measuring inequality

3 41

INTRODUCTION The crisis and the future of democracy

People’s dissatisfaction with the way democracy actually works and their distrust in existing institutions have skyrocketed. Their discontent largely derives from the fact that many governments have lost their previous ability to perform effectively because many collective issues now require management at larger scales than used to be the case. Sustained technological changes and the subsequent process of globalization propel the discombobulation of democracy and the governance of the world. Traditional recipes such as reinforcing national sovereignty, state capacity or ideological political parties no longer work; sometimes they may even be coun­ terproductive. The era of representative democracy focused on sovereign nationstates is over. Effective and accountable governance requires a renewed set of institutions at local, national, continental, and global levels. As democracy is disrupted by globalization, the solution is to globalize democracy. Let us explain this a little more. We see how new technologies for commu­ nication, automation, and artificial intelligence spread across boundaries and seem unstoppable. The ensuing globalization involves broad information traffic, massive human migrations, transnational capital investments, and transborder trade. Crucial parts of the economy are driven by big transnational corporations and technological platforms that escape state-based regulation and taxation. Relevant issues such as cybersecurity, refuge and asylum, capital movements, trade, energy resources, drug smuggling, terrorism, nuclear arms proliferation, or climate change require large-scale coordination and management. All this creates enormous disturbances in developed economies, most of which are nation-states with democratic regimes. Traditional sovereign states cannot work well in an interdependent world. They have lost control of many critical issues that now need to be addressed at the international or global level. Political institutions in most countries do not fit the world’s interdependence. Technological and economic globalization has been especially widespread since the 1990s. But the more recent Great Recession initiated in 2008, which mostly

2 Introduction

hurt developed democratic countries, especially in Europe and the United States, exacerbated economic dislocations, governments’ poor performance, and people’s disappointment. Nationalist backlashes have emerged almost everywhere. Our discussion suggests new ways for more effective, representative, and accoun­ table governance. Higher government effectiveness may require reallocations of powers at multiple territorial levels, each adapted to deal with issues that entail differ­ ent scales of efficiency and specific people’s demands. In general, the procedures to select representatives and high officials and to make decisions should promote effi­ ciency and policy consensus, not division and polarization. And there should be clarity of responsibility at every level to make the rulers and decision-makers accountable for their performance and results. We wonder if these complex structures can still be called “democracy” and how we may need to adapt to these new environments.

Anger, fear, and hope In the first part of the book we analyze serious economic and social changes that underlie the ongoing political crisis, especially the split of the middle class and the subsequent social and political polarization. We also look at political emotions, which have intensified in the practice of politics in recent times and are the subject of innovative psychology studies. People hurt by economic and social changes get angry and react against the rulers and the rules when their expectations are not met. In general, anger is a political emotion favorable to change from which opposition parties and chal­ lenger candidates can benefit. As in some recent crises, angry people tend to shout, “Kick them all out!” On the other side of the feud, incompetent or unlucky rulers who are unable to fulfill their previous promises or auguries may resort to inducing fear, another basic political emotion. Fear of external threats, whether enemies, competitors or immigrants, together with the suspicion that change can be for the worse, can reduce expectations, tame anger against the disappointing incumbents, and move dissatisfied citizens to resign themselves or acquiesce to the existing situation. In turn, hope emerges with rising expectations for positive change. In order not to produce new disappointments, a hopeful future for democracy needs clear and viable proposals for institutions able to provide effective policy-making. A clear division of tasks between local, national, continental, and global governments should foster multiparty and interterritorial cooperation and produce consensual policy. In the second part of the book we evaluate and discuss practices and changes that can help democracy to endure and prosper. All sources for quotes and references are reported at the end of the book. We include only two figures (in chapter 1 and chapter 7) in support of our two main arguments: First, popular support for democracy strongly depends on the government’s performance. And second, reviving and consolidating democracy in the world requires innovative institutional combinations of direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts.

Introduction 3

BOX 1.1 MISTRUST OF NATIONAL GOVERNMENTS AND DISSATISFACTION WITH DEMOCRACY Many recent surveys and accounts inspire and support our views. A Pew Research Center survey across 38 democratic countries (Wike et al. 2017) showed that more than two-thirds of people were in favor of representative democracy, and less than one-fourth would welcome an authoritarian regime. On the other hand, less than half of the people surveyed say they are satisfied with the way democracy is working in their countries. In the United States, less than one-fifth of people in recent years say they trust the government, which is a huge decline from more than three-fourths in the early 1960s. Gallup surveys show that trust in the elected legislative and the executive is lower than trust in the archetypal instance of a non-elected expert body, the judiciary, where the figure is over two-thirds. In Southern and Eastern Europe, less than one-third and one-fourth of citizens, respectively, are to some degree satisfied with the way democracy works, according to the European Commission’s Eurobarometer series. In Latin America, most people in most countries still believe that “democracy is preferable” to any other form of government. But less than onethird of those surveyed declare themselves to be, on average, satisfied with how democracy works in their country, according to Latinobarometro. All in all, trust in national governments and satisfaction with the way democ­ racy works decline, largely as a consequence of their worsening performance, in an increasingly complex environment that includes both small and very large scales of public efficiency. As interpreted by political scientist Russell Hardin (2013), declining public trust in national government may be “the inevitable result of the declining role of government in the age of economic globalization.” An optimistic reading can see in current democratic countries more critical “mistrust”— conceived as a critical and vigilante attitude regarding the rulers which “may well be inherent to vibrant democratic societies”—than disparaging “distrust” indicating a general discard of the ideal and principles of democracy, according to the distinction elaborated by political scientist Tom W. G. van der Meer (2017). It must also be noted that mistrust and dissatisfaction increase in countries where new nationalist and populist governments have been formed, while the citizens of these countries do not seem to reduce their generic support of democracy after these experiences. This suggests that it is possible to conceive future improvements of the ways democracy, as a general principle, may work in the current world. (See references at the end of the book.)

PART 1

The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Democracy is like a good marriage: Almost everybody says they would like to have it; some people get it, others do not; and many of those who get it, screw it up. Indeed, all across the world, almost everybody says they are in favor of democ­ racy. Most people in most countries so declare. Even authoritarian regimes render homage to democracy by adopting its name. Yet some countries have it, others do not. The diffusion of democracy has stal­ led in about half the countries and for just over half the population of the world, and it has not made much progress since the beginning of the century. And many existing democracies have screwed it up. In developed countries there is widespread mistrust in governments and dissatisfaction with the performance of actual democratic regimes. The people’s mood in some democratic countries began to change after the end of the Cold War by the late twentieth century. In the previous period, the threat of a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union, an invasion by Soviet troops, or a domestic communist takeover had given Western democratic rulers wide latitude for decision-making, not only on foreign policy but also on closely related domestic policies. During most of the Cold War period, most people in the United States and Western Europe were fearful of foreign threats and sought or docilely accepted their government’s protection. As a result, many rulers were able to keep state secrets, their public policy performances were not seriously evaluated, the media allowed them discrete privacy, and they gained the reverence and even devotion of the ruled. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Western democratic rulers lost an alibi for the Soviet threat, nuclear war included, and citizens lost their fear. With that gate open, the Great Recession initiated in 2008 generated expressions of frustration and anger regarding the lower performance of democratic govern­ ments. As a consequence, today’s political atmosphere in many democratic

6 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

countries is the opposite to what it had been during the previous period: it is dominated by general mistrust in government, close scrutiny of corruption prac­ tices, leaks of confidential plans and messages, frequent scandals about the private business or sexual affairs of even minor politicians, and loud claims for more transparency and accountability. Angry protests, government defeats, “surging” new candidates and parties, and demagoguery proliferate. The spread of digital media and social networks has greatly exacerbated the chaotic uproar. The most recent visible backlashes in well-established democratic regimes, which we will analyze in the following pages, include many government parties’ electoral overthrows, especially in Southern and Eastern Europe, the startling referendum and further chaotic process for Brexit, and the bizarre election and tenure of US president Donald Trump. There is also the degeneration of former democratic or liberal regimes in less developed countries, including in Latin America, the drift towards authoritarianism of elected governments in countries such Russia, Thai­ land, and Turkey, and other downturns. People all over the world seem to embrace the principles of democracy as an ideal but in many places neglect its actual embodiment and disregard real democratic practices and rules. Compared with several decades ago, there is more democracy but less governance. What can be termed the Great Disruption more heavily affects developed democratic regimes. In contrast, democracy is thriving, rather unexpectedly, in some poor countries of low wealth but notable political and economic performance, such as India and Indonesia. While democracy is in crisis in many developed countries, it flourishes in some underdeveloped ones. Meanwhile, more dictatorships than might be expected persist. Some author­ itarian rulers prove their resilience and gain people’s acquiescence, even support, thanks to their positive economic performance, as can be seem most prominently in China. We thus observe, against a certain tradition in the social sciences, that high economic development does not guarantee high-quality democracy, that democ­ racy can exist without much development, and that dictatorships can endure when they are accompanied by significant economic growth. A government’s poor performance has enormous political consequences because people’s support for democracy and its institutions largely depends on its effec­ tiveness in producing broadly distributed satisfactory results. A government’s per­ formance and relative economic growth appear to count more than the absolute level of development in explaining the success, resilience, or crisis of different political regimes all across the world. The loss of significant decision-making powers in national politics has the notorious side effect of banalizing political campaigns and giving politicians’ crude ambition greater visibility. Traditional government parties, unable to deliver as people have traditionally expected, are dejected and in decline. Outsider candi­ dacies replace or hijack existing parties. As the regular work of most politicians does not require much in the way of professional or technical skills regarding public policies, they are recruited from among people with little experience of

The Great Disruption: Anger and fear 7

public affairs and lower qualifications and honesty. Most political action becomes agitation and propaganda. Multiparty cooperation vanishes, polarization increases, and institutional conflicts and constitutional crises proliferate. This gigantic shift can explain many of the negative, angry, and hostile reactions of voters against incumbent rulers. People’s evaluation of the performance of gov­ ernments is not determined by actual outcomes per se, but—as has been observed for other human activities by recent psychological studies—by how they relate to previous expectations. Economic recession is especially fatal for democracy in developed countries because it affects people accustomed to living with sustained growth and complacently expecting it to continue. Expectations are the mother of all frustrations. By contrast, in underdeveloped countries where people have low expectations of government due to historical poverty and economic stagnation, unexpected inter­ national and technological changes are welcome and governments may appear successful. If this happens within a formal democratic structure, people can be very satisfied with the way democracy works.

1 IT IS NOT ABOUT DEVELOPMENT, BUT EFFECTIVENESS

We are stalled. Democracy in the world during the first decades of the twentyfirst century has failed to meet expectations of a continuous expansion of forms of government based on freedom, open elections, and the rule of law. The number and proportion of countries under colonial control or with dictatorial regimes steadily decreased over several decades following the Second World War. It was expected that the trend would continue. Instead, we see now that while many dictatorships create misery, others in countries with different levels of development—including, most conspicuously, China—seem to prosper. At the same time, existing democracies in developed countries such as the United States and the countries of the European Union, which were supposed to be “consolidated,” have been suffering internal turmoil to the point where there are concerns about further deterioration or even survival. In contrast, democracies in some underdeveloped countries, such as India and Indonesia, are able to deliver good results to their citizens and increase their popular support.

Development does not guarantee democracy The association between economic development and democracy is in question. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the postulate that only developed coun­ tries could have an effective democracy gained great influence, especially through the work of political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset (1959) and his many followers. At the time there were barely two dozen democracies in the world, almost all in rich, developed countries, while much of the rest of the world lived in poverty and under autocratic regimes or colonial domination. Using mostly British and the American references, Lipset identified “some requisites” for a democracy to exist and flourish: economic development and political legitimacy.

10 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

For certain interpreters the emphasis on the level of development implied that, in the long term, high economic development would bring about a general cul­ tural and political modernization which would include the establishment and con­ solidation of democracy. This focus inspired policies for the promotion or support of democracy in different parts of the world by the United States and the European Union as well as the World Bank and other global institutions. At the same time, some dictators in relatively underdeveloped countries used the doctrine as an excuse to postpone the political opening of their regimes. Recent experiences have shown the diminishing impact of economic development on democratic change. We have seen how economic prosperity can be compatible with dictatorships which, precisely thanks to that prosperity, can endure. Generally, dictatorships survive by using different forms of control and repression, but the delivery of positive outcomes also helps them. Authoritarian rulers can implement a trade-off: the deprivation of subjects’ liberties and participation in exchange for economic prosperity and other results. The regime’s delivery of prosperity is related to political legitimacy, Lipset’s second “requisite.” Legitimacy is not just a moral belief or judgment about the right of rulers to rule; it tends to be based on their good performance. The efficacy of the regime is to solve collective problems and effectively implement appropriate policies, especially regarding the economy, that “can strengthen, reinforce, main­ tain, or weaken the belief in legitimacy,” as pointed out by political scientist Juan Linz (1978). In a further self-revision after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, when the number of democracies had multiplied, Lipset (1994) adopted the idea and stated: “What new democracies need, above all, to attain legitimacy is efficacy—particularly in the economic arena.” However, it has turned out that a government’s good performance, especially regarding the economy, can legitimize any regime, not only a democracy but also authoritarian rule, especially in underdeveloped countries. After observing this, political scientists Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George Downs (2005) pointed to “an ominous and poorly appreciated fact: economic growth, rather than being a force for democratic change in tyrannical states, can sometimes be used to strengthen oppressive regimes.” Economic growth expands the resources at the disposal of dictatorial rulers and “over the short term, it also tends to increase citi­ zens’ satisfaction with their government, making it less likely that they will support a change of regime.” Economic growth may favor the existing regime, whatever it is. With economic growth, an existing authoritarian regime can evolve towards more liberal forms or be replaced with a democratic formula, as the traditional theory assumed. But if it proves sufficiently effective as it is, it can be increasingly legitimated and supported due to people’s appreciation of the performance by the rulers in charge. The importance of government legitimacy sustained by efficacy in promoting economic growth can explain the political success of both democratic India and dictatorial China, as well as that of regimes in other underdeveloped countries whose economies have been growing at high rates for several decades. That is why

It is not development, but effectiveness 11

Economic performance and trust in government Source: Adapted from Pew Research Center 2017 Global Attitudes Survey and data from the World Bank.

FIGURE 1.1

large majorities of both Indian and Chinese citizens “trust [that] the government is doing what is right for their country.” Likewise, most rich democracies unable to provide high rates of economic growth during the recent Great Recession experi­ ence lower levels of trust by their citizens or are openly mistrusted, as shown by the worldwide Pew Center Survey summarized in Figure 1.1. A key point is that with existing technology, and depending on the institutional setting, poor countries have more potential for economic growth than those that have already achieved high levels of wellbeing. Upward social change and improvement in the conditions of life may be more attainable by the destitute than by those who are already at the top. And, as was argued by Juan Linz (1988) and with relevance for mature democracies, the opposite result, ineffectiveness in deli­ vering policy, “weakens the authority of the state and, as a result, weakens its legitimacy.”

Rich democracies are in trouble, poor democracies can thrive In contrast to vulnerable dictatorships, most mature democracies under stress have proved to be resilient to crises and have survived as such. But many democratic regimes in rich countries have screwed it up. Largely due to certain consequences of technological change and globalization, the governments’ effectiveness in deli­ vering appropriate policies and their efficacy in securing sustained economic growth have vastly deteriorated. We knew that economic recessions tend to erode

12 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

and disgrace authoritarian regimes, but it had not been remarked that they could also corrode well-established democratic regimes. Low performance weakens the authorities’ legitimacy and the subsequent social support to the existing institutional and political arrangements, whatever they are. At least since the Great Recession, the ultimate sources of the ineffectiveness of democratic governments may lie outside their reach because they may be interna­ tional or triggered by unforeseeable and uncontrollable technological and economic transformations. Yet this has not deterred disappointed people from holding the democratic rulers responsible for bad results. Of course, protesting and blaming politicians in conditions of freedom is much less uncomfortable than rebelling against authoritarian rulers. Taking advantage of political and civil liberties, citizens of democratic countries disappointed with rulers’ performance have been replacing them in dramatic turnovers of existing political parties, party systems, coalition governments, traditional candidates, and incumbent presidents and prime ministers, as we will describe in more detail later. Most people follow Winston Churchill’s suggestion and keep supporting democracy as the least bad of all regimes that have been tried or invented, as we said at the beginning. But the popular perception of bad governmental perfor­ mance erodes support to existing institutions, governments, and parties. Most people like the idea and the principles of democracy—as they might like an ideal good marriage—but, to pursue our comparison further, they may not like the current partner or the existing institutional arrangement and screw things up. For the same reason that dictatorships fall when they do not deliver, existing demo­ cratic regimes in developed countries have been disrupted by lack of government effectiveness during the most recent period. Democracy is not reserved for developed countries, it is not a luxury good only available to the rich. It can be established initially at any level of poverty and can exist without much economic development. About half of the democratic regimes and much more than half of the world population living in a democracy are in relatively poor countries. More precisely, there are 93 countries with democracy in the world (according to Polity IV for 2018). About half of these democratic countries, 45, can be considered relatively poor while the other half, 48, are relatively rich, depending on whether they are above or below the world average person’s annual income (17,300 dollars per capita for all the world including both democratic and non-democratic countries, which is also about the level at which the line of poverty is usually drawn in the United States). More specifically, about 4.1 billion people, or 55% of the world population, live in a democracy. Of these, 57% live in a poor country, according to that measure. Without counting XXL India, the percentage of the population living in a democracy in a relatively poor country is still as high as 37% of all people living in a democracy. India is, of course, the most prominent case. Democracy was initially adopted after independence when the country was extremely poor, the economy was

It is not development, but effectiveness 13

mostly agrarian, and most people were illiterate. At that time, almost everybody outside India predicted a prompt collapse of the experiment, and even now some traditional scholars are puzzled by the case and exclude it from their reviews because it does not fit the classical doctrine. Yet, India is not an exception. The earliest modern democracies, such as Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, or the United States, had also enforced broad male suffrage for competitive elections in the nineteenth century when they were fairly poor, as poor as India was in the mid-twentieth century or as are now, at similar levels of per capita income (in purchasing power), dictatorial countries like, say, Azerbaijan or Egypt. Democratization is thus not necessarily associated with high levels of economic development. The traditional theory of joint economic, cultural, and political modernization failed because it was based on a myopic observation of a small number of successful rich democracies during a short period. But the number of cases quadrupled in the following decades and involved many countries with much more disparate economic and cultural structures. Students of democracy in the 1960s did not even know what they did not know—they looked at the world like a photo when actually it was a long movie made up of action, drama, crime, horror, and some happy-ending heroic or even romantic comedy. When democ­ racy began to spread across the world, some general propositions inferred from a few previous experiences did not hold. Dictatorships fall at different levels of economic development. Their end is often accompanied by episodes of economic recession or provoked by political crisis derived from flagrant inefficacy in solving major collective problems such as a war defeat, foreign pressures, a colonial breakdown, a dictator’s succession, or other failures of authoritarian rulers, including executive abuse or corruption scandals, which destroy the legitimacy that they may have enjoyed before. This is the main point about regime change: it can happen when the existing rulers fail their sub­ jects by not being able to meet their expectations—at any level of economic development. Democracy is not the result of economic success, rather it is the result of dictatorships’ failure. When dictatorships deliver good results, they can survive; but some success feeds people’s optimistic expectations, and when they fail to meet these, dictatorships tend to fall. When well-established authoritarian rulers disappoint their subjects, the trade-off of political liberty and participation for economic delivery stops working. Citizens’ political passivity ceases when the existing authorities appear ineffective and rulers may increasingly be seen as illegitimate. If the cost of collective action against a regime reliant on control and repression is not too high—which is much to say— people may begin to protest against poor government performance and demand freedom and participation. Many uprisings against ineffective dictatorships do not succeed, but some do. In other cases, authoritarian rulers have responded with moderate reforms that have eventually got out of control. Whatever the particular type of process, and we will analyze these later, most current democracies in the world have been established since the 1970s, not necessarily in highly developed

14 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

countries but usually during periods of economic recession and political crises that fatally erode the incumbent authoritarian regime.

Unmet expectations Many people living in developed and middle-income democracies are getting angry at governments’ bad performance and reacting against the rulers, the estab­ lishment, or the whole political system. Much of this challenge is due to unmet expectations. People in rich countries used to long periods of prosperity and upward social mobility enormously resent economic depression and social disrup­ tion. The other way around, newcomers to development enjoy the novelty of external openness and technological change and are relatively happy with their governments’ performance. Rich losers feel worse than poor winners. An incumbent government’s performance tends to be judged relative to previous expectations or aspirations. Whether citizens primarily choose candidates and par­ ties by a “retrospective vote” based on incumbents’ past delivery or by looking to promises and future policy programs has long been the subject of discussion among political scientists. Part of the confusion comes from not understanding that in a representative democratic regime, the only occasion when rulers can be held accountable for their past performance is when they run for reelection. In addition, the assumption that people are enthused by promises of a rosier future has probably been exaggerated. In any case, it seems reasonable for any voter to take into account information about the incumbent government’s track record when judging the credibility of candidates, the likely fulfillment of new proposals, and the quality of future policy decisions. Just as when any of us chooses a plumber or a painter to do a job in our home, we look closely at the candidates’ past performance and personal characteristics. Political expectations are shaped by past experiences and by politicians’ past promises and plans. Many years ago it was observed by psychologist K. C. Squires and his co-authors (1976) that “concrete rules defined by constant repetition of a stimulus can trigger an expectation about the continuation of its appearance in the future.” More recently, biologist Moshe Bar (2007) stated that “expectations can be formulated based on the knowledge gained through long-term experience.” As synthesized by psychologists Gillian Butler and Freda McManus (2017), “patterns of neural activity experienced in the past are coded and stored in such a way as to determine expectations about the future, and responses are sensitive to whether or not those expectations are fulfilled.” After a long period of government good performance, economic growth, and upward social mobility, people may expect it to continue and be disenchanted when it fails to do so. Citizens with a long positive experience of this sort can even idealize democracy as a regime that should deliver high achievements such as social justice, which may be more than it can. As a consequence, economic recession and loss of jobs, income, wealth, status or expectations of improvement severely damage the belief that the government is doing what is right. Discomforts that had

It is not development, but effectiveness 15

been overcome become intolerable when they reappear; then governments are judged by “the improvement they prevent” rather than by the injury they cause, as it was put by Alexis de Tocqueville ([1856] 2011) many years ago.1 The evaluation of government performance based on previous expectations depends on how people reconstruct the past, interpret the present, and construct the future. There is room here for political manipulation of people’s perceptions by unscrupulous politicians. The incumbents in power tend to emphasize how much better things are now than they used to be, while opposition challengers like to talk about how much worse things are now and how bright and beautiful things were in the past. Even if their actual living conditions have improved, people may feel frustrated simply because their reconstruction of the past does not fit the actual change. Emotional reactions are always stronger when the expectations are dismissed than when they are fulfilled. When the expected event occurs, pure confirmations of correctly formulated expectations carry little informational value and are therefore not relevant for the system. In contrast, in cases where it does not meet the initial expectations … errors of prediction have much greater value and relevance, as has been studied by neurologists Karl J. Friston and Klaas E. Stephan (2007). Put more simply: “Rewards are only reported as far as they occur differently than predicted,” according to neuroscientist Wolfram Schultz (2001). A relevant scene to observe these reactions can be found in the political econ­ omy of elections. In developed countries accustomed to sustained growth, if the economy is doing okay voters may condone politicians’ bad private conduct, but they are not more likely to vote for the incumbent than was the case on previous occasions. But if the economy slows down, and even more if it enters into a period of recession, high unemployment, and inflation, voters are quick to punish the incumbent party. “Voters punish incumbents for bad economic times, but fail to reward them for good times,” as summarized by political scientist Roland Kappe (2014). Likewise, when rulers appear to behave more or less decently, people are not particularly grateful, but when corruption scandals emerge, they are eager to complain. The prominence of the two issues can be related. The proliferation of scandals does not necessarily mean that there is more corruption or dishonesty than pre­ viously. It may mean that the government is delivering less than expected. Due to government underperformance, many citizens may feel that condoning theft is no longer sufficiently compensated. So, scandals and protests multiply. Mismanage­ ment or incompetence can generate uneasiness or anxiety about dissatisfying results, but corruption scandals generate stronger anger and hostility against those involved. In times of unexpected economic recession and political scandal, many voters are willing to enjoy the democratic opportunity to throw the rascals out without bloodshed.

16 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Loss aversion and risk propensity We can learn many interesting things from recent studies in psychology. People have “loss aversion,” as branded by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kah­ neman (1979) in their Nobel prize-awarded “prospect theory.” This basically means that for most people, some gains feel like losses, which magnifies negative reactions to unfulfilled previous expectations. The pain caused by disappointment is felt more acutely than the satisfaction produced by what is received: “losses loom larger than gains.” Tversky and Kahneman give the business example of “an unexpected tax withdrawal from a monthly paycheck, which is experienced as a loss, not as a reduced gain.” Transported into politics, this insight means that in countries used to sustained growth and prosperity, people can experience any decrease in the annual rate of economic growth as a loss, even if it is still positive. Any reduction in the regular provision of public services that people have to get accustomed to and take for gran­ ted, as can be imposed by budgets cuts or other fiscal restrictions, is also felt as a loss, even if significant positive amounts of government deliveries are still received. Then, frustration and disgust feed anger, one of the basic emotions in politics. Angry people tend to blame others when their expectations are unfulfilled. They perceive less risk in new situations and choose the risky options predominantly—an idea pioneeringly formulated by social psychologists Jennifer Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2000). More specifically, in political psychology, “angry citizens cling tightly to their prior convictions and are less receptive to new consideration or opposing points of view. Anger is a particularly powerful mobilizing force that motivates people to take and support risky, confrontational, and punitive actions,” as explained by Ted Brader and George Marcus (2013). In sum: “In the loss frame, the increase in risk-taking is the result of a strong loss aversion which leads to a preference for avoiding a sure loss, regardless the probability of obtaining a gain while gambling,” as demonstrated by numerous psychological experiments such as those by Marianne Habib and her team (2015). We can translate these findings into electoral politics. If, on the basis of biased interpretations, people feel that their past aspirations have been more or less ful­ filled, they may go along with the current situation. If previous poor experience had prevented them from expecting much, they might even celebrate the achievement. But if people are doing well but sense that their expectations are not being met, they may feel they are in the domain of losses, get angry, blame the rulers, the elite or the establishment, overreact against them for their betrayal, and open themselves to support any challenger offering a fresh message and risky choices. Depending on the opportunities offered by the existing political system, signs of revolt may emerge, and many people may vote for new, outsider parties and politicians brandishing grandiose positive promises, even at the risk of not obtaining satisfaction on even a small fraction of them. After a series of disappointments with successive candidates and governments, some citizens may express their dissatisfaction not only with the performance of

It is not development, but effectiveness 17

specific rulers but also with “the way democracy works”—a typical question in certain worldwide surveys. The feelings of “mistrust in the government” and other institutions can also grow. It is the [perceived] deterioration of the economic and political conditions that incites sharp increases in the citizens’ dissatisfaction with democracy, and that leads them to attribute much less legitimacy to their democratic regimes … . Citizens in countries particularly hard hit by the Great Recession suffer most from a democratic deficit, [even if] they still massively support the democratic principles, concluded a broad study by political scientists Hanspeter Kriesi and Leonardo Morlino (2016). All this could also be changed by the same psychological mechanisms we have just discussed. Neurologists Andreja Bubic, Yves von Cramon, and Ricarda Schu­ botz (2010) note that errors of prediction and the subsequent frustration of expectations can trigger an update of one’s knowledge and behavioral adaptations. At the end [a disappointment of expectations can] turn to be beneficial, as it can lead to an adaptive reaction to the changing environment. The discrepancies between expected and realized events are one of the main learning forces. After experiencing disappointment and the subsequent negative overreaction that favors risky political alternatives, people in developed countries might have a better knowledge of the domestic and international conditions of the economy, reduce their expectations, and adapt to mediocre results. Meanwhile, in successful develop­ ing countries, people who feel highly satisfied with government performance because it exceeded expectations can, on the contrary, raise their expectations, which makes it more difficult to remain satisfied with further political developments. People’s expectations, governments’ actions, and rewarding or punishing reactions interact with each other regularly and make it difficult to achieve an enduring match.

The new incumbency disadvantage Incumbent candidates and political parties with recent experience in government have lost the electoral advantage they enjoyed after World War II to opposition candidacies. It was usually assumed that there was an asymmetry between parties in electoral competition in favor of those in office. When a government or party leader was running for reelection, they benefitted from records of good perfor­ mance. Giulio Andreotti, prime minister of Italy seven times, gleefully observed that “power erodes … especially those who don’t have it.” Drawing from congressional elections in the United States, it had been remarked that the asymmetric advantage of incumbent candidates mainly derived from

18 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

having access to more resources than their opponents and more visibility in the media, as synthesized by political scientist Morris Fiorina ([1977] 1989). The incumbent could benefit, above all, from delivering public goods such as sustained economic growth and upward social mobility. And even if the record was some­ times second-rate, an incumbent party could always select sufficiently favorable information about its actions in government to communicate to the public. Generally, an incumbent could contrast the actual policies implemented by government and their concrete consequences on citizens’ wellbeing with the dubious hypothetical results of proposals presented by the opposition. The evalua­ tion of an incumbent can always be based on facts, while the estimation of the opposition’s promises can only be based on speculative hypotheses about their outcome. Incumbent advantage derived very largely from these informational biases. If momentarily faced with mediocre results, ignorant and risk-averse voters could still bet on the middling candidate they knew rather than on the one perhaps better but unknown. However, this changed dramatically during the years of the Great Recession, when incumbent governments began to lose one election after another. The incumbent advantage had been solid when things were going more or less well, when there was sustained prosperity and people were satisfied with how their country was doing. Whenever and wherever a major crisis arose, many voters felt extremely disappointed and the advantage of the incumbent turned upside down. Actually, the basics of the model are still helpful to understand what is happen­ ing. The asymmetry between government and opposition remains: voters evaluate the actual incumbent’s performance more closely than the opposition’s promises, and they pay more attention to recent results than those in the remote past. But if the government does not deliver as expected, the asymmetry can work against it. If the news on the abundant media becomes unfavorable, the incumbents’ high visi­ bility, previously an advantage, turns into a liability. Fiorina ([1977] 1989) had already warned that the incumbency could rely upon an informational advantage only “if information about the incumbent was noncontroversial in content and correspondingly positive in its impact.” With a poor performance, the profusion of information backfires, the cred­ ibility of governments falls, and voters’ strong negative feelings for being in the domain of losses can overcome any advantage the incumbents may have had in the past. The hypothetical opposition’s risky promises may seem an attractive bet in comparison with the proven ineffectiveness of the government. In the mid- or long term, the prior good performance of certain parties in govern­ ment can still count on the faithful allegiance of some voters. But recent dis­ appointments, especially for young voters without personal memory of past results, tend to carry more weight. The big bang of the Great Recession in 2008 in numerous countries proved that when the economy collapses and rulers’ reputation falls, many voters may as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. That there can be ousters of

It is not development, but effectiveness 19

governments, replacements for traditional parties, and other political disruptions after an economic crisis is not big news. Academic students of the US political system coined a “disillusion theory” to explain the gap that tends to form between people’s expectations about the virtues of newly elected rulers and the sub­ sequent perception that they do not deliver as anticipated. But this time the dimensions of the grievance, the outrage, and the subsequent backlashes are unprecedented. Usually, as observed by economists Atif Mian and co-authors (2014), banking, currency, inflation, or debt crises lead to greater ideological polar­ ization in society, greater fractionalization of the legislative body, and a decrease in the size of the working majority of the ruling coalition. The size of the governing coalition shrinks after almost any [of those] types of crisis and, at the same time, political fragmentation increases. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, financial crises were indeed associated with high rates of political turnover in democratic countries. The trend peaked during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when recently established democracies were terminated. More recently, the stagflation crisis of the 1970s concurred with the end of long periods of single-party dominance, such as the forty-year rule of the Social Democrats in Sweden. The economic crisis of the early 1990s and the end of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union also put an end to several enduring party systems based on domestic political cold wars. In Italy, the ruling Christian Democrats lost an election for the first time in forty years and the party was disbanded, as was its rival communist party soon after the Soviet Union dissolved. In Japan, the ruling Liberal Democrats also lost an election for the first time in forty years, while the leftist Socialist party in opposition (which had promoted uni­ lateral disarmament and friendship with North Korea, among other policies) temporarily changed its name and then disbanded. Comparable political tempests descended on other democratic countries. Yet this time it was different. In comparison with previous downturns and depressions, the political impact of the Great Recession on democratic functioning appears to have been of the highest magnitude and the one which has exerted the largest impact. The shockwave was big, first, because the new scenery contrasted with a previous long period in the democratic West of economic prosperity and peaceful alternations between center-right and center-left parties that shared basic policy-stands and were widely supported by a balancing middle class. In the United States, they were for a long-time moderate Republicans and Democrats. In most of Europe, Conservatives, Liberals or Christian-democrats on one side alternated with Social-democrats or Labourites on the other. More recent democracies in Southern and Eastern Europe had also adapted to this model of social equilibrium, political moderation, and consensual policy-making. There was a broadly-spread expectation that these leanings would remain fruitful.

20 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

The political disruption was also vast because the big economic downturn came in at a time when political parties were already discredited and traditional party systems had begun to flop. The collapse of party legitimacy did not only derive from their lack of delivery in government but more especially from their overlap with private or state finances, lobbies, and crooks and the crude transparency of politicians’ self-interest. The long duration of relative political stability made the parties evolve from matureness to rottenness. In the analysis by political scientist Piero Ignazi (2018): Political parties have wasted the aura that they acquired in the early postSecond World War years as essential instruments of—and for—democracy and liberty, and for the general wellbeing of their electorate. The long journey from that ‘golden age’ to the twenty-first century has ended with a dramatic collapse in terms of confidence and trust. Parties today fail to gain the hearts and minds of citizens not only for the long-sown, ontological bias of being an element of division, but rather for their misconduct. The political consequences of the Great Recession under conditions of party dealignment have included incumbent governments’, presidents’, and prime ministers’ loss of elections, dissolution of traditional governmental parties, the emergence of new, mostly extreme groups and candidacies, more polarization of electoral and political competition, more fragmentation of parliaments, more difficulties forming legislative majorities, more minority governments, unstable cabinets, delays in adopting policies that were more urgent than ever to address the sources of the crisis, government shutdowns, repeated snap elections, and a sense of political impotence which has reinforced the people’s frustration with the parties and rulers and their dissatisfaction with the working of democratic institutions. Voting against the incumbents became the norm in democratic elections after the financial and economic collapse of 2008. In some cases, the traditional oppo­ sition won; in others, the traditional parties were hijacked by surging populist groups or candidates; in others again, new parties with no past record of office got in. In countries with a second-dip recession, the new incumbent disadvantage has operated in a series of elections over more than a decade. An accumulation of unmet expectations and frustrations with the performance of successive incumbents tends to produce dissatisfaction not only with the gov­ ernment of the moment but also with the democratic regime. “As parties fail, so too fails popular democracy,” wrote political scientist Peter Mair (2013). “Democracy is endangered by the brutal loss of confidence in the parties,” sum­ marized Piero Ignazi (2018). The “lack of satisfaction with party performance will spill over into dissatisfaction with democracy, into the development of ever more personalized politics, and into the birth of populist and irresponsible new parties and leaders,” as political scientists Luciano Bardi, Stefano Bartolini and Alexander Treschel (2014) have stated.

It is not development, but effectiveness 21

Note 1 A recent OECD (2019) survey on 21 rich countries confirms this view. On average, people are living safer, healthier, and longer lives, and are better educated than ever before. Yet, “there is clear dissatisfaction with existing social policy” because “it is not meeting the public’s needs and expectations.” Having low income does not seem to lead to dissatisfaction with benefits and services, but a worsening economic situation does. “Feelings of dissatisfaction are particularly strong among people who believe their economic situation has deteriorated.”

2 LESS BOURGEOISIE, LESS DEMOCRACY

The bourgeoisie as such is in crisis. It can be argued that there are many bourgeois or affluent people living off rents from wealth. But a compact middle class with a leading role for innovation and a balancing place in soft forms of government is vanishing. The dispersion of the middle class—which is a major consequence of international economic and technological changes—explains much of the political vulnerabilities of the current democratic regimes in developed countries. An early argument in favor of the leading and stabilizing political role of the middle class was elaborated in the early nineteenth century by English political theorist James Mill. He was the most direct and active disciple of the founder of liberal utilitarianism, Jeremy Bentham, and the father of the more famous political economist, moral philosopher, member of the House of Commons and darling of progressive liberals John Stuart Mill. The Encyclopedia Britannica commissioned James Mill, the father, to write the essay “Government” (1820). With a strong focus on the ongoing experience in Britain, he held that the best leaders of the society were not the aristocrats, but the class which is universally described as both the wisest and the most virtuous part of every community: the middle rank … In Great Britain the [members of the] middle rank are numerous, and form a large proportion of the whole body of the people … The middle rank, which gives their most distinguished ornaments to science, to art, and to legislation itself, to everything which exalts and refines human nature, is that part of the community of which, if the basis of representation were now so far extended, the opinion would ultimately decide. Of the people beneath them, a vast majority would be sure to be guided by their advice and example. For this and other pioneers of liberal democracy, the middle rank or class was assigned a leading role for the whole society. The opportunity to lead did not

Less bourgeoisie, less democracy 23

derive from special natural qualities of its members but from its economic and central position in society, which allowed it to look at both sides. In their own interest, the middle class would try to attract either the upper class or the lower classes to their proposals, norms, and values, thus forming a majority on which liberal economic, social, and political institutions could find foundation and support. To be able to play that role, the middle class should be sufficiently broad, and thus economic prosperity should be widespread. If the middle class were just a thin tier, it would be smashed like the filling in a toast sandwich, as happened in countries where the industrial revolution stopped mid-way and frustrated those kinds of expectations. An embryonic bourgeoisie, if forced to participate as a sub­ ordinate partner in a coalition with either the upper or the lower classes, would not be able to prevent polarization, conflict, or likely authoritarian government. By the mid-twentieth century, political sociologist Barrington Moore presented the argument on the background of a large comparative historical analysis of poli­ tical transformation in several agrarian and industrializing countries. Moore (1967) held that, in contrast to long-living authoritarian empires and monarchies in mostly agrarian countries, “a key feature in bourgeois revolutions is the development of a group in society with an independent economic base, which attacks obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism that have been inherited from the past.” As he famously summarized: “no bourgeoisie, no democracy.” Looking at more contemporary changes, Seymour Lipset (1994) noted that “a larger middle class tempers conflict by rewarding moderate and democratic parties and penalizing extremist groups.” Even more recently, economist Daron Ace­ moglu and political scientist James Robinson (2006) likewise sustain that “the middle class plays an important role in the emergence of democracy” because “it can be its driving force …, can favor the poor being included in the political arena … and perhaps most interesting, it can act as a buffer between the rich and the poor” to prevent both tyranny by the rich and revolution by the poor. Yet, we can see that nowadays the middle class is not at all what it was or what it was expected to be. In developed countries with well-established democratic regimes, the existing intermediate middle class tends to disperse into fractions, fre­ quently supporting opposite political sides. It tends to vanish as a central force and cease playing the crucial supporting and moderating role that was assumed to be its special contribution. The fragments of the former middle class are in a sort of minefield, each of them at any point vulnerable to detonators of different inclina­ tions—mostly nationalists against a diversity of foes. This social change is one of the chief contributors to the current political turmoil.

Democracy by default When an authoritarian regime fails in a less developed country and, sometimes unexpectedly, precipitously falls, there may not be many bourgeois, members of the middle class, or cultivated democrats. The previous absolute monarchy, military

24 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

dictatorship, strongman, or communist regime may not have favored economic development and social complexity, and repressed and persecuted liberal ideas and values. On many occasions, democracy has been established by default just because the previous strongman was unable to secure his succession and continuity. Sometimes, political change has come from decolonization, foreign pressures, external invasion, or just by imitation of or contagion from neighboring countries with similar cultural features or international situations. In all these cases, the result is what has been called “democracy without democrats.” For our discussion, we could say “democracy without a bourgeoisie” or “democracy with just a weak middle class.” If this is the case, the further consolidation of democracy to make it durable and self-sustainable can take a while. People deprived of the economic and social comfort of middle-class attachments, unacquainted with liberal norms and values, lacking any previous experience of dealing with multiple political parties and open elections, unaccustomed to using freedom of expression and operating under the rule of law may adapt to and learn from practice and discourse. It may be expected that representative government and the rule of law can be relatively efficient in the provision of public goods and favor the progress of the private economy. But the role the classics assumed would be played by the now absent, weak, evanescent, or dispersed middle class would need to be replaced by renovated links between rulers and citizens, with new dynamics between expectations, results, and government effectiveness and accountability able to make democracy a satisfactory and efficient form of governance. For a democracy to become widely accepted, secure, and therefore durable, it may need the self-reinforcing practical experience of using freedom, voting, and governing under the rule of law for attaining economic growth, upward social mobility, and general improvement in wellbeing. It was generally assumed that democracies that lasted would tend to become permanent: the longer they endured, the more likely they were to continue. A common rule of thumb for students of democracy was that two or three elections, which might include at least one alternation of parties in government, would give people the confidence that their interests and opinions would be taken into account and that the electoral democratic game was worth playing. Few democ­ racies that have lasted for more than ten years have been overthrown. One of the exceptions is the oil producer, Venezuela, whose democracy broke down after twenty years. Yet, as happened in the 1920s and 1930s, over the last few decades there have been numerous instances of democracy set up, then quickly interrupted. This was the case with Russia in the mid-1990s when, after two elections, a new autocracy was rapidly put in place. The Arab Spring that briefly flourished around 2011 mostly ended in a new set of dictatorships and civil wars, such as those in Egypt and Syria. There have also been numerous attempts to call regular multiparty elections in the largest African countries, including Nigeria and Congo. In many cases, the experience of democracy did not last long enough to stick and become sustainable.

Less bourgeoisie, less democracy 25

We have also recently learned that even in mature democracies with a long duration, although democracy as a general principle endures, the existing demo­ cratic institutions, established political parties and representative political class can be broadly rejected and significantly downgraded. Without a leading and balancing middle class, a sense of general vulnerability has arisen.

Winners and losers of globalization During the last few decades there has been a broad redistribution of technological, economic, and political power in the world, as well as a huge reallocation of jobs, income, and wealth among different professional and social groups. These changes have altered social relations, cultural mores, and political behavior in ways that have greatly affected the future of democracy. Some social consequences of technological change and globalization became more far-reaching and visible during the recent Great Recession. New technolo­ gies have always been major drivers of economic growth and all of them have caused upheaval in preexisting social structures. Typically, new technological eras have begun with the exclusion and deterioration of the living conditions of some traditional social groups, followed by improvements for them or their descendants. This happened with the replacement of agriculture by the first industrial revolution and with successive waves of technological innovations leading to the pre­ dominance of the service sector over farming and manufacturing. Former peasants who moved to the cities to work in factories experienced all kinds of hardship, but their children or grandchildren had a much better life; middle-level technicians in manufacturing compounds worked hard and long, but they were able to send their children to college so they could embrace more professional careers. But this time the innovations brought about by digitalization, automation, international trade, and capital investment mobility, while they have successfully increased productivity, have also generated some deep disappointments regarding social progress and upward mobility. For many people, the prospect of future rewards for current sufferance is remote and uncertain. There has been relevant research on who are the “winners” and the “losers” of the recent social changes induced by globalization, technology, and recession. A common parlance is that the winners are the very rich in rich countries (the United States, the European Union, Japan) and the middle class and the very poor in poor countries (including China, India, Indonesia); while the main losers would be the workers and the middle class in rich countries. In other words, so far in the twenty-first century, the rich have become richer, the poor have become less poor, and the middle class has split: there is a larger middle class in poor countries and a smaller middle class in rich ones where it has also split into higher and lower middle classes. A popular professor of economics in Spain said that economists fall into two types: those who try to help the rich get richer and those who (like himself, he claimed) try to help the poor become less poor. In retrospect, one could say that

26 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

both types have been relatively successful in their endeavors. But the ones who failed were the helpers of the middle class. The disruptive consequences of these social changes for democracy could not be more significant. Many of the major differences regarding the survival and perfor­ mance of political regimes are largely due to the different fates of the middle class in different regions of the world. To summarize: Dictatorships in poor countries with an emerging economy and a rising middle class survive, as in China. Democracies in poor countries with an emerging economy and a rising middle class also survive and even thrive, as in India or Indonesia. Democracies in rich countries also survive, but some of them languish and deteriorate along with their middle classes, as in parts of the United States and Europe. Meanwhile, democracy at the global level does not make much progress because, among other reasons, “a truly global middle class is still more promise than reality,” as a recent survey from the Pew Research Center put it (Kochhar 2015).

The rich are richer, but fewer Let us give a closer look to these ongoing global developments. At one extreme, the very rich are becoming richer. The personal concentration of income and wealth by the owners and chief executives of big transnational companies reflects the increasing concentration of corporations, capitals, and profits facilitated by the gigantic economies of scale granted by globalization. The success of large-scale business challenges some basic postulates of neoclassical economic theory, which has been taught as the main orthodoxy in economic schools for many decades. Economic journalist David Warsh (2007) (drawing especially from Nobel laureate Paul Romer, 1990) tells the tale of a major con­ tradiction between two neoclassical postulates. On the one hand it is assumed that open market “perfect” competition among multiple enterprises can produce socially efficient results. According to the theory, unlimited competition among many companies also tends to minimize private profits down to zero. On the other hand it is observed that huge increases in productivity can be achieved by big business through the division of labor and large economies of scale. Adam Smith’s visit to a big pin factory is a famous example. Large companies generate lower costs than small businesses, but they also have a tendency toward monopoly with maximum private profits. The lead goes to the larger companies: “Thanks to the advantages of falling costs, whoever starts out first in the market will run everybody else out of the business,” says Warsh (2007). The opportunities for high concentration of wealth are particularly acute when new technologies appear, including those in the trans­ port and communication fields that open up international trade and especially network goods that enlarge the scale of efficiency of some private endeavors. The key to solving the theoretical conundrum may be that a situation, such as the one in perfect market competition, in which private profits go to zero cannot be an “equilibrium,” as economists put it—that is, it is not a stable situation. If

Less bourgeoisie, less democracy 27

private economic agents seek the maximization of profits, as is also typically assumed by the theory, then the race to build monopolies may become unstop­ pable—even if, theoretically, a hypothetical “competitive equilibrium” could be more socially efficient. The characteristics of the top billionaires of the world seem to confirm this insight as they mostly inhabit the digital and global economy, with business cen­ tered on computers, internet, e-commerce, and telecommunications with very large territorial scope. The annual lists of the top global wealthiest guys usually include Americans such as Jeff Bezos from e-commerce Amazon, Bill Gates from computer software Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg from social media Facebook, Larry Ellison from computer software Oracle, Michael Bloomberg from financial media Bloomberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin from internet Google, and only a couple from less specialized investments, such as Warren Buffett and Charles and David Koch. All of these belong to the famous top of the top one-tenth of 1%, or 0.1%, who enjoy more than one-fifth of the income and near half of the wealth of the country according to Emmanuel Saez (2016) and Saez and Gabriel Zucman (2014). These and a few other Americans are not very much wealthier (just a few bil­ lions away: everything is relative!) than the Mexican Carlos Slim from mobile tel­ ecom America Movil or the Chinese Pony Ma from internet Tencent and Jack Ma from e-commerce Alibaba. The global economic oligopolies of the digital econ­ omy might become the basis for a global political plutocracy if the global and international institutions lacked the power and weakened their resolve to prevent global monopolies from being formed and expanded. A wider top group encompasses the top 1% of the population in the global income distribution. This group has largely increased their share since the fall of the Berlin Wall according to successive estimates by the World Bank and one of its leading research economists, Branko Milanovic´ (2016). However, the global top 1% is very unequally distributed as it includes the top 10% in the United States and around the top 5% in Britain, Germany, France, and Japan. These wider upper sets are made up of lawyers, doctors, dentists, investment bankers, professionals in tech or pharmaceutical industries, and people who are able to set their own pay and also play the bubbling stock market, as well as a bunch of rentiers, heirs and heiresses more focused on leisure and pleasure. In the US, most of the top 10% people are located in the northeast or on the California coast, plus a few enclaves in Texas. In other times, this layer might have fitted the classic notion of a socially leading class. But nowadays they are not a cohesive group able to identify its interest with the general interest of society, as was expected of the best of their predecessors. Some reporters have detected a sense of complicity among the members of the owner class. But it rather seems to be a sense to imitate and pretend to be like those at the top and to avoid or ignore those regarded as inferior. The con­ descendence and content of many members of the upper set toward less fortunate people can evoke the attitude of nineteenth-century British new rich without nobiliary title, the so-called “snobs” (in Latin, sine nobilitated, abbreviated as s. nob.). Today like yesterday, their most distinctive activity is the consumption of luxury

28 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

goods that must be sold in small quantity in order to maintain its reputational value, as accurately defined by economists Giacomo Corneo and Olivier Jeanne (1997). In more descriptive language, political scientist Charles Murray (2013) noted derisively: the members of the new upper class are seldom attracted to the films, TV shows and music that are most popular in mainstream America. They have a distinctive culture in the food they eat, the way they take care of their health, their child-rearing practices, the vacations they take, the books they read, the websites they visit and their taste in beer. You name it, the new upper class has its own way of doing it.

The poor are less poor, but not by much At the other extreme, the very poor are becoming less poor. But how much depends on how poverty is measured. In some rich countries, different studies estimate poverty as individuals or household members getting less than half or other proportions of the average or median income of the country. This can imply, of course, that some people considered poor in rich America or Europe may be richer than members of the middle class or even rich people in poor parts of Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East. It would be like the quip by Adam Smith in the eighteenth century, when “the accommodation of an industrious and frugal peasant in Europe exceeded that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages” (1776). Specifically, in the United States, poverty measured as half the median house­ hold income (about 17,000 dollars per year) is estimated to embrace about 12% of the population. This measurement includes less than 10% of whites and around 20% of blacks and Hispanics. Poverty is broadest in Louisiana, Mississippi and West Virginia and is also significant in the South West, including zones with a majority of Hispanic population such as farming communities in Arizona, New Mexico or central California. Yet it is a common observation that even destitute people in the US have easy access to food and clothes, the most severe problem being housing— so that you may not recognize a homeless person when they are walking by in the street. Similarly, Eurostat (www.ec.europa.eu/eurostat/) estimates that about 17% of the population of Europe is below the risk-of-poverty threshold, which in this case is set at 60% of the national median income. Regarding this threshold, the number of people at risk of poverty or exclusion has increased during the Great Recession, especially in Greece, Italy, and Spain, where it is placed at between 25% and 35%. But the same source acknowledges that only about 7% of the population in the EU are severely materially deprived. The just-mentioned poverty thresholds of the US and the EU are higher than the median household income of about 160 of the 190 or so countries with data,

Less bourgeoisie, less democracy 29

which means that the typical “poor” in America and Europe are richer than most of the population in most countries of the world. This kind of measurement of relative poverty may be valid for discussing inequality within a country, but it is not the best for estimating poverty in a comparative perspective across countries. Other comparative stories focus on “absolute” or “extreme” poverty by choos­ ing a precise amount of monetary income, as does the World Bank. Where to place the absolute threshold of poverty, however, is a highly subjective decision, liable to be manipulated for the sake of positive results. The World Bank used the threshold of one dollar a day for years; it changed it to 1.25 dollars in 2008; after a little hesitation about raising it to two dollars it settled on 1.90 dollars a day in 2015 (revised for the purchasing power of the dollar in 2011), only to add new measures at 3.30 and 5.50 dollars a day for richer countries from 2019 (www.worldbank. org/en/publication/poverty-and-shared-prosperity and www.worldbank.org/en/ topic/poverty). According to the 1.90 dollars measure, the World Bank congratulated itself for having achieved the goal of halving the 1990 extreme poverty rate by 2010, when it was reduced to 10% of the world population. But like extreme wealth, extreme poverty is unevenly distributed across the world. In Europe and in East and Central Asia, extreme poverty—according to the above-mentioned absolute threshold— had been significantly reduced to about 3% of the population, but the number of extreme poor people increased in sub-Saharan Africa, where many people remain deprived of safe water, electricity, schools and paved streets. The majority of the global extreme poor live in rural areas, are barely educated, and are employed in agriculture. The new measure adopted by the Bank in 2019 is relative to the median income or consumption in each country, acknowledging that poverty may mean not having access to basic goods such as sanitation or core health care, even above the 1.90 threshold. With this measure, it was revealed that non-extreme poverty has remained about the same for 25 years, at the rate of 28%. Highly consequential for politics is the fate of the high numbers of workers with declining income and wages in developed countries, especially those traditionally employed in manufacturing, construction, and other blue-collar professions or “muscle jobs.” For a few decades now, some of the old jobs are being replaced by new manufacturing ones demanding higher skills in such fields as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology, semiconductors or telecom equipment. But in many cases the only new opportunities are low-skilled jobs (often with fewer working hours), lower earnings, temporary and/or part-time employment, or precarious forms of self-employment. The suspicion that this downgrading may not be temporary comes from the fact that many young people and new entrant workers are typically being offered low-paid work. For some sociologists, the traditional proletariat has been largely replaced with a new “precariat.” In the United States, workers’ productivity has increased over the last few dec­ ades. But the total number of those employed in manufacturing and the number of hours worked per employee have decreased and their average wages and living

30 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

standards are stagnated. In some sectors, such as those involving assembly-line work in a factory, the average real salary has significantly decreased for several decades. The distribution of these changes is unevenly spread across the territory, mainly affecting older major industries such as furniture, textiles, and some parts of steel and automobile manufacturing. Large losses of employment have occurred in traditional industry hubs such as Ohio and Wisconsin, the traditional auto­ mobile center of Detroit, Michigan, the coal mines in Kentucky and West Virginia, the textile industry in North Carolina and other enclaves. The political map of the country has changed accordingly, as we will see later on. In Europe, the real wages in some traditional industrial countries and regions have decreased for at least ten years since the beginning of the Great Recession, in some cases by as much as 20%. The strongest negative impact has been in southern countries with previous high rates of the labor force devoted to manufacturing, construction, and agriculture and with low education levels, especially Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Croatia, Spain, and Italy. More than 30% of the 231 economic regions identified by the European Union have shifted towards losing jobs. Regions where recovery from the Great Reces­ sion took longer or has never been completely achieved include the Peloponnese, the Ionian Islands and East Macedonia-Thrace in Greece; Andalusia, Extremadura, Castile-La Mancha, and Murcia in Spain; Puglia, Basilicata, and most of Sardinia and Sicily in Italy; and most of Bulgaria and Romania (OECD, 2018). The political consequences of these changes are also clearly identifiable.

3 THE SPLIT OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

In between the super-rich and the poor, the middle class now encompasses about half of the world population if counted together with the 10% of rich people, as it has expanded along with increasing globalization. This is a common but equivocal estimate from several observers, and in particular by the Future Development project led by economist Homi Kharas at the World Bank and the Brookings Institution (see Kharas 2017 and Kharas and Hamel 2018). Kharas’ definition of the members of the middle class encompasses people within a wide range of daily spending from 11 to 110 dollars, typically with white-collar jobs, who can afford, in different places with different costs of living, to not only cover food, clothing and shelter, but also a family car, electronic appliances, higher education, and leisure time. The data collected with these lenses are often presented as if they showed “the rapid emergence of the global middle class.” However, they also demonstrate that the vast majority of new entrants to the middle class are located in China, India, Indonesia and most of the rest of Asia, and to a lesser extent in other poor countries in Latin America and Eastern Europe, depending on how the economy of these countries has benefitted from international economic changes. At the same time, in Western Europe and the United States “the middle class is shrinking.” The political consequences of this social destabilization look rather disappointing. At the global level, “the politics of middle-class societies range from autocratic to liberal democracies,” notes Kharas. In some poor countries “the middle class ended strongman rule,” as in Indonesia or Tunisia, while in others “the middle class has supported a return to stability through military intervention against democratically elected governments,” as in Egypt or Thailand. Globally speaking, “there is little evidence to suggest that [the global emergence of a new middle class] will create pressures for more democratic governance,” which is in sharp contrast with the historical role attributed to the middle class in Europe and North America in the past.

32 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

In developed countries, most aggregate income has moved from the middle to the upper class, while the average income of middle-class people has stagnated. Yet average values obscure the split. On the one side, those who remain in the uppermiddle class keep prospering, but they are shrinking in number, and many are afraid of losing wellbeing and status. On the other side, the broader lower middle class is in decay and recession. An OECD report on The Squeezed Middle Class (2019) presents this summary: Middle-class households feel left behind and have questioned the benefits of economic globalization. In many OECD countries, middle incomes have grown less than the average and in some they have not grown at all. Tech­ nology has automated several middle-skilled jobs that used to be carried out by middle-class workers a few decades ago. The costs of some goods and services such as housing, which are essential for a middleclass lifestyle, have risen faster than earnings and overall inflation. As observed by geographer Guillaume Guilluy in his book No Society (2018) about “the end of the Western middle class,” it was unexpected that “the price to be paid for western societies adapting to a new economic model” would affect not only the European and American working class but also the bedrock of the lower-middle class … . Employment is increasingly polar­ ized. This comes with a new social geography: employment and wealth have become more and more concentrated in the big cities. The deindustrialized regions, rural areas, small and medium-sized towns are less and less dynamic. One very significant consequence is that two factions of the middle class are increasingly separate and tend to support opposite political alternatives fighting each other. The Great Disruption of democracy in Europe and North America is, in great part, a product of this socioeconomic chasm and the subsequent political battle between the upper and lower segments of the middle class. A disruptive populist coalition can be formed by the top wealthy people and either of the two segments of the middle class, standing counter to the other remnants of the middle class and perhaps joining most workers and the poor. This can produce a trompe-l’œil effect. The average income of the members of the middle-class segment supporting the right-wing populists may be higher or lower than the income of the other segment of the middle class still leaning towards more traditional and institutionalized parties. This data point has flab­ bergasted some observers, who have claimed, among similar guesses, that it is “the left behind” that support the populist far right. But the average income of the entire social coalitions, including not only fractions of the middle classes but also the rich minority on one side and the poor minority on the other, should be more consistent with their general lineups along the right–left political dimension.

The split of the middle class 33

The polarization of political combats in certain countries can be bitter, but it is largely due to the breach of the center. It is a central polarization, rather than a direct clash between the more distant richest and poorest. As W. B. Yeats said, “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold.”

America divided A number of recent chronicles depict the deterioration of the living conditions of broad segments of the rural lower middle class and the pursuits and distress of its urban counterpart. In rich countries, large regional disparities exist between small towns in decline with an ageing population and some cities and urban areas where new economic activity tends to concentrate and young people are inclined to move or migrate to. In the United States, sociologist Robert Wuthnow (2018) observed that “many rural communities are decreasing in population; schools are closing, business are leaving, and jobs are disappearing.” He conducted hundreds of interviews in farms and small towns of the Midwest and South to understand how “a fraying social fabric is fueling the outrage towards the federal government.” Wuthnow portrayed a large fresco of “the left behind,” including “farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities’ needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined.” A pastor in an undisclosed location in the Midwest is quoted as saying: “We’ve become a society of fear and anger rather than a nation of let’s get along and do things together for the good of the country. It’s not helpful. It’s not enabling us to live as we should in community.” The author argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening them. Political scientist Katherine J. Cramer (2016) also observed in a number of interviews that “rural voters are distrustful that politicians will respect the distinct value of their communities and allocate a fair share of decision-making power and public resources to rural areas.” She noted that the actual allocation of public resources did not support the idea that rural areas are the victims of distributive justice. But she argued that the challenges for the future they may face can explain these perceptions. However, Cramer’s interpretation that “rural resentment [toward people who live in urban society] plays a major role in dividing American against itself” has been challenged. Her colleague Darren Davis (2017) noted that in her transcrip­ tions of conversations with different communities in Wisconsin, “anger and being mad come through well” and can be a better description of the emotion than the language of resentment. Likewise, Roger Petersen (2017) saw in the interviews low resentment of the type that would tend to generate actions to reduce the status position of groups in a superior position. He would rather see anger and contempt directed at groups that have “committed a bad action against one’s self or group,”

34 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

such as people who have become public employees. This kind of one-shot retaliation could permit “a relatively rapid return to less confrontational politics.” In parallel, hillbilly stories from industrial brownfields describe the deep poverty and cultural anxiety of those “that can’t fully escape the poverty, abuse, and trauma that is present in their middle-class lives,” as narrated by J. D. Vance (2016) from an Ohio steel town. “Their ancestors—he reports—were day laborers in the Southern slave economy, share-croppers after that, coal miners after that, and machinists and millworkers during more recent times.” In the last period, they have moved “from low social mobility to poverty to divorce and drug addiction.” Journalist Alexander Zaitchik (2016) visited six states and also explains the gilded rage of the blue-collar middle class … . Desperate and angry, these are the Americans of the vanishing industrial heartland, depressed Appalachian coal country, and the no-man’s land along the Southwestern border. These are coal miners, out of work construction workers, and small business owners, who have watched their fortunes dwindle with each passing year. Regarding the political consequences of these economic changes, he pointed out that “these men and women feel forgotten and screwed over by political, corporate and media elites.” In turn, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild (2016), “alarmed at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between two political camps,” tried to understand the emotions of anger that underlies American politics. By visiting the plants in the bleak industrial outskirts of Lake Charles, Louisiana, he also observed how “polarization makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.” Indeed, more systematic statistics show that “the middle class is shrinking in most U.S. metropolitan areas, and both lower- and upper-income tiers are gaining share,” according to Census data and the American Community Survey. The movements into the lower-income tier have been particularly pronounced in the Midwest and other areas with traditional manufacturing industries in crisis, includ­ ing Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, as well as enclaves in North Carolina or Pennsylvania. The blowout of the housing bubble which partly triggered the Great Recession mostly hurt the middle class as well. Foreclosures, savings bankruptcies, and long­ term unemployment were widespread. House prices went down on average by 29%, but by more than 50% in urban and suburban enclaves in Las Vegas, Phoe­ nix, and Miami, as well as in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and numerous other towns in California. Mortgage redeems were reverberating as the American Dream vanished. Historian James Adams had launched the idea in the 1930s: it was a “dream of a better, richer and happier life for all our citizens of every rank” (1931). In the 1950s, it was typically associated with having a family with two or three kids (who would go to college), a house, and one or two cars. “Home ownership has to be the

The split of the middle class 35

theme that most clearly symbolized the American Dream over the decades,” stated Lawrence R. Samuel (2012). Nobel laureate economist Robert J. Shiller (2017), who has studied the housing market, also noted that “many people came to associate the American Dream with homeownership, with some unfortunate results.” Reflecting retrospectively on how the bubble developed from the 1990s, his colleague and collaborator Karl E. Case (2010) observed that some people thought that “the American dream is owning property that appreciates by 30 percent a year, making a house into a vehicle for paying bills.” Those kinds of dreams have become nightmares for the millions of foreclosed property owners who have found themselves sliding toward bankruptcy. Indeed, as the secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson would warn later in a speech at the National Housing Conference on June 9, 2017, “millennials may become a lost generation for homeownership, excluded from the American Dream.” For many in both the working class and the middle class, accessing home­ ownership was also an element of “the notion of upward mobility, the idea that one can, through dedication and with a can-do spirit, climb the ladder of success and reach a higher social and economic position,” in Samuel’s words. But what many people had thought to be a promise has waned. In the U.S., the proportion of adults who earn or consume more than their parents has fallen from 90% of those born in 1940 to 50% of those born in 1980 (that is, those who belonged to the millennials in their upper twenties or early thirties during the Great Recession), according to economist Raj Chetty and co-authors (2017). In spite of its appeal for continuous immigrating flows of dreamers, the American Dream has recently been described as “fading,” “withering,” “sliding,” “unraveling,” “going backward,” or even “dying.” As a consequence, trust in government and existing institutions has also collapsed.

The European PIGS In Europe, a housing price crisis was also widespread and strongly contributed to the broader financial and economic crisis, particularly in Great Britain, Ireland, and Spain. In the last two countries, a great deal of private debt accumulated by banks from unpaid loans and mortgages was partly transformed into public debt. Greece, Italy, and Portugal had already accumulated huge amounts of government debt. All this became unpayable, produced a “sovereign” or public debt crisis, made the first green shoots of recovery wither away, and triggered a “second-dip” downturn. The European Central Bank, the European Commission, and (reluctantly and to lesser extent) the International Monetary Fund—typically scoffed at as “the Troika”—initiated rescue programs of both private banks and public finances for a number of peripheral countries: Atlantic Ireland, Southern Cyprus, Greece, Por­ tugal and Spain, and Eastern Hungary, Latvia, and Romania. The bail-outs were issued conditional to ensuing austerity policy measures, which then prolonged the recession.

36 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

The derogatory acronym PIGS has been used for the set comprising Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain, countries that shared the most severe features of the crisis. During the Great Recession, house prices in these countries went down by 31% on average. Many firms closed down and capital and people emigrated. More than ten years later the per capita income of 2008 has still not recovered, most wages have decreased, and relative poverty spreads. The split of the middle class in these countries has been reported concurrently. In Italy, journalists Massimo Gaggi and Eduardo Narduzzi published an early account entitled The End of the Middle Class and the Birth of the Low-Cost Society (2006), in which they portrayed “the decline of the middle income, the twilight of the bourgeois consumer, and the disappearance of the welfare privileges of the traditional middle class.” In Spain, journalist Esteban Hernandez published a book with the same title, The End of the Middle Class (2014). He held that “the so-called middle class is extin­ guishing, and it is gradually emerging in its place a vast, soon immeasurable, social layer of perplexed and impoverished individuals, agglutinated under the eloquent label ‘precariat’.” Regarding Greece, political scientist Harris Mylonas (2011) observed that the middle class—the backbone of democratic politics—is emaciated. Small and medium-sized businesses are closing one after the other, more and more cheques bounce and non-performing bank loans are on the rise. Moreover, employees are losing their jobs and a new class is being formed, that of the ‘former middle class’. And in Portugal, sociologist Elísio Estanque (2015) saw the split as forming “one ‘subcategory’ of the middle class, characterized by high economic capital but poor cultural and educational capital, which can be contrasted with the new, emerging ‘subcategories’ with their high educational capital and low economic resources.” The latter subcategories of educated, impoverished middle classes began to be known as the “embarrassed poor”. Greece, Spain, and Italy have the highest rates of unemployment in Europe, together with “high persistence of young people not in education, employment or training” or in temporary forms of employment. This has raised the age of leaving the parental home and generated low reemployment probabilities, especially for low-productive women. The high proportion of “youth left behind” has also created alarm for a “lost generation.” Many college-educated people have also left their countries of birth in search of better opportunities (Coppola and O’Higgins 2016). The economic, social, and territorial decomposition of Southern European countries has provoked much frustration, anger, and political protest. A crucial constraint is that, in these countries, public intervention, including in productivitypromoting infrastructures or relieving welfare spending, is limited by poor public finances. The public debt cannot be repaid or indefinitely postponed by taking on

The split of the middle class 37

new debts (which would likely be at higher interest rates). The public budgets are constrained by an agreement of the European Union to limit deficits and repay debt in priority, which was inserted into all member states’ constitutions and is supervised by their creditors. Some blame the EU and the euro for the blockage. But in the weakly institutio­ nalized settings of most Southern European countries, where malmanagement and corruption flourish, remaining in the EU and the euro and living under those con­ straints can be seen as a less bad option. The alternative of leaving the Union or the common currency would involve giving larger latitude for policy decision-making to largely incompetent and often irresponsible domestic political classes. The split is deep and renewed between the core and the peripheries of Europe. Within the larger countries in the south, Italy and Spain, it is also replicated in the relationship between the more urban, richer north and the poorer south. And within the northern regions of these Southern European countries, the cleavage also widens visibly between a minority wealthy upper middle class and an impoverished, angry petty bourgeoisie.

Inequality is (not always) the issue It is often said that economic inequality hurts democracy or can threaten its con­ solidation. Just google the words “inequality” and “democracy” and will find numerous gloomy references. The topic deserves to be discussed. In many cases, indeed, an increase in inequality, if it involves huge accumulation of wealth by a tiny minority and broad impoverishment, may trigger political polarization, which may be fatal for democracy. But in other cases, if greater inequality is produced by a large increase in wealth of the rich but at the same time most people also improve their economic conditions, it may not destabilize a democratic regime. At the global level there is no statistical association between inequality and regime change or democratic instability. After an extended analysis of the eco­ nomic conditions behind changes between democracy and dictatorship, both ways, political scientists Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman (2016) concluded that the “level of development did not affect the incidence of transitions in our sample” [which is exhaustive] and “inequality does not appear to be a driving force behind changes in political regime.” Economic “inequality” is not an entity that can interfere directly in the political process; it is just a quantitative estimate by students of the distribution of income and wealth and is typically given as a number or share, it may come in different flavors, and it does not have obvious political consequences. As we have discussed, the crucial factor is rather the relative gains or losses of real people in the distribu­ tion, which may or may not be associated with decreasing or increasing inequality as a whole. From a long-term perspective, changes in the distribution of wealth and income depend on numerous factors, many of which are out of control by human beings,

38 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

private enterprises, or public institutions. Historian Walter Scheidel (2017) has shown how big changes in inequality strongly depend on “the four horsemen”: wars, revolutions, collapses, and plagues. The “great leveler” is violence, and the two world wars of the twentieth century were among the greatest levelers in history. Generally, “there is no compelling empirical evidence to support the view that modern economic development, as such, narrow inequalities,” while “democracy does not of itself mitigate inequality.” It is “shifts in power relations that have been instrumental in complementing or exacerbating disequalizing pressures arising from technological change and global economic integration.” Relatively less pronounced changes in the unequal distribution of wealth can also depend on economic growth and depression, as well as on inheritances, numbers of children, unexpected family decisions, bankruptcies, expropriations, changing tax policies, investor management mistakes or strokes or luck, and similar unpredictable variables. “To summarize: inequality does not follow a deterministic process … in the direction of rising or shrinking inequality. Which one dominates depends on the institutions and policies that societies choose to adopt,” in economist Thomas Piketty’s words (2015). By several measures, current levels of inequality are lower than those of a hun­ dred years ago, in the early twentieth century. The most recent few decades of worldwide peace, globalization, technological change, growth, and recession have had the rather unpredictable consequence of reducing inequality. As we suggested above, the income of the poorer half of the world population has risen, especially in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and Sub-Saharan Africa, with extreme growth for China’s middle class, while the income of the richer half of the world population has tended to stall, including extreme losses for the American lower middle class, as analyzed by economist François Bourguignon (2015). In a con­ current study by Branko Milanovic´ (2016) with data from the World Bank, “income inequality has fallen or stabilized, rather than risen, in most parts of the world.” Even not counting taxes (especially on the rich) and social benefits (largely for the poor), Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2014) have documented a “secular decline in inequality” in Europe and the United States. In the U.S., “wealth inequality levels have still (sic) not regained the record levels observed in Europe before World War I.” They also remark that “the important point is that, to a large extent, there has always been a wealth middle class in the United States.” But as they define the middle class as those below the 10% richest and above the 50% poorest, the notion refers to a minority group in society that may not include parts of the above-characterized lower-income tier of the middle class. In the very long term, there is unlikely to be a continuous trend towards the reduction of inequalities, but rather “waves” of increases and decreases that may be hard to predict, according to Milanovic´ (2016). In the future, “wealth inequality will converge toward a finite level. The shocks will ensure that there is always some degree of downward and upward wealth mobility, so that wealth inequality remains bounded in the long run,” as seen by Piketty (2015).

The split of the middle class 39

Political consequences of economic inequality How can we try to understand the recent political consequences of all these relatively minor collective fluctuations of economic inequality? There are at least two potential political actors that could be motivated by changes in economic inequality. On the one hand, it has been said that inequality can make it easier for rich people to exert higher influence on the political process. But as argued by Walter Scheidel (2017), “we may wonder whether it is the pre­ sence of very large fortunes rather than inequality per se that accounts for this phenomenon.” Actually, there is no evidence that the rich, if they are really very rich, have less influence during times of less economic inequality than in other periods. On the other hand, the desire for less inequality can politically motivate the less affluent. The ambition to “keep up with the Joneses” might result in upward social mobility and likely satisfaction with the way collective life works. If, in contrast, it produces frustration and anger and thus some detachment from the democratic system, it may be due to some worsening of the status or absolute position of the actors involved and not necessarily to inequality as such. Of course, the resentment of inequalities and the desire for less inequality can also be driven by a moral concern of justice or fairness. But people who want to catch up with others’ positions are not necessarily concerned with equality as a general value; they usually envy those who are above but close enough to their own and whose status they had expected to match. Their claim to less inequality crucially contains a desire to improve their personal situation. We are assuming all the time that people are primarily concerned with their own fate. An alternative assumption that people behave depending on how the others are doing would suggest more sensitivity to inequality, a sense of relative deprivation, or envy. Our analytical assumption of self-interest motivation is broadly used by traditional social sciences to try to understand how people actually behave, independently of ethical judgments. But it is even consistent with the classical moral norms to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “love your neighbor as yourself.” If we read these prescriptions attentively, we may notice that they take self-interest for granted and recommend being as good to others as one is to oneself. So we can assume that people tend to be satisfied with the way collective affairs work or are managed when their personal life works well, and dissatisfied and angry when their expectations are frustrated. It is a point of view that fits the one adopted by Scheidel (2017) at dealing specifically with inequality: Nobody would disagree that poverty, however defined, is undesirable: the challenge lies in demonstrating that income and wealth inequality as such has negative effects on our lives, rather than the poverty or the great futures with which it may be associated.

40 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Likewise, philosopher Harry Frankfurt (2015) has claimed: “Our most fundamental challenge is not the fact that the incomes of Americans are widely unequal. It is, instead, the fact that too many of our people are poor.” Keep in mind, thus, that we are not discussing here normative criteria of fairness, just considering some logical and likely political consequences of different forms of economic inequality and their changes. Our hypotheses are the following. First, rather obviously, electoral representative democracy can attract broad satisfaction among the population if inequality decreases and a majority of the poor, the workers, and the middle class improve their positions. Something of the sort may have happened in the United States during the twenty or so triumphal years after the Second World War, as well as in those countries in Western and North­ ern Europe where successful equalizing welfare policies were adopted for several decades. But democracy can also afford a relatively high rate of inequality or even an increase if at the same time a majority of middle-income and poor people sig­ nificantly improve their condition—which in this case obviously means that the top rich would be improving theirs more. An obvious example of this would seem to be India. In this situation, some people may be morally scandalized by the luxury and extravagance of the super-rich, but they may not be ready to make it a big political issue as long as their own lives are also improving to a significant extent. Contrariwise, democracy can be in trouble if the measure of inequality rises or even if it remains stable if at the same time the living conditions of the poor, the workers, or the middle class worsen. Polarization can increase and the political process may go off the rails. Roughly speaking, this has been the case in parts of several developed democratic countries during the most recent period, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Southern Europe, as documented in the previous pages, and it seems to be the main underlying explanation of the subsequent discombobulation of their democratic regimes. Finally, democracy can collapse if a substantial reduction of inequality is achieved via the impoverishment of the rich, the middle class and the poor, as has been happening—to mention a paramount case—in the recent process in Venezuela, as well as in some African countries where democracy has never settled. In short, while greater inequality may have recently damaged democracy in developed United States and the countries of Southern Europe, it does not seem to have disturbed democracy in developing India. While less inequality may have been welcome in the postwar developed West and other countries in the past, it has been fatal for democracy more recently in some poorer countries. Greater inequality can be bad for democracy if it is associated with large segments of the poor, the workers, and the middle class not fulfilling their expectations, not necessarily with the departure of the richer minority from the condition of these social groups. Analogously, less inequality can be beneficial for democracy if it involves improvement for the relatively deprived but damaging if it means general impoverishment and reduction of wellbeing for almost everyone.

The split of the middle class 41

BOX 3.1 MEASURING INEQUALITY If, as mentioned above, it is difficult to define and measure poverty, it is even more difficult to measure inequality, and much more difficult to ascertain how it can affect people’s political behavior. The data and the literature available present estimates, calculations, and indices of inequality of income, consumption, wealth, opportunity, schooling, or even happiness; calculations of income are given either before or after paying taxes and receiving government’s social benefits or health insurance from government or employers; capital gains and debts are sometimes taken into account and other times are not; very few studies include nonmonetary benefits; in some cases the values are estimated for individuals and in others for households which may be formed of either three or four individuals; and income and wealth can come either in nominal monetary values or be com­ pared for the purchasing power of the same amount of money in different countries or periods. Different authors aggregate proportions of income or wealth for the top and the bottom deciles or for similar quintiles, or for two halves or other fractions of the population, or use other coefficients and measurements. Countries of very different sizes and degrees of complexity are compared as if they belonged to the same category of units. Some politicians and analysts tend to cherry-pick from this large variety of data to support their specific points. Certain electoral candidates also make confusing statements that can induce some people to believe, for example, that the highly unequal distribution of the increased new wealth created during the previous year reflects the distribution of all the existing wealth in the society. Some pessimistic projections for hypothetical future trends are based on peculiar short periods. The most serious and widely accepted measure of inequality for comparisons across countries and over time is the so-called Gini index. Its values range from 0, which would represent total equality if every individual received or held the same amount of resources, to 1 if one individual controlled everything and everyone else earned or owned nothing. Consistent with the above-quoted summaries and comments, the available calculations of the Gini index at the global level show that income inequality increased for two centuries and then decreased for most of the twentieth century and again since the mid-1990s. Specifically, if the Gini index is calculated for all disposable income—that is, discounting taxes and adding government and social benefits (as measured by the LIS Cross-National Data Center)—the Gini index of global inequality has decreased from about 0.69 in 2000 to 0.65 15 years later, according to the esti­ mate by Tomas Hellebrandt and Paulo Mauro (2015) of the Peterson Institute. Inequality in most developed countries as measured by the Gini index of dis­ posable income is now, in 2020, at about the same level as in 1995, including the United States (at about 0.40), the United Kingdom (0.37), Japan (0.33), France (0.32), or it is even decreased in about two centesimal points in Greece (to 0.34), Spain (to 0.34) and Italy (to 0.33). For the average of 31 developed countries of the OECD, it has remained stable since 2007 at 0.32. In Latin America, it has decreased about ten points, down to 0.47.

4 NATIONALISTS AGAINST THE EUROPEAN UNION

The political crack in most of Europe has been spectacular. Much more frequently than ever before, governments have been defeated in elections, traditional political parties have dramatically declined both in votes and affiliates, the formation of majority coalition governments have required protracted negotiations, minority governments abound, and snap elections proliferate. During six decades of sustained prosperity after World War II, there was low political instability. Incumbent prime ministers’ parties won almost two-thirds of their runs for reelection with an average of 40% of votes, lost an average of less than 3% of total votes between one election and the next (the slight “erosion” of the incumbents that Andreotti derided), and alternated with the opposition every ten years on average (according to the data compiled for more than three hundred democratic elections in OECD parliamentary countries by political scientist Alfred Cuzán (2019)). In contrast, in the first election immediately after the beginning of the Great Recession in 2008, incumbent parties in the 28 member states of the EU more than doubled their losses, up to more than 7% of votes lost on average. In the central core of the continent, traditional parties more or less managed to keep control of the political process. But in 15 peripheral European countries heavily hit by the crisis, incumbents’ losses reached two percentage digits, with an average—at 18% of votes lost—more than six times higher than in the previous period. Traditional government parties in Bulgaria, Czechia, France, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and the United Kingdom obtained their worst ever results in terms of percentage of votes. Most of them not returned to government; several dissolved themselves. At the same time, new parties achieved presidency or prime ministership for the first time in five countries: France, Greece, Italy, Latvia, and Slovenia. In the countries suffering a second-dip economic crisis or longer stagnation, including

Nationalists against the European Union 43

Italy, Portugal and Spain, the losses of the new incumbent governments in further elections were even higher, leaving them with about half of their initial support. One-term governments and prime ministers have multiplied.

Change in troubling times That a sudden recession would harm the electoral prospects for parties in govern­ ment so arrestingly was not immediately obvious. In previous, relatively milder recessions, opposition parties did not grow so strongly and many people rallied behind the government, especially during the “golden age” of political parties. A few early analyses even conjectured that the international scope of the crisis might reinforce support for incumbent governments because voters would seek refuge in the hands of sitting rulers. This would have been a reaction similar to what can be observed following natural disasters, terrorist attacks, or external aggressions when they are not perceived as a government’s responsibility. Apparently, some politicians and observers expected that many voters would follow St. Ignatius of Loyola’s rule: “In times of desolation do not ever make a change.” These speculations were supported by analyses of previous crises. For example, political scientists Timothy Hellwig and David Samuels (2007) found that for the period 1975–2002 voters residing in more closed economies who expected their rulers to be more able to manage macroeconomic policy “were likely to sanction national leaders for past performance outcomes.” But voters in open economies, who might be more aware of their rulers’ deprivation of power due to the inter­ national scope of the crisis, “were relatively less likely to attribute reward or blame to domestic politicians for economic performance,” according to political scientists Timothy Hellwig and David Samuels (2007). Along these lines, during the first few years of the Great Recession Marina Costa Lobo and Michael Lewis-Beck (2012) hypothesized that “the impact of the growing involvement of the EU institutions may erode citizens perceptions that the government is responsible for economic policy” and make voters “less likely to hold their national government accountable for managing the economy.” Yet voters may have realized that the Great Recession was not a direct result of the European common market or the common currency, but rather of spendthrift national governments and their clumsy management of housing and financial bubbles prone to burst. In fact, the so-called European Union “interferences” in domestic economic policy had been unanimously agreed by all its member-state governments and basically consisted of coming to the rescue of mismanaged national economies. It was thus very soon observed that many voters, depressed not only in the economic sense of the word, were in for a dime, in for a dollar. For the same reason that governments often claim merit when the economy works well or other collective goals are achieved even when they are not responsible for such accom­ plishments, people tend to indiscriminately blame government, as the main arm of democratic accountability, for bad results. An actual recession and net losses of jobs,

44 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

income, and opportunities, the ending of long-fueled optimism for a brighter future, and contagious sentiments of anger and outrage led to “punishment” votes against ruling parties and opened up unforeseen opportunities to political outsiders and adventurers. The second-dip economic crisis, as already described, provoked a second-dip political crisis which sustained political instability for many more years. In fact, “new governments elected after the outbreak of the Great Recession which failed to redress the economic situation of their countries were more severely punished than governments that happened to be in office in hard-hit countries when the Great Recession began,” as observed by political scientists Enric Hernández and Hanspeter Kriesi (2016). This was not clearly anticipated, either. In a very long-term study of financial crises by economists Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch (2016), it was found that “the political effects are temporary and diminish over time. They fade about five years after the beginning of the crisis, and after ten years almost all variables are back to their pre-crisis levels.” However, as the same authors have also remarked, political instability contributes to slow economic recoveries. “Increasing fractionalization and polarization of parliaments make crisis resolution more difficult, reduces the chances of serious reform and leads to poli­ tical conflict at a time when decisive political action may be needed most.” Funke and co-authors had to revise themselves several years after the first appraisal to acknowledge that, in contrast to their previous prediction, the financial crisis’ “effects haven’t faded, it is still empowering populist parties, and politics has not returned to normal” (2018). The basic explanations are, first, that the crisis of 2008 was a major shock, with more long-lasting political effects than the average financial crisis in the past on which initial speculations and predictions had been based. As explained by political scientists Fernando Casal Bértoa and Till Weber (2019): The more severe the impact of a crisis on a certain economy, there larger should also be its impact on the respective party system. The lower economic growth after the crisis, and in particular for countries with negative growth, the more pronounced is the increase of electoral volatility, party system fragmentation and political polarization. Second, the initial reaction to the recession provoked the political disruption of the regular democratic process, which made the redress of the economy more difficult and in turn fed more political turmoil. The events confirmed that under conditions of profound economic crisis voters tend to shift their support more frequently in search for a leader or political party capable of putting an end to the unfavorable economic situation … citizens will favor cabinet access for new governing parties as well as the formation of innovative governing coalitions.

Nationalists against the European Union 45

Incumbent governments are overthrown Since 2008, regular democratic elections were disrupted in almost all the countries in the western, eastern and southern peripheries of Europe which had been strongly hit by the Great Recession and where the traditional middle class was splitting and shrinking. The main reaction of voters was not to take refuge in the status quo or blame the European Union but to make national governments accountable for poor performance and to overthrow many of them. Let us see a summary. In the United Kingdom in 2010, incumbent Labour lost the election with the party’s worst result ever; the following three elections, in which half of voters changed their choice of party, produced two “hung” parliaments without a single-party majority of seats. In Ireland in 2011, long-term incumbent Fianna Fail slipped to third in votes and has not yet returned to government. Comparable events occurred in the more recent post-communist democracies in Eastern Europe. In Bulgaria in 2009, the Socialists lost two-fifths of their previous support and have not yet returned to government; four years later, the new incumbent Conservatives lost one-fourth of their support and were replaced by a government of independent experts. In the Czech Republic in 2010, the former incumbent Conservatives split and lost two-fifths of their previous support, while the Social-democrats lost about one-third of theirs; three years later, the parties of the incumbent center-right coalition lost almost half of their previous votes while three other parties obtained more votes than any of them. In Hungary in 2010, the Socialists in government lost more than half of their previous electoral support and have not yet returned to government. In Slovenia in 2011, the incumbent Social-democrats lost two-thirds of their previous support. In Slovakia in 2012, the incumbent Christian-democrats lost two-thirds of their previous votes and became the fifth party in size. In Lithuania in 2008, the incumbent center-left three-party coalition lost half of its previous support and its component parties fell behind three other parties. In Latvia in 2010, the Conservatives in government lost 90% of their previous support and dissolved a couple of years later. Even more dramatic defeats of incumbent governments took place in Southern Europe, where the economic crisis was more severe and the impact on party systems has been more pronounced. In two French presidential elections since 2012, the incumbent one-term pre­ sidents, one Conservative and one Socialist, were defeated or withdrew from run­ ning, in contrast to the long-term reelection of their predecessors from both parties; for the first time, two newcomers from parties without previous presidential tenure competed in the runoff. In Greece, there were four snap elections in less than four years since 2012. First, the incumbent Socialists lost more than two-thirds of their previous votes and never regained first place; then the new incumbent Conservatives also lost more than two-fifths of their previous votes; through two further elections, the Radical Left won and formed a government, just to lose the following election.

46 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

In Italy the only debate about the state of the economy was, like the one in the Monty Python sketch about a parrot, whether it was dead or just tired and resting. Since 2011, there has been a parade of a Conservative prime minister’s resignation, a grand coalition government led by an independent expert, a new election in which two-thirds of the voters changed their choice of party from the previous election, three different center-left prime ministers succeeding each other without elections, two failed referenda on electoral and constitutional reforms, and the defeat of an incumbent center-left party that obtained its worst results ever. In Portugal in 2011, the incumbent Socialists lost the election with the party’s worst result ever; four years later, the incumbent center-right government was replaced with the Socialists supported by less than one-third of the votes, the smallest minority ever. In Spain in 2011, the incumbent Socialists lost the election with the party’s worst result ever; in a further series of four snap elections, both the new incumbent Conservatives and again the Socialists obtained their worst results ever. Two illegal referenda for the independence of Catalonia exacerbated political conflict, fragmentation, and polarization.

Nationalist parties surge and fall Several political parties that traditionally formed governments in different European countries have disappeared from the political map, while new ones have entered parliament and gained ground. Some of the surging nationalist, anti-European Union parties try to shape a new political agenda by strongly concentrating on cultural issues, such as those linked to religion or immigration. But on related and relevant socio-economic issues most of them can be located close to the far right and a few on the far left of the political spectrum. As a consequence of the emer­ gence of extreme parties, political polarization increases, which makes the forma­ tion of consistent governmental and parliamentary majorities more difficult and provokes higher governmental instability, legislative paralysis, and more biased influence in electoral and administrative agendas than in previous decades. A summary of specific instances of anti-EU nationalist parties includes: four prime ministers, four participations in coalition governments as junior partners, and three cases of support from within parliament minority of governments formed by traditional parties, in addition to other political disturbances. Let us look at this in more detail. There have been two prime ministers from nationalist parties on the right and two from the left. The two nationalists from the right have ruled in post-communist Eastern Europe: in Hungary, Civic Alliance (Fidesz)’s Viktor Orban brags of being an “illiberal democrat”; while in Poland, Polish Law and Justice (PiS)’s Jar­ oslaw Kaczynski waves a “law and order” agenda. Both were reprimanded by the European Union institutions for attempting to reduce the division of powers and the rule of law by controlling the judiciary and public media. As an expression of the internal social and political breaches, these two national governments led by

Nationalists against the European Union 47

populist-nationalist parties have been paralleled by city councils and mayors elected with liberal, progressive, and pro-European orientations, including Budapest in Hungary and Warsaw, Gdansk, Poznan, Lodz, and Szceczin in Poland. The two prime ministers from new left parties have been in Southern Europe. The Greek Syriza was created as an anti-establishment, anti-euro, and anti-European Union radical coalition of more than a dozen groups self-labeled as ecologists, anticapitalists, feminists, patriots, social-democrats, radical socialists, or luxemburgists, plus variants of heterodox communists (including euro-communists, trotskyists and maoists), which obtained broad support from a social ocean of unemployed and impoverished citizens. However, once in government under Alexis Tsipras’ lea­ dership, Syriza became a mildly Eurosceptic party that kept Greece a full-time member of the European Union. In Italy, a nationalist anti-EU government was led by the Five Star Move­ ment, which was founded as a post-ideological anti-party party to fight against “the caste” or corrupt political and economic elite. It found broad support among the unemployed and precarious youth as well as students and other highly educated people with pessimistic feelings about the economy (according to a survey of its voters by Tecnè). The leftish Five Star first formed a coalition government with the nationalist League, which identified itself as “neither right nor left, but for the people against the elites.” The coalition government tried to stem immigration from North Africa and the Middle East and experimented with challenging the fiscal and budget policies of the EU, only to quickly acquiesce to its rule. It lasted barely a year. Five Stars replaced its coalition partners with the center-left Democrats, which were more attuned to local rulers in Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, Bologna. In addition, three far-right parties and one far-left party have had stints as junior partners in multiparty coalition governments. In Finland, the Finns attracted sup­ port from “low-income, low-educated workers who depend on the welfare state to protect them from rising unemployment and other economic risks” and largely at the expense of the formerly dominant Social-democrats, as documented by political scientist Sheri Berman (2018). They entered government in coalition with the center and the conservatives, but less than two years later they were expelled from their offices and the party split. The Freedom Party of Austria was in gov­ ernment with the conservatives twice; the first time the party split, and the second time it led to the breaking up of the coalition and a snap election following a corruption scandal. The Conservative People’s Party of Estonia coalesced with the Liberals. On the left, the Spanish We Can (Podemos) pretended to follow up the spirit of the protests by the Indignados movement, whose motto, “Yes, we can,” was inspiration for its name. Initially, it was defined as populist neither of the right of the left; it placed itself in the confrontation of “us versus them,” characterizing its foe as “the caste” and opposing this with a vision of a unified “people.” In coali­ tion with the remnants of the traditional communist United Left and a few regio­ nal leftwing groups, it was mostly supported by young, highly educated members

48 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

of the urban lower-middle class who were both dissatisfied and pessimistic about the economic situation, while the traditional Socialists retained more support from lower-income, poorly educated and lower-skilled workers (according to surveys by CIS analyzed by Pau Marí-Klose (2015) and Politikon (2015)). In parliament We Can briefly supported a Socialist minority government, and after a new election it became a junior partner in a coalition government. A few nationalist parties lent parliamentary support to minority governments of traditional parties, two from the right and one from the left. In Denmark, the People’s Party supported a liberal-conservative coalition government for ten years. The Party for Freedom in the Netherlands supported a center-right government, but frequent disagreements led to a snap election after two years. In Portugal, the Left Bloc, which was formed by a loose coalition of heterodox communists, trotskyists, and dissident socialists, received some backing from the educated but declining urban middle class and supported, together with the traditional communists, a minority government of the Socialist party. There have been other government disturbances. Opposition parties won half a dozen pressured resignations or successful motions of censure against incumbent prime ministers in the Czech Republic, Italy, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovakia, and Spain. Multiple snap elections were called when new political dispersions of representatives made multiparty coalition majorities difficult to form in Finland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain. And several independent, expert, or caretaker governments were formed when no other formula was attained in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy, Romania, and Sweden, as well as in Belgium due to sustained territorial conflict. Many of the insurgent nationalist parties have tried to support each other in their unsettling endeavors. The far left and the far right coincide in opposing further integration of the European Union; their populism is made of debasing alignments on the left-right or other policy axes and claiming that the main dividing line is between those at the bottom and those at the top, “us versus them.” The leader of the French National Front, later renamed National Rally, Marine Le Pen, declared that “the political divide is not left and right anymore but globalists and patriots,” and “since in Greece or Spain where there is no equivalent to the National Front, … it is the extreme left that takes our place.” The far-left Syriza chose a right-wing, strongly nationalist party called Independent Greeks as the partner in their majority coalition government. As mentioned, the Italian leftish Five Star Movement formed a government together with the far-right League. For the European Parliament, some coordination has been achieved among some of the far-right parties. One Eurosceptic group was organized around the exiting British and Polish conservatives, another was led by the Italian League and the French National Rally, while members of the Italian Five Star and the Brexit party remained “not aligned.” Meanwhile, Syriza, We Can, and other leftist parties tried to cooperate on the other side. In contrast to more consistent international groupings of conservatives, social-democrats, liberals, and greens, the oxymoron of an international of nationalists has not been achieved. The relative organizational

Nationalists against the European Union 49

weakness of some of the new parties is reflected in their names, which tend to discard the word “party” and lean more toward appellations such as Alliance, Alternative, Bloc, Coalition, Front, League, Movement, Rally, or other peculiar tags. The main differences between some of those parties derive precisely from their nationalisms, which may well lead them into rivalry and an opposition of interests. On the contentious issue of immigration, Britain, Germany, or France receive immigrants not only from Africa or the Middle East but also from Poland, Greece, Italy, and Spain, which places the respective nationalist parties on different sides. The Polish plumber, the Spanish stonemason, the Romanian fruit picker, and other xenophobic stereotypes about “invader” manual laborers who moved to Britain, France, or Germany are targets of some anti-European nationalists. In some cases traditional parties have built up a cordon sanitaire against an extreme unwelcome party, which has encouraged broadly inclusive coalitions. In other cases, traditional social democrats have been replaced by some other group such as the greens as the main center-left party while a new centrist or liberal party may have become referential on the center-right side, which might restore some regular alternation between moderate coalition governments. However, in a context of uncertainty, it is the European Union institutions that have become the main anchor of stability. They have sponsored the reduction of public debt and deficit, tested the resilience of the private financial system, stimu­ lated economic recovery, and promoted further economic, political, and military unions. The EU checks that the rule of law is preserved in all countries; not only Poland and Hungary, as mentioned, but also the Czech Republic and Romania have received warnings regarding the loss of independence of their judicial systems. Bulgaria and Romania are submitted to a Cooperation and Verification Mechanism by which the European Commission periodically issues reports about their progress on judicial reform, corruption, and organized crime which must be endorsed by each country’s council of ministers. A succession of national government turnovers has produced some domestic policy ups and downs, but almost every country has ended up complying with the pacts, programs, and procedures that the EU has adopted with shared responsibility from the representatives of all member states. The EU constraints on policy­ making by national governments shape people’s expectations about what they can expect from the latter, which might reduce frustration and favor predictability. No future restabilization of politics in Europe is foreseeable without a further empowering of the European Union.

Brexit: a warning to everyone The biggest nationalist surge against the European Union has been Brexit. After the Second World War, Winston Churchill called to “construct such a thing as the United States of Europe.” But he implied this should be without the United Kingdom. It was just a proposal to prevent another war in which Britons would

50 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

have to intervene again from outside. The early European Communities were built around the France–Germany axis of conflict, which had generated three major wars in less than seventy years. The UK was not a founding member. From that moment on, British politics struggled between the dream of retaining historical links with the vanishing British Empire and the increasing strength and appeal of the European Community (EC). Eventually, with the empire mostly disbanded and a laggard economy, the United Kingdom became a member of the EC in 1973. For continental Europeans, the union of Europe was a triumph of peace, democracy, and economic opportunities. In contrast, for the UK, “the entry into Europe was a defeat: a feat she had resisted, a necessity reluctantly accepted, the last resort of a once great power, never for one moment a climatic or trium­ phant engagement with the construction of Europe,” as described by historian Hugo Young (1998). The European Community was sensed as “a place of British failure—proof of Britain’s failed independence, site of her failed domination.” Two years later, European membership was ratified by the UK’s first national referendum, despite many sharing former prime minister Clement Atlee’s opinion that referenda are “a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators.” The Brexiteers of the time lost, but their campaign premonitory slogan was “Make Britain Great Again.” On the one hand, the UK made substantial contributions to the EU based on its military force, its presence in the United Nations Security Council and the Group of Seven, its liberal approach to free-market exchanges, and the provision of Eng­ lish as a major lingua franca for most Europeans. On the other hand, as long as the European Community reinforced itself, a succession of British governments played chicken and resisted further integration. They tried to reduce Britain’s financial contribution to the EU. The UK was excluded from the Schengen agreement for free circulation of people across national borders. It did not adopt the common currency, the euro. And it did not accept the primacy of the European Court of Justice over national law regarding some fundamental rights. Every braking possi­ bility was pursued under the threat of Brexit or vetoing a treaty change. And on most issues, the EU, feeling that it had much to lose, conceded and hit the brake. The stakes increased, especially with the Great Recession of 2008, which some British politicians confusingly attributed to the monetary union. Very soon a wave of immigrants arrived from Eastern European countries whose entrance into the EU had given their workers freedom of movement. Tensions were augmented, forms of English nationalism revived, and nostalgia for empire resurged. The driver on the subsequent path was Prime Minister David Cameron, whom president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker (2019) would name “one of the great destroyers of modern times.” For the European Parliament election of 2009, Cameron brought the British Conservative party out of the European People’s Party, arguing that it was too “federalist.” Two years later, more than one-fourth of Conservative members of the House of Commons broke party discipline to vote in favor of a referendum on membership of the EU. That motion did not win, but as anti-EU pressures increased, Cameron decided to call such a referendum. In the following European election in 2014, the most voted party was

Nationalists against the European Union 51

the anti-EU right-wing UK Independence Party, UKIP—which Cameron had described as “a bunch of fruitcakes and loonies and closet racists.” It was the first time in more than a hundred years that a party other than the Conservatives or Labour won a national election. Cameron tried to renegotiate the existing deal with the EU to present a new offer at the June 2016 referendum. By then, the EU had become more integrated and had more to lose from new special formulas. Enlarging the number of special dishes in the membership menu was increasingly indigestible. Cameron was able to confirm that the UK would remain outside the euro and that it was not committed to further economic and monetary union or political integration. But on the cen­ tral issue of immigration from Eastern Europe, the EU did not accept eliminating the essential “people’s freedom of movement”; the only modest concession was a waiting time for newly arriving EU workers to access to non-contributory in-work benefits. Some EU officials branded the British negotiators’ proposals “Cakeism” from their wish to both have their cake and eat it in a deal that would permit continued single market access and the end of people’s free movement. The EU rulers were determined to avoid creating an example for possible departures by other countries, and they no longer hit the brake. Despite his almost empty pockets, Cameron expected the EU referendum between “Remain” and “Leave” to be as successful as his own-called referenda regarding electoral reform in 2011 and Scotland independence in 2014. However, the Remainers ran a lackluster, negative campaign focused on the costs of leaving rather than the advantages of remaining, while banning the European Commission from playing any role in it. The Brexiteers, in contrast, mobilized not only UKIP but also both Conservative and Labour MPs. Their campaign focused on slogans such as “Take back control,” “We want our country back,” and “Believe in Brit­ ain,” which reflected a dream to move “back” to imperial times, together with chauvinistic anti-immigration messages and unsupported claims about the UK’s high financial contribution to the EU. The division was between internal visions of the United Kingdom rather than about Europe, on which little information was evidenced by either side. Most voters in London, Scotland, and Northern Ireland voted Remain, while the rest of England and Wales voted Leave, which unexpectedly won 52% to 48%. Immediately afterwards, many commentators used clichés about the success of “the left behind,” “the white working class,” and the “losers” of globalization who were the “winners” of the referendum and vice versa, even making the whole affair a “working-class revolt.” Several analyses show a more nuanced picture of the breach in British voters around the Brexit issue. An early examination of the University of Essex Con­ tinuing Monitoring Survey was published by political scientists Harold Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whitley (2017). They showed that many people formed opinions on the EU based on their assessment of a combination of the economy, immigration, and sovereignty, as well as the ability of domestic leaders and parties to deliver on those issues. Consistent with our discussion regarding the

52 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

relations between anger and risk-taking, the surveyed Brexiteers expressed few concerns regarding the risks of leaving—as people with such a negative attitude they might have felt they had nothing to lose. Several authors analyzed more encompassing survey data from the British Elec­ tion Study. They confirmed the importance of the immigration issue and also consistent with our more general previous discussion about the Great Disruption, documented the pivotal split of the middle class, the emotions of disappointment regarding economic expectations, and the Brexiteers’ propensity to make risky choices. More specifically, political scientists Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo (2017) noted that key predictors of the vote for Brexit were not the number of immigrants in the country but recent increases in the rate of immigration at the local level and sentiments regarding control over immigration. Likewise, Ailsa Henderson and her associates (2017) found that immigration concerns played a major role in the Brexit referendum, alongside a general willingness to take risks, right-wing views, older age, and English national identity. Sociologist Lorenza Antonucci and her team (2017) dismissed the narrative of the “left behind” Brexiter and focused on the malaise of the declined, squeezed middle class. “We challenge”—they wrote—“the popularized view of the Leave voter as an outsider and find that individuals from an intermediate class, whose malaise is due to a declining financial position, represent an important segment of the Brexit vote.” Voting Leave was associated with self-identification as middle class rather than as working class, intermediate levels of education, and psycho­ social features of dissatisfaction due to the perception of a declining economic position. The group of Leave voters that do not identify as “working class” is predominant in quantitative terms; “the core group driving the Leave vote is, according to us, an intermediate group whose position is declining.” Other analyses concluded with similar observations. For sociologist Graham Taylor (2017), the key base of support for Brexit can be found amongst “middle­ class voters in the South of England.” He provided some relevant data: while twothirds of voters in the referendum identified themselves as middle-class, 59% of Leave voters fulfilled that social condition. Thus, a simple calculation would show that, as we discussed more generally in a previous chapter, the middle class split. About 31% of all voters would have been middle-class members in relatively wealthy regions with negative attitudes to multiculturalism and globalization who leaned toward Leave, while about 35% of all voters would be younger and edu­ cated middle-class members leaning toward Remain. If we assume that most of the upper class was Leave, the working class would have also split along similar lines. The role of emotions turned out to be relevant. Economist Federica Liberini and her associates (2019) analyzed the Understanding Society data set and the British Household Panel Survey. They demonstrated that in addition to immigration, citi­ zens’ subjective feelings of discontent about their incomes were a substantially better predictor of pro-Brexit views than their actual incomes. Confirming again the observations collected in our previous discussion, they showed that more risk-averse

Nationalists against the European Union 53

individuals and more trusting people were happier in the EU than those with the opposite attributes. Emotions triggered by the frustration of expectations moved many voters to take the risky choice of Leave, largely unaware of the consequences.

Direct democracy versus representative parliamentarism By resorting to a referendum to learn “the will of the people,” the British political rulers were trying to evade their duty to deal with a difficult issue. The typical referendum choice between two opposite alternatives produces a polarization of partisan stands and people’s opinions, which jeopardizes further negotiations and compromises. And after a referendum, a government and parliament still have to deal with the topic in order to implement the decision by specific legislative means, a task that may be hindered by the pre-referendum adversarial campaigns and vicious confrontations. Legally, the nationwide Brexit referendum was consultative, advisory, nonbinding, as befits the parliamentary democracy of a large country. An inquiry by a House of Lords committee had concluded that, “because of the sovereignty of Parliament, referendums cannot be legally binding in the UK, and are therefore advisory.” Cameron’s government had subsequently declared that “Under the UK’s constitutional arrangements, Parliament must be responsible for deciding whether or not to take action in response to a referendum result.” Yet Britain’s political and chattering classes, adrift in unchartered waters, demonstrated a knee-jerk impulse to abide by “rules are rules” even when no such rules existed. The British government could well have done as the Greek govern­ ment did one year earlier: discard enforcing the result of a non-binding referendum and seek a new accommodation with the EU. Everything might have been dif­ ferent because, while the Brexit referendum option to Remain in the EU obtained only 48% votes, it was initially supported by 75% members of the “sovereign” parliament, including 54% of Conservatives (according to data from House of Commons Library elaborated by Henry Mance (2019)). When Cameron resigned in the wake of his failure, the new prime minister in charge of implementing Brexit was his minister Theresa May, who had backed “Remain” in the referendum campaign. “Brexit means Brexit,” she then repeated, as if the referendum result was above her own political pledges. May called a snap election in the expectation of getting rid of many Remainer Conservative MPs but instead lost her party’s parliamentary majority. She turned for parliamentary support to Northern Irish unionists, who obstructed any deal keeping the border with the Republic of Ireland open. The further process precipitated one of the worst political and constitutional crises in a few hundred years. The result of an irresponsible experiment with direct democracy wrecked representative parliamentary democracy. Unable to reach a political agreement in Parliament, several extensions of the Brexit schedule were solicited from the EU over the following years. In its isolation, the inefficiency of the restrictive British political system was revealed in all its splendor.

54 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

In the House of Commons debates, there were, in fact, at least three alternatives: no-deal Brexit, Brexit with some deal with the EU, and Remain. Some maximalist Brexit positions rejected any deal above all, even more than Remain. With this configuration, no positive majority in favor of any of the alternatives was workable, while there were negative majorities to reject each of them. A new prime minister and Conservative leader, Boris Johnson, was selected by internal party voting, with the participation of less than 1% of the party voters in the most recent election. (The opposition leader, Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, had been selected in so-called “primaries” with the participation of less than 5% of party voters).1 Both prime ministers, May and Johnson, lost votes in parliament more often and by larger margins than ever before. The government and parliament lost control of the process. Unforeseen mass protests erupted. For the European Union, Brexit was an outstanding occasion to learn and to teach a lesson. Either not even a country like the UK could manage to leave, or leaving would prove to have dire consequences and the Britons would crash out. The EU won the chicken game; it survived without further departures, increased its cohesion, and moved ahead. The most damaging political consequences for the UK should be perceived with a long-term eye. Constitutional scholar Vernon Bogdanor (2019) set up a frame­ work. He sternly asserted that the entry into the EC in 1973 “abrogated the sovereignty of Parliament.” Further reforms were “gradually creating a new Con­ stitution, the constitution of a multinational state.” They included: the devolution to Scotland and Wales, the partnership with the Republic of Ireland on Northern Ireland, and the binding referendum about the independence of Scotland which implied the recognition of its right to self-determination. Also, the creation of a supreme court not based on the House of Lords introduced judicial review of legislative and executive decisions. Bogdanor emphasized that a post-Brexit poli­ tical system would be very different from the pre-European membership one, and forecast as unlikely a restoration of the sovereignty of parliament. “Sovereignty is like virginity,” he said. “once lost, it can never be recovered.”

Note 1 Johnson was selected as Conservative leader and prime minister in a vote session with 139,318 participants out of 16,636,684 Conservative voters in the most recent election in 2019. Corbyn was selected and confirmed as Labour leader in two successive primaries with 422,664 and 506,438 participants out of 9,347,304 Labour voters in the 2015 election.

5 MAKE AMERICA DIVIDED AGAIN

Immediately after the shocking election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States in November 2016, catchy headlines and hasty book titles pointed to suspects like “the left behind,” “the losers of globalization,” “the working-class whites,” “the blue-collars,” “the revenge of the poor,” “the poorly educated,” or “a large overlooked coalition of mostly blue-collar white and working-class voters.” The Democrats, in turn, were seen as “increasingly dependent on a white, upper, urban, educated middle-class that has isolated itself from the rest of the American society.” Some dared to summarize: “The class inversion of American politics accelerates: Donald Trump’s Republicans are becoming the party of bluecollar white voters, as college-educated white voters slip away.” (See sources at the end of the book.) These hurried diagnoses are not based on strong grounds. Every observer knows that Trump won thanks to his narrow advantage in five states in the Upper Midwest: Iowa, Ohio, and especially Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, where he was ahead by less than one percentage point. In these states, strongly hit by recent dein­ dustrialization and technological change that intensified during the Great Recession, the traditional middle class has split. Largely due to this socioeconomic breach and the subsequent political polarization, these states have become more critical to making a majority in the Presidential Electoral College and in Congress. In contrast to hypotheses such as the ones quoted above, multiple reliable sour­ ces show that both in the Midwest and nationwide the vast majority of the upper class and the upper-middle class voted for the Republicans, while most of the lower-middle class and the working or lower class supported the Democrats. The point is that the traditional balancing role of the old, wider middle class has vanished and polarization has increased. To sustain this analysis, the population of the United States can be divided into three social groups of similar size, which can be defined by an overlapping set of

56 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

economic, cultural, and geographical variables. Indicators such as income, educa­ tion, occupation, and subjective identification significantly correlate with each other, while cultural attitudes regarding race and immigration, as well as place and type of residence, strongly interrelate with economic circumstances. Political sci­ entists John Michael, Tesle, and Lynn Vavreck (2018) even talk of “racialized economics” as they observe that for certain voters, “racial attitudes are the prism through which voters think about economic outcomes.” (Our data, analysis, and calculations come from the Congressional Budget Office, the Pew Research Center, American National Election Studies, the FiveThirtyEight website, and political scientist Larry Bartels (2006).) The top third includes the upper 10% and those whom we previously identified as the upper-middle class. The typical household in this group has an annual income above $90,000, most of its members are white professionals, they widely overlap with the 30% of adult Americans who completed four-year college courses, and most are registered as Republican voters. Many of these people live in separate urban and suburban enclaves and prosper in terms of income and wealth. However, some members of the upper-middle class may be fearful that their status is threatened, afraid of paying too much in taxes and of being increasingly surrendered by immigrant and non-white neighbors who might diminish the value of their property and the quality of their district schools, and determined to save their patriarchal family structure. Their tone may echo commonplaces of the old Tea Party’s rhetoric, including being dismissive of the lower-middle class as “poor white trash.” The most visible minority dissidents from this group in the elections during the second half of the 2010s were suburban, college-educated women who declined to vote for Trump or his congressional candidates. The second third is the lower-middle class. The typical household here makes more than $40,000 per year and includes sectors of the traditional petty bourgeoisie and small-business owners. On the one hand, in rural areas and small towns, some had seen their standards of living eroded, were pessimistic in terms of expectations, and felt in the loss frame; the most active expressed their anger in campaign rallies, certain media, and social networks; many were ready to make the riskiest choices and broadly voted for Trump. On the other hand, in large and middle-sized cities a main component of the lower-middle class comprised the urban young, more qualified precariat. Their most active voters were somehow heirs of the spirit of the Occupy protests, they mobilized in favor of democratic socialist Bernie Sanders in the primaries and massively turned Democrat. Finally, the bottom third is formed of the working class, which has been in long-term change and membership decline. Nowadays, only a small part of the working class is employed in traditional blue-collar jobs such as manufacturing, and even fewer work in construction, mining, or agriculture. Most current workers have white-collar jobs in the service sector, especially retail commerce, or in technical or administrative occupations. A notable number or members of tradi­ tional working-class families are associated with economic activities in decline, and many are retired, homeworkers, or disabled.

Make America divided again 57

A racial and cultural split within the working class emerged in the mid-1960s and still exists. About fifty years ago, many white workers joined the Republican party after the ruling Democrats enforced voting and civil rights for African Americans in the South, and also in reaction to cultural wars regarding family, sex, religion, and work values. Nowadays, out of the barely one-sixth of the electorate that may be identified with the white working class, about half vote Republican, while more than three-fourths of Black and Latino workers, if they vote, vote for the Democrats. We can thus estimate that in recent elections the Republicans have won votes from more than two-thirds of voters of the upper third, about half the voters of the second third, and about one-third of the lower third above identified. This means that the support for the Democrats comes from less than one-third of the upper third, the other half of the second third, and two-thirds of the lower third. Let us call it the three-thirds model, meaning that the three social groups, from top to bottom, can be divided 2/3, 1/2, 1/3 for the Republicans and, symmetrically, 1/3, 1/2, 2/3 for the Democrats.1 The crucial change from a few decades ago is, again, the split of the middle class between a prosperous upper-middle class and a declining lower-middle class, as well as the sharp division of the lower-middle class into two halves covering its rural and urban sectors—the latter increasing in number. Also to count is the revival of the historical breach within the working class between whites losing expectations and Blacks and Latinos holding on to traditional demands. An emphasis on the central split of the middle class in American politics is not generally to be found in the analyses of media pundits and the commentariat—or in academic works even when the data they provide can support our inter­ pretation. One view that more explicitly coincides with our approach was included in the sociological survey “The Vanishing Center of American Democracy,” produced by James Davison Hunter and Carl Desportes Bowman (2017) for the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture of the University of Virginia after the 2016 elections. This survey emphasizes the cultural conflict which, in their words, “was always one taking place within the middle class … mainly the differences between the low-middle and the upper-middle class.” But as they pointedly note: The backdrop for the culture war is a significant change within the objective conditions of middle-class life during the past half-century; a change that was amplified and highlighted in public consciousness by the ‘Great Recession.’ Since 2008, awareness of a cleavage between the highly educated, professional upper-middle class on the one hand, and the less well-educated, non-professional middle, lower-middle and working class on the other, has deepened and hardened. The former were surprised and even shaken by the economic contraction, but were not broadly trauma­ tized by its harsh effects, while the latter felt much of the recession, if not its full impact.

58 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Political party polarization The increasing polarization in the United States triggered by these recent economic and social changes has been magnified by existing institutional rules. It is well known that presidential and congressional elections in the US are held in districts in which only one seat is in dispute, the first past the post wins, the winner takes all, and, as a consequence, there is room for only two potentially winning political parties or candidates. This framework fosters a high degree of political polarization even where the distribution of voters’ preferences may be consensual. It is less frequently recalled that these formulae are in contrast with the ones used in most democratic countries in the world, where multiparty elections and coalition governments tend to be more common, as we will discuss in the second part of the book. The impression that American politicians are now more polarized than ever is also backed up by a comparison with the equivocal structuring of political parties in the period prior to the mid-1960s. For about a hundred years following the Civil War in the nineteenth century, the two-party system in the US was sustained by a split among conservatives. Northern conservatives mostly supported the Repub­ licans—that is, the party of Lincoln—while Southern white conservatives who had been deprived of ownership of black slaves ranked with the Democrats. During those times, the heterogeneity of the voters and the representatives of each party generated low voting discipline in Congress, which in turn produced changing majorities for different issues involving different sets of members of the two parties. This flexibility facilitated low partisan confrontation, less difficult agreements, more compromises, and more consensual decisions than the typical clash between two sturdy blocks. Party indiscipline was a rudimentary, confusing substitute for a multiparty system. It was the grease that oiled the wheels of policy decision-making in an otherwise adversarial two-party system. All this began to change about fifty years ago. The changes promoted by civil rights legislation in the mid-1960s generated a realignment of voters and political parties, as we mentioned, which eventually shaped two more homogeneous elec­ toral, partisan, and congressional blocs. In the 1970s, president Richard Nixon launched the “Southern strategy” to attract white segregationists in the South to the Republican party. In the 1980s, some voters motivated by moral and family issues became “Reagan Democrats.” And in the 1990s, Republicans led by Newt Gingrich launched series of confrontational initiatives when they achieved control of the majority of the two chambers of Congress for the first time in decades. Gradually, most white conservatives in both the North and the South became the core support of the Republicans, while most liberals and progressives, together with the vast majority of African Americans, aligned with the Democrats. Con­ servative Democrats had fled the party, while liberal Republicans were almost extinguished. In comparison with those previous periods, American voters are now “better sorted” into the two parties, to put it in political scientist Morris Fiorina’s (2017)

Make America divided again 59

words. Better partisan sorting has generated stronger party discipline in Congress, which in turn fosters more adversarial politics, confrontation, legislative paralysis, government shutdowns, and “gridlock.” Politicians have more opportunity to shape the agenda by selecting issues on which partisan policy proposals are notably distant from each other in order to seek potential electoral advantage for their party. Legislators remain entrenched around those positions and polarization increases. But to understand the magnitude of the recent increase in polarization of American politics we should take as reference not the rosy but anomalous and politically ambiguous 1950s or more remote times but rather the mid-1990s, when the realignment of the two major parties discussed above was consummated. In a comparative perspective, the current high degree of polarization of Amer­ ican politics looks not dissimilar to the one that existed for many decades in Great Britain, which also used single-seat districts with only two major, well-sorted par­ ties competing for top power. In European and other multiparty democracies using proportional electoral rules the polarization arising from the Great Disruption has provoked the emergence of challenging new parties, while in the two-party sys­ tems of the United States and Great Britain it has moved some outsiders to hijack the existing parties, pushing them further apart. In sum: in a system that only admits two major political contenders, two wellsorted, highly disciplined, prone-to-conflict political parties exaggerate the degree of polarization in the electoral competition that can be generated by socio­ economic divisions such as the split in the middle class. One of the most relevant consequences is that a few states and electoral districts with critical socioeconomic and cultural features have become battlegrounds for harsh, dead-heat contests with uncertain results.

The Electoral College draw The decisive role of the Presidential Electoral College to break ties has become more visible in polarized electoral contests. In two of the first five presidential elections in the twenty-first century the candidate winning in the Electoral College has been the loser in popular votes—in contrast to the occurrence of the same paradox in only three of the previous 53 elections. Victories and defeats at state level by a few decimals of one percentage point of votes are unequivocal manifestations of high polarization. The US Presidential Electoral College is an inheritance of a constitutional democracy established with only a limited menu of available tools for institutional design, and not renovated for a couple of centuries. In this sense, it is comparable with the institutional formulas of the even older British system, which have also become increasingly obsolete and dysfunctional. This is the usual price paid for early innovation and long-term stability. A classic example is the railways of Britain, which were the first in the world but eventually became widely outmoded and maladjusted. The same could apply to JFK Airport in New York City, which was a pioneer when it was built but decades later is one

60 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

of the most incommodious. Or think, if you prefer, of early models of cell phones that forerunning veterans still keep using at the cost of an increasing loss of effi­ ciency and mismatch with more recent versions. Some electoral and institutional formulas of the oldest democracies in the world can be seen in this light. The defenders of the surviving Presidential Electoral College in the United States resort to the logic of federalism: no region with an overwhelmingly biased political majority should decide the fate of the whole country. This is also the logic that makes the representation in the Senate equal for all states, even if the larger states have up to two-hundred times the population of the smaller ones. The unequal representation of the population in the College is much less disparate than in the Senate but still significant. Currently, there are two regions that in a nonfederal, unitary election by direct popular vote could take the presidency by storm. One is Democratic California, the most populous state which was single-handedly responsible for the popularvote plurality for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Without counting California, Trump won the most votes. The other is a central strip of about a dozen low-population states that stretch from Montana in the Rocky Mountains to West Virginia and include Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Okla­ homa, Arkansas, Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee (say, states that not even a typical educated European would be able to locate correctly on the map). The combined population of all these states is similar to although somewhat lower than the population of California (about 35 million and 40 million, respectively). In most of them, Clinton lost the Democratic primaries (to Bernie Sanders) and the presidential election (to Donald Trump). In a unitary election, the Democratic threat that California would determine the winner would be matched by the Republican threat that this central region might determine it too. In recent times, the most competitive region has not been either of these two but the one around the Great Lakes in the Upper Midwest. Whoever won there, won the College and the presidency. In 2016, Hillary Clinton did very well in the noncompetitive coastal states of both the West and the Northeast. Donald Trump did well in the noncompetitive central states. But the point is that he did just well enough in the frontline states in the Upper Midwest—winning them by a hair. A close national election was decided in a few states with very narrow internal division in economic, social, cultural, and political terms. Trump’s backers argued that had the College not existed and the election been based on nationwide popular votes, they could have won by merely campaigning differently and mobilizing more supporters in large Republican-leaning states such as Texas or Florida. The Democrats could of course have answered that they too would have campaigned to mobilize more votes in large states leaning their way, such as California or New York. It is not possible to know who would have won a direct election had the system been designed that way: as long as the Electoral College is in place the question will be who can win in the economically shaken and socially divided Midwest. Due to population and economic changes, the sub­ urbs of some metropolitan areas might also, in the foreseeable future, become a key

Make America divided again 61

battleground. But in a federal-like institutional design such as the College based on state electors, large majorities in many states will keep losing.

Trump: from anger to fear The electoral campaign of Donald Trump in 2016 immoderately encouraged the expression of anger by people who felt lost, disappointed, or threatened in their hopes and expectations. While the angry mood of Trump’s diehard followers reverberated echoes from the Tea Party’s revolt, Republican leaders lauded the agitation in rallies and mass gatherings as an expression of the frustrations and values of ordinary Americans. Appeals to “anger” were present in 77% of Donald Trump’s campaign TV ads, in contrast to only 53% in Hillary Clinton’s. On the other hand, appeals to the opposite emotions of “hope” or “enthusiasm” were included in 81% of Clinton’s ads, but only in 55% of Trump’s. Both candidates made far fewer appeals to another basic political emotion, “fear,” which was pre­ sent in only about 22% of each candidate’s ads—all according to political scientists and political communication analysts Kathleen Searles and Travis Ridout (2017). It was difficult for Clinton, someone with decades of experience in Washington, to make a case for “change” and “hope.” This was in clear contrast to Obama’s outsider campaign eight years before, which was run under the slogans “Hope” and “Change we can believe in.” Clinton did not focus on “fear” of the threat of a Trump presidency as much as one might expect either, perhaps to attenuate her image as a member of the loathed establishment. Basically, Clinton advocated inclusivity of groups defined by gender, race, or immigrant characteristics, and tried to galvanize her followers with “enthusiasm” at the prospect of electing a first female president. Trump, in contrast, was running as an opposition, challenger, outsider, and antiestablishment candidate whose main strength was the excitement of disgust and resentment. As we discussed in a previous chapter, current social psychology demonstrates that “anger” feeds risky choices in favor of change, reversal of paths, promises, and positive expectations even if they may not likely bring clear gains. Angry voters squarely found a risky, innovative candidate in the outsider Donald Trump. About a year after Trump’s inauguration, campaign adviser and short-tenure White House chief strategist Steve Bannon wondered about the race. His interviewer Michael Lewis (2018) hinted that Trump’s numerous campaign speeches and events whipped up one emotion that got him elected: anger. Bannon rousingly confirmed and itemized: “We got elected on Drain the Swamp [of Washington], Lock Her [Clinton] Up, Build a Wall [at the Mexican border]. This was pure anger. Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls.” Actually, Trump had already begun to try to induce not only anger but also fear about external perils and enemies in numerous campaign tweets, in anticipation of what would become the main bulk of his messages once he became president. The main out-of-control perils which the American public was told to be afraid of were

62 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

Islamic terrorism, Latino criminal gangs, foreign trade, and immigration. Asked by journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa how he would define real power, Donald Trump famously responded: “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word: ‘Fear’” (see Woodward, 2018). While anger is the favorite passion for exciting opposition campaigners, fear is indeed the emotion that rulers of diverse persuasions and flavors often choose to employ while in power. The angry and optimistic seeking of risk when in oppo­ sition can be replaced with inducements of anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and pessi­ mistic risk-averse choices once in government. “When problems are complex and their causes poorly understood”—as was certainly the case for Trump’s inexper­ ienced and incompetent new administration—“fear often leads us to pin the blame on individuals or groups, conducting witch-hunts rather than pausing to figure things out,” pondered philosopher Martha Nussbaum (2018). From the White House, things came full circle: Trump accused the so-called “resistance” of the Democratic opposition of promoting anger, the same political emotion that had driven the incumbent ruler to power just a short time before. The new rulers viewed the new protests through the same blurry lenses as previous rulers might have gazed at the former protesters now in power. From the govern­ ment, they were trying to induce fear out of the anger of the opposition. After several Republican congressmen censured different groups of protesters, Trump joined in, asserting that “the radical Democrats have turned into an angry mob.” In sum: the former angry opposition had become a fearmongering set of rulers accusing the former set of rulers, now in opposition, of being angry with them. With the circle closed, it was time for a new cycle to begin.

Note 1 This would account for a 50:50 division of the whole electorate between the two parties; of course, some deviations come from not counting abstentions, which may hurt both parties, and votes for third parties. Any range within 45:55 either way can fit the basic model.

6 INDIA, INDONESIA Poor but delivering

Against all the odds, democracy is safe and sound in India and Indonesia. Both countries hold still relatively low positions in the world in terms of per capita income. But their economies have been growing at high annual rates for decades. India and Indonesia are among the countries with the largest proportions of citizens conferring trust in the government, including the federal, the state and the local governments, at more than four-fifths. About three-fourths of Indian and Indone­ sian people also declare to be satisfied with the way democracy works in their countries. Their citizens support democracy against authoritarian rule by a pro­ portion of four to one. (See the Lokniti report Democracy in India (2015), the Edelman Trust Barometer’s Global Report (2018), and the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes & Trends (2017)). Let us address each case separately below.

India: The “strange” successful case The success of India’s democracy is in sharp contrast with the gloomy auguries at the moment of its independence, the approval of a new constitution and the first election, more than seventy years ago. At that time, nobody outside of India gave a penny for the success of democracy in such a huge, ethnically diverse, poor, and vastly illiterate country. Among the British colonists, the prevailing voice was more or less: “Chaos would prevail in India if we were so foolish to leave the natives to run their own show.” Similar conjectures derived from standard studies of democracy in political science and sociology over the following decades. Barrington Moore ([1966] 1993) wondered about that “strange” case which had a democracy before it developed a middle class, and acknowledged that “this case stands somewhat apart from any theoretical scheme that it seems possible to con­ struct for the others.” Robert Dahl (1989) also saw India as “a leading con­ temporary exception” to democratic theory. Arend Lijphart (1996) acknowledged

64 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

that democracy in India “has long been a puzzle” for political scientists. Still at the turn of the century, Adam Przeworski and associates (2000) “repeatedly predict it as a dictatorship” before 2030. Yet India is not a democratic exception or an anomaly. It is the largest democ­ racy and the homeland of one-third of the people living in democracy in the current world, its population is much larger than that of the United States and European Union combined, and its continuous democratic experience is as old as the oldest in Europe. It would thus be foolish to analyze the state of democracy in the world without including India and trying to make sense of such an important case. It would be like analyzing the state of capitalism in the world and neglecting to include the United States. First of all, India successfully preserved its democracy by keeping the military out of politics, when so many other newly independent countries failed. Political sci­ entist Steven Wilkinson (2015) has shown the success of early reforms to change the basis of recruitment for the inherited British-style military army and its com­ mand and control strategies and to rebalance the army’s ethnic composition. Thanks to these and other decisions, the new governments in India succeeded in preventing military coups—unlike many other colonial states that inherited imperial armies, and unlike its neighbor Pakistan, which inherited part of the same Indian army at independence. For its political institutions, the new India copied the parliamentary model of Britain. During a couple of decades, the dominant Indian National Congress party, initially led by Jawaharlal Nehru, promoted a set of policies favoring simplicity and high concentration of power: a unitary state, a centralized and closed economy, a single-party government, and a neutral or “non-aligned,” somewhat isolationist foreign policy. Expectations were very low, the performance less than mediocre. Actually, the experiment almost failed when Nehru’s daughter and successor as prime minister, Indira Gandhi, forcing centralized control of public life, dictated a state of emergency for twenty months in the mid-1970s. Yet Indian democracy not only survived but has thrived because later leaders introduced major top-down institutional and policy changes oriented to acknowl­ edge complexity and disperse power. The main changes run against all the ele­ ments of the independent India foundational model; they fit both the diversity of the country and the economic and social dynamics of globalization and technolo­ gical change. They focus on territorial decentralization, economic liberalization, multiparty government, and international openness. As summarized by Indian economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (1999), “An ungainly, unlikely, inelegant combination of differences, India nonetheless survives and functions remarkably well as a political unit with a democratic system.”

Pluralism and decentralization First, the territorial organization. The Constitution defines India not as a state or a nation, but as a “Union of States,” which has fostered decentralization and may

India, Indonesia 65

have prevented efforts at imposing cultural homogenization. The diversity of the population of India has been addressed by the gradual creation of (currently) 29 states with democratic governments (while seven territories are still controlled from New Delhi) and, since the early 1990s, more than 250,000 elected local govern­ ments. There are two official languages at the federal level, Hindi and English, and 17 at the state level. Anthropologist Paul Brass ([1974] 2005) early observed what he called a “dual nationalism,” with individuals seeing themselves as members of two nations: Sikh, Bengali, Tamil, or another nation on one level of identity and Indian on another. Nowadays, more than three times more people express loyalty to their state first and to India second than the other way around, as documented by political scien­ tist Sumatra Mitra ([2011] 2017). “The constitutionally enshrined protection of diversities has constrained the Hindu nationalist project,” sustains, optimistically, political scientist Ashutosh Varshney (2013). Second is the economy. The centralized and closed Indian economy grew at an often-mocked annual rate of 1% for about forty years. Since the early 1990s it has liberalized and opened up to new technologies and globalization. India has enjoyed significant benefits from open trade and capital inflows. Only several decades later on has it begun to receive the waves of mass immigration that have become a controversial political issue in Europe and the United States. The sum of imports and exports, which amounted to less than one-fourth of the domestic product in 1990, has risen to about three-fifths. Foreign investments have increased, and Indian corporations have acquired robust firms abroad. In about twenty-five years, India’s per capita income (in purchasing power) has quadrupled, while the world average has barely doubled; in other words, the average Indian per capita income was about 20% of the world average and now it is about 40%. Together with economic growth, inequality has increased. The wealthy minor­ ity has become still wealthier. But the middle class is much larger, up to one-third of the population depending on definition and self-identification. And mass pov­ erty has decreased. Growth is most visible in the west of the country and in the cities that attract inward migration, including Delhi, Maharashtra and its capital Mumbai, Haryana, or Gujarat, while the speed of change is much slower in the agrarian and rural zones, especially in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and the small states of the extreme northeast. But there is not a net decrease in income and wellbeing among the still numerous peasants and other poor; in contrast to what can be observed in developed countries, these people have never lived at a higher level, did not have high expectations of social mobility, and are not losing jobs. This can help explain why the democratic course in India is relatively smooth and self-reinforcing. Indian citizens consider the substantive outcomes of democ­ racy, and economic growth in particular, much more important and definitive characteristics of democracy than its procedural aspects. “The idea of democracy is not an elitist project in India and finds acceptance amongst the most marginalized,” as summarized in the Lokniti report. Indian democratic elections have become occasions of massive participation and celebration. Recent turnouts have been

66 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

more than two-thirds of the electorate; on the most recent occasions, more than 600 million voters have participated, which makes these elections the most massive human mobilizations in the world—more than any other election, war, pilgrimage, migration movement, world fair, or other event. A general election lasts for five weeks and involves more than one million polling stations. Whether at the top of the Himalayas or in the middle of a forest, no one has to travel more than two kilometers to get to the polls. There is even a budget for elephants to carry voting machines to hard-to-reach areas. Varshney (2013) has documented that In India, unlike in many other democracies, the incidence of voting by now is higher among the poor than among the rich, among the less educated than among the graduates, in the villages than in the cities. The deprived seem to have greater faith in India’s elections than the advantaged. This is an observation in sharp contrast with the usual generalizations from devel­ oped countries. Indian voters appear to think that “the electoral mechanisms of democracy can be used to serve at least some of their purposes.” Single-party dominance has been replaced by a multiparty system. In the first eight elections to the lower chamber of parliament, Lok Sabha, during the more than thirty years of Indian National Congress hegemony, the largest party was allocated a majority of seats after receiving an average 45% of votes. During the following nine elections since 1989, the largest party received an average of less than 30% of votes. The Congress and the People’s Party (BJP) have alternated in government seven times. As these two major India-wide parties combined barely collect one-half of total votes, federal coalition cabinets became the norm. They always include numerous state-based or ethnic parties whose participation in federal politics also works as a factor of Indian union. Many state governments are ruled by local and opposition parties, which is a counterweight to authoritarian temptations in the center and makes the whole system highly inclusive of the diverse popula­ tion. Recent developments at federal level suggest “that India is pivoting away from the politics of religion and caste, patronage and populism, toward a Westernstyle, left-right debate over economic policy,” according to political scientist Eswaran Sridharan (2014).

An unfinished quest After the end of the Cold War, the old Indian policy of “non-alignment” was initially replaced with one of “strategic autonomy,” which has somehow slowed the pace of India’s full, active integration into multilateral institutions. India remains outside the United Nations Security Council, in spite of having become a nuclear power, and outside the Group of Seven despite being the fifth or sixth democratic economy in size. Nevertheless, India has become more dynamic in supporting the democratization of its neighboring countries in South Asia, which is

India, Indonesia 67

still a poorly integrated region. It is also the oldest and most stable democracy among the members of the so-called BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and it has recently increased its relations and deals with the United States and the European Union in a world of fluctuating international coalitions. The experience of managing the country’s internal territorial and political plur­ alism and liberalizing and opening up the economy can be an asset for adaptation to a wavering world. Globalization and economic change are “subtly transforming Indian politics. India’s integration in the world economy, contrary to most fears, has lessened, not increased, the politics of anxiety,” in the words of diplomatic experts Waheguru Pal Singh Sidhu, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, and Bruce Jones (2013). They say: Post-cold war India has also started to reflect a more pragmatic, realpolitik approach to multilateralism and multipolarity … and today there is more recognition of the fact that the more India engages with the global economy, the more its power and security will grow. For all of its warts, a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious India has the capability to position itself as a mediator among different civilizations and ways of life. Democracy was established in India in extremely adverse conditions, including high levels of poverty and illiteracy. This was the scenario for forty years until India began to develop in economic and social terms in the early 1990s, a period when the challenges of globalization were becoming unavoidable. Democracy has sur­ vived and flourished in India with the help of political and institutional accom­ modation to the country’s internal complexity and the new external environment. Precisely because India was late in adopting more sophisticated institutions and policies, it has been able to adapt more readily to the global economy. In contrast to developed countries with old technologies and onerous preexisting social arrangements, India has not had to dismantle former industrial and bureaucratic structures that might have obstructed innovation. According to Lokniti surveys, Indian citizens support for democracy has doubled: from 43% in 1971 to 85% in 2013. Yet nothing is guaranteed. In the words of Ashutosh Varshney (2013), Indian democracy has only “half-won” the major battles foreseen in the mid-twentieth century: the achievement of internal unity in diversity, the subduing of national and caste issues, and the eradication of mass poverty. India’s “unfinished quests” include issues such as the traditional corruption that survives against the back­ ground of weak institutionalization, rates of illiteracy, and the tension between Hindu nationalism and the Muslim minority, which is particularly strong in bor­ dering Kashmir. These are major challenges that might jeopardize the continuity of a success story. So far, changes have moved fast enough and achievements have been sufficiently high—given the initial low expectations—for most citizens to be very or fairly satisfied with the way Indian democracy works. This is the opposite of what has

68 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

been happening recently in developed countries, where high expectations fed by a history of good performance have been unfulfilled, provoking dissatisfaction, rage, and political backlash. The mood of Indian citizens could change if an economic slowdown became a stop or a real hiccup in the long-term process of economic growth. Politics in India is strongly focused on economic performance and, as the country is still poor (far poorer than China, in particular), its inclusive, flexible, and open institutions allow for sustained high rates of economic growth. Alternatively, the paradox might be that continuous success may increase peo­ ple’s expectations about the government’s performance, and these expectations may be increasingly difficult to fulfill. One indication that this is could be occurring is the recent mass protests by women as victims of violence or about pollution in the major cities, as these raise issues which, in other mature democracies, became politically relevant at higher levels of development. What is certain is that the melancholy forecasts that democracy in India would end in chaos and dictatorship have not been realized.

Indonesia: the third largest democracy Although the case is frequently overlooked, Indonesia is the third largest democ­ racy in the world, after India and the United States, and one of the most recent ones. According to traditional social science assumptions, certain territorial and cultural features of the country should run against the likelihood of democratic success, but grim prognoses have been defied. Indonesia is an extremely fragmented and dispersed archipelago that includes the large islands of Sumatra, Java, and Celebes, together with most of Borneo (the northern fringe belongs to Malaysia) and the western half of New Guinea (the other half being independent Papua New Guinea), as well as more than 900 permanently inhabited minor islets. People speak more than 700 indigenous lan­ guages, including Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese. But language conflicts have been avoided by adopting Bahasa Indonesian (a standardized variant of Malay) as the official language; this is the first language of just under one-fifth of the population and has been used as a lingua franca for centuries. During the 1970s and 1980s, Indonesia was one of the so-called “Asian tigers” whose high rates of economic growth made some people ponder the advantages of authoritarianism for material prosperity. But the international economic recession of the late 1990s quickly brought about the collapse of the bureaucratic and cor­ rupt regime. There was an outbreak of social protests, led by university students— that is, the children of the middle classes who had benefited most from the economic growth of the previous period. The protests caused the resignation of General Suharto after more than thirty years as president, just as he was preparing to be reelected without opposition for the seventh time. This led to the formation of a provisional government, the legalization of political parties, and the convening of competitive elections.

India, Indonesia 69

The political change in Indonesia showed once again, perhaps even more clearly than in previous cases, that authoritarianism rests not only on repression and per­ secution of dissidents but also, as with any type of political regime, on a kind of exchange with the citizens. As we have discussed, an authoritarian regime tends to survive partly through its ability to provide public goods—whether economic growth, social peace, public order, or just arrogant nationalism—in exchange for citizens renouncing their right to choose and control the rulers. Yet when an authoritarian regime stops being able to provide the goods in question, there are no established mechanisms for identifying the responsibilities and procedures for the legal replacement of rulers—unlike government change in democratic regimes. It is the regime itself that stops being supported by subjects who were once recompensed by positive results and are now left with no alter­ native but to turn against it. In an increasingly globalized economy, the Asian tigers were actually paper tigers (as the Chinese say) that could find more solid ground to face the changing international environment by democratizing themselves. Indonesia is still relatively poor. But despite the global Great Recession, its economy has continued growing at an annual average rate of more than 5% for twenty years, the third fastest growth rate after China and India. Per capita income has multiplied by four since the first democratic election in 2004, and the middle class is expanding rapidly. During the agitated transition period of 1999–2002, two presidents elected by parliament alternated: a Muslim nationalist and the leftist daughter of former pre­ sident Sukarno. After four constitutional amendment packages, direct elections of the presidents were introduced in the context of a multiparty system. Every five years, the Indonesians hold the world’s largest single-day election, which is a national holiday extolled as a Democracy Festival. Nearly a quarter of a million people run for office at national, provincial, and municipal levels. Seven million citizens volunteer to keep the polls running in more than 800,000 polling stations. Ballots are distributed to the periphery via planes, canoes, and elephants. Dozens of people die every election day due to heat strokes and exhaustion while keeping the polls open. Voter turnout is above 80%. A dozen national parties and at least three local parties usually run in elections, but they eventually coalesce into two oversized “rainbow” coalitions to nominate the main presidential candidates. Two parties have alternated in the elected pre­ sidential office: the first two terms, the center-right Democratic Party, which pro­ moted forms of religious nationalism, and the following two terms, the center-left Democratic Party of Struggle, which represents a “pragmatic, moderate, and inclusive populism,” according to political scientist Marcus Mietzner (2018). “The normalcy of the polls seems to be a sign of the robustness of Indonesia’s still rela­ tively new democracy in a region dominated by authoritarian and electoral authoritarian regimes,” in the view of political scientist Edward Aspinall (2015). The Indonesian regime of separation of powers has benefited from institutional incentives that support cooperation between the president and the parliament. They include second-rank regulations that require joint deliberation and approval

70 The Great Disruption: Anger and fear

of legislation by the executive and the legislative, as well as the formation of broad multiparty coalitions that promote inter-institutional cooperation and policy consensus, as studied by Djayadi Hanan (2015). The persistence of Indonesia as a union and the recent but already notorious success of democracy shows that territorial and cultural diversity can be accom­ modated within a large country with appropriate inclusive institutions. Indonesia, which is the world’s largest Muslim-majority country, may also be the best exam­ ple of the compatibility of democracy with Islam. While more than 85% of its citizens identify themselves as Sunni Muslims, the state has defined itself as pluralist and multi-faith. Only a few minority parties wear the religious label, and they are open to coalitions and agreements with parties of different persuasions. In short, similarly to India: relatively low expectations, some appropriate insti­ tutional arrangements, and the governments’ delivery of sustained economic growth can help explain why high proportions of Indonesians are willing to parti­ cipate in democratic practices and feel satisfied with the way that the democratic system is working. Indonesian democracy is indeed vulnerable and will remain so for years to come. “While Indonesia has made democratic progress, it remains crippled by severe structural problems, most notably corruption and weak law enforcement,” as well as “outbreaks of Islamic nationalism,” as warned by Marcus Mietzner and Edward Aspinall (2010). Yet, as they conclude, all in all, “Indonesia stands out as one of the most successful cases of democratic transformation in Asia, a continent that has been, with several notable exceptions, generally resistant to democratic change over the last three decades.”

PART 2

The global future: Hope

The only political future we could predict for developed democracies under cur­ rent conditions is one of sustained instability. The only sure thing is uncertainty. In the most recent period, many traditional parties and incumbent governments, heavily damaged by disappointing public delivery, have been defeated, and new insurgent parties and candidates have risen up. However, the newly empowered malcontents may be unable to deliver prosperity or establish a new social balance and political equilibrium, while they can still foster greater political and cultural polarization. When the previous insurgents run for reelection, they may suffer the same incumbency disadvantage that had permitted them to win in the first instance. By definition, one can be elected as an outsider only once. Any govern­ ment may be doomed to suffer defeat and replacement by dissatisfied, still angry, or just tired, chastened, and weary electorates. The best alternative future we can imagine is one with consensual policies pro­ moting broadly distributed economic growth, more social balance around the middle layers, and international cooperation and accountability. Contrasting with this desir­ able model, ongoing globalization disturbs democracy both in dearth and in excess: there is too little global democracy and too much global interference with national and local governments. Many people suffer the disturbances provoked by globalizing changes while the global institutions are too weak to address and arrange them. A more effective and consensual governance may require reallocation of powers at local, national, continental, and global levels making each of them able to make final decisions on some issues and accountable for their management. As in an ideal marriage—to which we previously compared democracy—, building hope for the future needs, for democratic institutions and rulers, a division of tasks, mutual respect and obligations, openheartedness, as well as continuous revisions, corrections, and improvements about the way daily life works and what long-term prospects look like.

72 The global future: Hope

Our horizon aims at preserving and broadening both the virtues of freedom and democracy and the benefits of international exchange. The fatal victim of the duo—democracy and globalization—may be the absolute sovereignty of national states. Erosion of sovereignty may be a cost worth paying if it means that democ­ racy at different levels can find more a solid base for promoting cooperation in the pursuit of greater endeavor. With that in mind, in the second part of this book we look at the future of democracy in the world. We discuss which institutional rules for representation, decision-making, and accountability might improve the governments’ performance and subsequently people’s satisfaction with the way democracy works. Institutional rules are always relatively longer living than governments, rulers, parties, or poli­ cies, even more when the latter fail in times of political turmoil. Our discussion explores the long-term evolution of some democratic regimes, empirically tested evaluations of certain institutions’ performance, and our own criteria regarding what a satisfactory democracy can be. We pay close attention to innovative prac­ tices, including, among others, the external openness of cities and the consensual policy-making of international and global institutions. These are often neglected by the routine agendas of the media focusing on more traditional national settings. According to this perspective, first, we discuss the potential active role of cities in promoting broad cooperation beyond traditional state borders and the chances of broadening people’s participation in local governments. Then, looking at repre­ sentative democracy at the national level, we discuss how political party competi­ tion can avoid polarization and produce cooperation between institutions and consensual policies. At a higher level, we compare and evaluate the performance of continental democratic unions and platforms for world governance to assess the viability of democracy at greater scales. The last chapter addresses the future of national democracy in countries that remain under authoritarian rule. All in all, we present one form of government, democracy, as compatible with different institutional formulas. They should provide representative, effective, and accountable governance for political communities of different sizes and at several levels of government in a complex and interdependent world. Whether this mis­ cellany of political institutions and rules should still be called “democracy” will be our final question.

7 HIGH EFFECTIVENESS REQUIRES MULTIPLE GOVERNMENTS

Imagine the European Parliament in Brussels debating and voting whether a streetcar line in the city of Barcelona should pass through the Diagonal Avenue or not. This issue was actually put to an advisory referendum in Barcelona. Although the experiment was inconclusive, it broadened the discussion among interested people who provided new insights and opinions. There is no sign that the European Parliament ever considered discussing the topic or even gave a damn. The other way around, imagine the city council of Barcelona voting for a motion against the transatlantic negotiations for a trade agreement between the European Union and the United States. This vote actually took place. But it was inconsequential, and barely anybody beyond the city council noticed it. If your home is away from these uncheerful events, you may prefer to imagine, for example, that the two chambers of the United States Congress debated and voted on how to assign students to public schools in the city of San Francisco, California, by giving, or not, priority to the school closest to their home. Of course, that congressional discussion never happened, but the topic was submitted to a referendum in the city. Out of many other referenda that have been held at the city level in San Francisco or the state level in California, or in any other city or state in the US, none has ever dealt with an international treaty.

Democracy at multiple levels The number one lesson in designing efficient political institutions for a satisfactory and durable democracy is that communities of different sizes dealing with different issues are attuned to different institutional formulas. Policy decisions should be made and public goods should be provided by multiple governments across a range of territorial scales. From Barcelona to the European Union, from San Francisco to the United States, or to international treaties and worldwide institutions, they go

74 The global future: Hope

from the local to the global, depending on their efficient economies of scale and people’s demands. The normative evaluation of this “vertical” division of powers is well established in the academic literature. The consequences of the size of governmental jurisdic­ tions for the efficiency of the provision of public goods have been estimated to be “positive or negative depending on the type of public good or service. Those involving face-to-face delivery, such as education, policing, and social welfare, would show a negative effect of governmental unit size; those involving economies of scale, such as highways and utility systems, would show a positive effect,” as summarized by Nobel laureate political scientist Elinor Ostrom (2010). In their extensive studies on the topic, political scientists Lisbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2009) conclude that over time: Governments have come to provide many public goods, and they vary widely in scale. Some, like security from invasion, are best handled at the national level, whereas others, such as home care for the elderly, are best provided locally. The structure of governance is a functional adaptation to scale diversity in the efficient provision of public goods. Because the costs and benefits of centralization vary from policy to policy, governance should be multilevel. It should be added that over time some public goods change the scale of efficiency at which they must be provided. A local contagious disease can become an epidemic and expand into a pandemic, thus requiring institutional action at broader levels. National regulations of postal services and telephony have been superseded by the expansion of the internet across national borders. The prevention of political violence has been transformed by international terrorism. The protection of peace in the context of typical inter-state wars is being replaced by transcontinental defense against weapons launched over long distances by means of rockets and drones. In a basic approach to efficient governmental delivery, “there is a need for a separate governmental institution for every collective good with a unique bound­ ary, so that there can be a match between those who receive the benefits of a collective good and those who pay for it,” as political economist Mancur Olson (1969) puts it. According to this ideal model, every public good should be provided by a spe­ cific institution for certain users and make them pay or contribute to the provision. However, this would create too many costly, overlapping bureaucracies. In prac­ tice, administrative costs are usually reduced by disaggregating policy problems into separate pieces and making certain institutions deal with several of them. That is why, although the number of public goods and services provided by public insti­ tutions is enormous, the number of government levels for most people in the current world is more limited, ranging from three to seven—typically including at least local, national, and global institutions, plus a variety of neighborhoods, municipal districts, wards, school boards, counties, metropolitan areas, regions, or continental unions.

High effectiveness with multiple governments 75

In most countries, local governments are in charge of providing public services such as kindergarten, preschool and primary education (such as the schools of San Francisco mentioned above), garbage collection and water treatment, fire protec­ tion, parks, cemeteries, and town planning (including, as also mentioned, the tram routes in Barcelona). Regional or national governments are more efficient in taking care of higher education, roads, long-distance transportation, gas, electricity, health, and consumer protection. Continental and global institutions, rather than having a general purpose on multiple issues for the population under their jurisdiction, tend to take responsibility for specialized tasks such as transborder trade (also referenced) and broad networks of transport and communication, and others that affect core elements of traditional assignments to the sovereignty of the states, including areas of security, justice, and monetary policy. The model of governance through multiple institutional levels is based on the democratic fundamentals of federalism, just developed into a broader perspective. In comparison with centralization, multilevel governance has many democratic advantages. It is inclusive of different groups that may have broad or majority support at some local level but would be excluded from decision-making in a unitary, centralized structure at the national level. Multiple levels of government limit the potential accumulation and concentration of power and favors, in con­ trast, people’s information, responsibility, and involvement. And they lower the stakes in elections because they may make potentially bad results at any of the levels less disruptive of the whole public affairs endeavor. All formulas for democratic governance are hybrids with different combina­ tions of direct participation, representative elections, and expert rule, which imply different degrees of openness, transparency, and accountability. Even in a town hall assembly a few advisors, officers, or councilors prepare the discussion and shape how the issues are going to be debated, while political parties remain on the sidelines. At state level, parliaments, governments, and presidencies are formed on the basis of partisan elections, while the members of the judiciary, most officers in the administration, the rulers of the central banks, and specialized agencies are usually selected by non-elective means. In international or global organizations, the assemblies and councils representing elected (and non-elected) governments of the member countries are replicated with boards formed by highly qualified professionals who need proven experience and pass demanding tests to get their jobs. All these formulas tend to complement each other at the different governance levels. Representative governments enrich their background with people’s direct participation in consultative or advisory events. Global institutions mostly ruled by experts heavily rely for their legitimacy on the participation of national democratic governments. There is broad popular support for these different formulas of government across the world, in contrast to broad rejections of personalistic and military dictatorships, according to a Global Attitudes Survey by the Pew Research Center, summarized in Figure 7.1. Yet the smaller the community, the higher the opportunities are for

76 The global future: Hope

FIGURE 7.1 Support for direct democracy, representative government, and rule by experts

Note: Percentages are global medians based on 38 countries.

Source: Pew Research Center 2017, Global Attitudes Survey, Q29a-e.

direct democracy. The broader the public, the more important elections of repre­ sentatives are. And the more complex the issue, the more influential the role of unelected specialists selected for their expertise tends to be. For democracy in the present day, there is not a single institutional master key able to open all doors. In public affairs, one size does not fit all. The assumption that it does was, and still is, the modern notion of national state sovereignty’s main mistake, which has significantly wounded the performance of democracy in the current world. Recent economic, technological, and human developments are prompting critical revisions of the issues allocated to each level of government and a major restructuring of democratic regimes.

National sovereignty is over To make the complexity of the current globalized world governable, the processes of decision-making must be simplified. Each of the multiple levels and sectors of government should deal with specific policy issues. None of them should claim jurisdiction over all policy and collective issues. The model of multiple levels of government militates against the claim of unity of powers or “sovereignty,” which has become one of the most obsolete political concepts in the current world. The concept of sovereignty was coined long ago, in the mid-seventeenth century, by such luminaries as the English Thomas Hobbes and the French Jean Bodin, with the intention of justifying the strengthening of the central powers of the monarchy. The root “sover-” comes from the Latin “super,” or supreme. The monarch’s sover-eignty or supre-macy was conceived as “absolute” and the subsequent political regime as “absolutism.” That is why we still call—sometimes—a current king or queen the “mon-arch”—that is, the only or “mono-” holder of decision power—“the sove-reign,” even if almost nobody enjoys such monistic or absolute powers nowadays.

High effectiveness with multiple governments 77

Many currently existing constitutions enshrine the “sovereignty” of the people, the parliament, the nation, or the state, but the concept is the same as when it was created centuries ago for monarchs, only allocated to somewhat different subjects. Sovereignty continues to be conceived as “absolute.” It implies that one single political body has the prerogative to make final decisions on all public issues within a clearly bordered territory. In reality, almost no monarch, dictator, president, parliament, people, state, or nation has this power nowadays. Sovereignty is not what it was or what it was assumed it would be. Today, international law is claimed to have direct effect on the citizens of every country; the global institutions’ work consists precisely of coordinating, shaping, approving, and making public policies enforceable by the states, in the course of which they frequently interfere in domestic affairs; almost all states are deprived of unlimited power to produce laws, which was implied by the notion of sovereignty. The current world is not one in which states interact as independent entities but one of interdependence. When the campaigners for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union or Brexit used the slogan “take back control,” they implicitly acknowledged that the British government had lost control of its internal affairs, mainly although not only at the hands of the European Union. But the Brexiters discovered very quickly that in a globalized world the government would be unable to control very many of its public issues. Some politicians talk of “limited,” “shared,” “divided,” or “partial” sovereignty when they face undeniable international memberships and commitments. Similar expressions are sometimes used to deal with internal divisions of powers between central and territorial governments in federal-type countries. Yet these expressions are an oxymoron. Sovereignty is absolute or it is not sovereignty; it cannot be shared or divided. The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, as well as the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, sometimes encouraged a “European sovereignty.” With this, they acknowledged the erosion of nation-states’ sovereignty. But they obviously did not mean that the states of Europe should submit all public policies to final decisions by the EU. What these and similar expressions by politicians at different levels intend to transmit is the wish that some level of government—local, national, continental, or global—should be able to make final decisions on some issues. There will be different issues for each level of government—which is the opposite of sovereignty traditionally and legally conceived as the power to make final decisions on everything. Most states of the world have used their legal sovereignty to give up the actual exercise of their sovereignty on many policy issues. Yielding some part of sover­ eignty to an international power destroys the very meaning of sovereignty. For­ mally, once inside an international institution, each state retains the legal right to exert its formal sovereignty and leave. But this rarely happens. Indonesia withdrew from the United Nations but only for twenty months in 1965/6, its absence being registered as a “cessation of cooperation.” The United States left UNESCO in 1984 after accusing it of advancing Soviet interests; it returned, only to leave again, together with Israel, in 2017 after Palestine was voted full membership. The

78 The global future: Hope

United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016 with catastrophic consequences, as we have discussed. As these instances suggest, the cost of leaving or backing away from international organizations or commitments is very high. In federal countries, attempts by central government to regain sovereignty by taking back powers that are in the hands of local government also tend to provoke poli­ tical crisis. As long as the economic, technological, and human trends continue as they have done for decades, the loss of sovereignty of any single unit will become irreversible.

Multiple level unions The member states of the largest continental or multi-state unions, such as the United States of America and the European Union, have largely given up their sovereignty even in legal terms. Let us look at the evolution of the concept over time. During the campaign for the initial 13 independent states to ratify the US Constitution in the late eighteenth century, one of its main authors, James Madison (1787), argued that “each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body, independent of all others.” He assured that “the States will retain under the proposed Constitution a very extensive portion of active sovereignty,” and upheld that “the power dele­ gated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined, [while] those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” Yet when the Constitutional Convention submitted the constitutional text to Congress, it noted that “It is obviously impracticable to secure all rights of indepen­ dent sovereignty to state, and yet provide for the interest and safety of all.” An early amendment clarified that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States.” But the word “sovereignty,” which was initially associated with the states, does not appear in the US Constitution. It holds, rather the other way around, that “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States … shall be the supreme Law of the Land.” The tension between the two levels of government endured. By the early nineteenth century, the Supreme Court confirmed that “the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance are supreme, they control the Constitution and laws of the respective states, and cannot be controlled by them.” In reaction, several states defended their right to enforce their own rules on numerous issues, far beyond the basic affairs related to taxes, police, or the expropriation of private property for public services—and including, most ominously, the right to own slaves. This strain triggered the Civil War in 1860. The European Union was initially conceived in the aftermath of the bloodbath of the Second World War, with the aim of the “definitive abolition of division of Europe into national, sovereign states,” in the words of Altiero Spinelli, one of its Founding Fathers. Since then, the EU has been following a path that mirrors the historical process of building the United States of America in several ways.

High effectiveness with multiple governments 79

Over time, the EU has greatly expanded its powers. It has approved thousands of regulations which are directly binding on all the European citizens, as well as a high number of directives which are confirmed by the state parliaments. The European Court of Justice early affirmed the primacy of European Union law over the law of the member states; when there is conflict between them, European law prevails and the norms of national law, including the constitutions of member states, have to be set aside. The Treaty of Lisbon, enforced since 2009, confirmed that “the Treaties and the law adopted by the Union on the basis of the Treaties have primacy over the law of Member States.” In the EU’s multilevel structure of governance, nobody is actually sovereign anymore: neither the traditional states, which as “member” states of the Union are deprived of competence on important policy issues and submitted to the primacy of European law, nor any local or regional government that might claim such an ambition. The member states of the EU have pooled powers from their previous sovereignties, but they have not created a new European sovereignty. The citizens of Europe live under multiple jurisdictions of different scopes and breadths. In the written constitutions of ten EU member states, the word “sovereignty” is not even mentioned (Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Denmark, Ger­ many, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden). Rhetorical references to the sovereignty of “the people” are made, as a simple synonym of democracy, in seven states (Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Portugal). The sover­ eignty of the “nation” is affirmed in only five countries and that of the “state” in another four (Bulgaria, Croatia, Lithuania, Romania, and Spain for the former and Ireland, Malta, Poland, and Slovakia for the latter). Lending further support to EU power, the Constitution of Ireland asserts that: “No provision of this Constitution invalidates laws enacted, acts done or measures adopted by the State which are necessitated by the obligations of membership of the European Union or of the Communities.” The Constitution of Slovenia, which is a more recent democracy that aimed from the beginning to become a member of the EU and took the issue as a leitmotif, proclaims no less than eight times that the republic will “transfer the exercise of sovereign rights to international organizations.” The notion of sovereignty is also alien to many other countries. In the con­ stitutions of Commonwealth members such as Australia, Canada, Jamaica, and New Zealand, the words “sovereign” or “sovereignty” are not even written. These examples could provide new inspiration to move further towards—to paraphrase Spinelli—the definitive abolition of division of the world into national, sovereign states.

8 LOCAL GOVERNMENT THRIVES IN AN OPEN WORLD

For first time in human history, the majority of the world population lives in cities, which are becoming a core scenario for innovation and openness. The city is the type of community in which democracy was first conceived. From “city” were derived the notions of “citizen” and “citizenship”—that is, the condition bestowed from mutual acceptance of rights and obligations among members of a community, the “citizenry”. The notion of citizenship has been hijacked and distorted by the state and the nation, which have made it contingent on other attributes. A member of a city can have recognized rights and participation in collective affairs whatever their place of birth, ethnicity, family language, or religion, in contrast to the con­ ditionalities “rummaged for old parchments or musty records,” in Alexander Hamilton’s words, that are usually imposed by nationalities and nation-states. Contemporary cities, metropolitan areas, and economic regions are not like vil­ lages of old close around a cit-adel and surrounded by a wall. They are open, strongly articulated by the global economy, and sanctuaries for immigrants and refugees. The new thriving of local units is a result of the disaggregation of eco­ nomic and communication spaces previously controlled by nation-states. Increasing economic exchanges at large scales, promoted and permitted by new technologies of transport and communication, tend to concentrate different economic activities in a few countries, regions, and cities, which become densely populated. This phenomenon, called “aggregation” by economists, implies high specialization of each local unit in some activities and subsequently interdependence. In the previous period dominated by states and national economies, each coun­ try tried to develop every new industry. For example, it is well known that the development of the automobile industry in Europe during the second third of the twentieth century took place within statewide, protected markets. The result was that Britain, France, Germany, Italy, even Spain all had their own automobile industries. In contrast, in the United States, the automobile developed within an

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already unified large market with a common currency, free of internal tariffs and other barriers to trade. Economic integration in a large area facilitated the devel­ opment of a single, highly specialized automobile-producing region in southern Michigan (especially in the city of Detroit) and the neighboring states of Indiana and Ohio, which over time increasingly reinforced the territorial concentration of the industry. Now, as international markets become more integrated, as is also happening within the European Union, each city or region tends to specialize in a few key activities and to sell to broader markets.1 In Europe, just as happened in the United States, there is a developing concentration toward just a few automobile-producing regions. Other specialized centers include hubs for eurozone finance in Frankfurt, aircraft manufacturing in Toulouse, gas and oil in Oslo and Akershus, electronic platforms in Stockholm, biotechnology in Amsterdam or Munich, software in Helsinki and Tampere, cargo ports in Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg, touristic theme parks in Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Istanbul, and Venice, and so on. While megalopolises such as New York, Paris, London, Shanghai, and Beijing lose population, economic specialization and external openness have triggered the blossoming of cities such as San Francisco, Toronto, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Seoul, Dubai, and Sydney. Some prospering cities of medium size benefit from economic and technological innovation and external exchanges by relying upon high-quality international research universities such as Boston, Austin, and Montreal, or Zurich, Lausanne, and Edinburgh, among many others. Small, formally independent but actually heavily interdependent states have also proliferated alongside the expansion of transnational markets. About seventy of the entities recognized by the United Nations are mini-countries with less than ten million inhabitants, including Botswana, Estonia, Ireland, Singapore, and Uruguay (all smaller in population terms than the largest three dozen cities in the world). Also, forty more are micro-countries with a few hundreds of thousands of inhabi­ tants, including Andorra, Bahrain, Barbados, Brunei, Dominica, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Maldives, Monaco, St Kitts & Nevis, Seychelles, and Vanuatu. In addition, there are more than five hundred regional political units with govern­ ments and legislative powers located within a couple dozen of continental unions or large federal states. Economic specialization makes each city, metropolitan area, small country or region dependent on others, that is, all are increasingly interdependent. “Cities are strategic to economic globalization because they are production sites, command points, and global markets [especially] for the information and service economy,” as vastly studied by sociologist Saskia Sassen (2006). “Large cities in the highly developed world are the places where globalization processes assume concrete, localized forms”; they are, “in good part, what globalization is about,” she summarizes. Mayors and leaders of cities and regions have developed extensive transborder networks for cooperation which elude the limitations of state sovereignty, as documented and highly praised by political scientist Benjamin Barber (2013).

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Seventy percent of the world’s cities and metropolitan areas participate in city-to­ city international programs such as United Cities and Local Governments. According to Barber’s survey, “global networks of cities through cross-border cooperation have achieved at least some success in controversial areas where states have failed.” The outstanding ones are security, including city-to-city intelligence and cross-border police cooperation to prevent terrorist attacks; environment, with coordination action about climate change; and arts and cultural exchanges. Yet other problematic activities also agglomerate in globalized cities, including massive immigrations and illegal trafficking networks in people, drugs, and stolen goods. This undermines the hypothesis of “sovereign” cities since their management would require broader enforcing authorities.

New local governance The growing sense of dissatisfaction with representative democracy at the national level has generated some vindications of direct democracy, or government by the people, as possibly a superior alternative, especially at the local level. Some local initiatives try to channel people’s frustration away from authoritarian populism and into positive energy favoring more direct involvement in policy-making. The feelings of being disfavored in small towns and rural areas, as well as cities’ increasing autonomy and their sense of external openness not restricted by formal state borders, have created opportunities and enticements for experimenting with these formulas of democratic governance. Across the world there are many cases of traditional users of common-pool resources such as meadows, forests, fisheries, and irrigation systems being able to build and sustain institutions of local self-government to ensure reproduction and prevent extinction without the need of a state. These rural communities succeed as long as they are able to establish clearly defined boundaries for the users of their common goods, well-distributed rights to all participants, control of the enforce­ ment of agreements and punishment of violators, and low-cost ways to resolve disputes, as extensively studied by Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators (1990). Other traditional formulas of self-government, such as town hall meetings and people’s assemblies, are also conceived for local communities with relatively homogeneous populations and harmonious interests. It is assumed that, in this kind of setting, all the people involved in collective issues can openly deliberate, vote, and make independent decisions. Some communes, counties, or even member states of a large union may benefit from the aggregation and specialization devel­ opments just reviewed for such new practices. Urban neighborhoods or districts in larger cities can also expand from regular procedures in condominiums and citizens associations. Traditional small towns can find renewed energy in the revitalization of people’s direct participation in collective affairs. There is, indeed, a high degree of diversity in institutional formulas for local units. The stronger the capability of self-government, the greater the opportunities for experimenting with new formulas of governance. Through the experience of

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direct participation, people acquire new information and can elaborate their views and reconcile opinions, often in interaction with specialized experts. Direct democracy can also become side-support to representative democracy at higher levels; it may help improve the efficiency of public affairs and increase satisfaction with the ways governments work. In the next few pages we review some of these formulas and practices: town hall meetings, citizen legislative initiatives, electronic democracy, and referendums.

Town hall meetings and citizen initiatives Some modern experiences of direct democracy through people’s assemblies in towns, cities, villages, communes, or cantons have remote origins. One of the oldest is in Switzerland, where the communes and the cantons are more important than the federal government. Several-centuries-old traditions of people’s assemblies are alive and well at the communal and even—to a lesser extent—at a few cantonal levels. About 90% of the more than two thousand relatively homogeneous Swiss municipalities hold town meetings twice a year to deliberate and vote on local issues such as primary schooling, streets and infrastructures, local police, or taxes. The most traditional meetings are called by bells, typically on a Sunday morning, and people gather in a circle in a green meadow or wide square. Traditional and still alive democratic forums are also the town meetings in New England, in the northeast of the United States, in the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. A pioneer study by Jane Mansbridge (1983) of the meetings in a town in Vermont underlined the common interests, face-to-face relations, and consensus among the participants, in contrast to the adversarial politics that usually develops at state or national level. Frank Bryan (2004) surveyed a large sample of meetings in more than two hundred towns held over a period of thirty years. He observed a decline in the number and variety of issues submitted to public deliberation and vote, which were sometimes limited to local school budgets, rules on salt for snowy highways, and the appro­ priate local taxes. Joseph Zimmerman (1986) also collected a wide range of infor­ mation on annual town meetings and noted that as the population of towns has grown, many traditional gatherings have been replaced with “representative” town meetings in which only the elected can vote, which have eventually ceded pass to town or city councils. “Ideally,” Zimmerman reflected, “the process of establishing public policy should result in the integration of the views of citizens, elected representatives, and bureaucrats.” The relevance of this model for larger cities lies in features that match those of owners’ meetings in big urban condominiums, which in some cases have larger populations than rural communes. Membership is limited to masters of households who are resident in the commune or the condominium. Near-unanimous decisions are most frequent. Lots or turns are used to appoint officers in charge of imple­ menting the assembly’s decisions. These experiences are even less studied than the more traditional ones in small towns and rural areas. But many participants of this

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kind of urban gathering might agree that they have some potential to be projected at neighborhood or community settings to deal with public affairs. Much more broadly diffused are citizens’ legislative initiatives leading to referendums, which are legal in more than a hundred countries. By collecting signatures, groups of citizens can challenge a law, promote a referendum or their own draft bill (which legis­ lators may respond to with an alternative proposal for choosing from), or just require the local council or state legislature to produce a new regulation on a specific subject. The citizen ballot initiative and referendum also have a long tradition in the communes of Switzerland. They have also been adopted over the last few decades by all Germany länder and other local governments in Europe. In the United States, local ballot initiatives and referendums have been legally adopted by 28 states and about ten thousand municipalities, including most of the largest cities. Hundreds of initiatives are filed each year, although many are invalidated by courts, only about one-fifth make it to the ballot, and most of them do not pass. Most of the refer­ endums resulting from citizens’ initiative are concentrated in five states in the West: California, Oregon, Colorado, Arizona, and Washington state. During the last few decades, the most popular issues have turned around restrictions on taxes, legaliza­ tion of marijuana and other drug matters, against and for same-sex marriage, limits to state appropriations of lands, and changes of electoral rules for party primaries, city mayors, governors or legislative representatives. A review of the experiences over four decades by political scientists Arthur Lupia and John Matsusaka (2004) held that the “mere presence of direct democracy induces sitting legislatures to govern more effectively.” They concluded that “the initiative has tended to bring about more fiscally and socially conservative policies at the state level that would occur otherwise,” including cuts to public spending and taxes, more spending transferred from state to local governments, shifts from broadbased taxes to user fees and charges, as well as more support for capital punishment. Matsusaka (2018) extended the survey to Swiss cantons with similar results. In many cases, the experience of citizens’ direct participation in making simple decisions about complex issues reveals that voters often have insufficient and inadequate information. Some referendum campaigns can be used by political parties, incumbent politicians, or emerging challengers for electoral purposes. In the summary by Lupia and Matsusaka (2004): When voters or legislators have information sufficient to make simple binary comparisons such as ‘better’ and ‘worse’, then direct democracy can be and effective way to improve policy. [But] when voters are uncertain about the policy implications of a referendum and are also unwilling to seek the advice of credible experts, then direct democracy can produce policy outcomes worse than the status quo. If voters cannot find effective information shortcuts, then direct democracy may end up producing outcomes that they later regret. A more recent reform tries to mitigate these drawbacks. The California legislature adopted a “second reading” of ballot initiatives. Legislative measures go through

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committees and are debated, reviewed, and amended. This process permits negotia­ tions with citizen sponsors to vet and fix propositions and deal with the matter by ordinary legislation. Direct and representative democracy are appropriately combined. Other innovative formulas of people’s political participation in local units include advisory boards formed by volunteers, community organizations, and deliberative assemblies. In participatory budgeting, people can discuss and prioritize some public spending projects and decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget. The experiment was first launched in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre but quickly spread to more than 250 other municipalities in the country. It has since been adopted in more than twenty countries worldwide. A study of a few cases suggests that people’s participation can result in citizenship learning, greater government transparency and accountability, and more equitable public spending. The recall and removal of elected officials before the end of their term is an old tradition in the United States. In 17 states a few dozen officials are removed every year, including state legislators, mayors, city councilors, school board members, and judges. For example, in 2003 the governor of California, Gray Davis, was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger by this procedure. Another dozen or so countries have legal provisions to enable the recall of elected representatives. Peru, where hun­ dreds of recalls are voted every year in about half of the country’s municipalities, is the world’s most intensive user of this mechanism.

Electronic democracy The emergence of new communication technologies such as computers, cell phones, and the internet by the late twentieth and early twenty-first century was seen as a great opportunity for a “radical renewal” of the formulas of people’s political participation and policy-making in the direction of the classical tenets of direct democracy. The optimistic prospects envisaged, first, citizens’ better acquisi­ tion of knowledge about civic affairs and public policy and better communication of their informed opinions and desires to policy-makers. Second, an improvement in the capability of public officers to make informed policy decisions and deliver public services with greater equity and efficiency was expected. One new form of participation was designed the “electronic town hall.” It would be held on a single issue (say, for example, gun control, immigration, or universal basic income), there would be a televised discussion between government officers, elected representatives, and selected experts, viewers would vote through their computers, cell-phones, or interactive TV devices, and the results would be given to legislators. The expectation was that “consensus by computer” could be achieved. A generalization of this kind of process should produce a plebiscitary democracy beyond the limits inherent in traditional town hall meetings or other mechanisms of people’s direct participation. The confines of local government would be transcended into a “global agora” or an “electronic commonwealth.” Some enthusiastic forecasters of the new wave megatrends imagined that new technologies were opening “a mind-boggling array of possibilities for direct

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participation in political decision-making,” sufficient to make representative democracy “increasingly obsolete,” or just “obsolete.” Before the spread of the internet, political scientist Benjamin Barber ([1984] 2003), already quoted, had projected a “strong democracy” based on “unmediated self-government by an engaged citizenry.” The basic point was to achieve face-to-face interactions which in mass societies had been precluded by scale. “An electronic and digital commons might for once and for all overcome the old problem of scale, the bugaboo of direct democracy,” he ventured. The initial project was totalizing: neighborhood assemblies, legislative initiative, referendum, TV technology, “they must be adopted together or not at all,” they “cannot be addressed piecemeal. Taken one at a time, they become more vulner­ able to abuse and less likely to succeed in reorienting the democratic system.” Other authors called this “the creation of a participatory society.” The new edition of Barber’s book was prefaced by a critical self-revision of the initial predictions and desires. “The aim was not to replace representative with ‘strong’ democracy”—he reformulated—“but to thicken thin democracy with a critical overlay of participatory institutions.” But even with this limited aim: “The new proto-democratic electronic and digital technologies that seemed so promising twenty-five years ago have in fact become part of the problem that confronts strong democrats, nor part of the solution,” he reflected. A few years later still, it is possible to sketch a broader assessment. On the one hand, there is little doubt that the internet and related technologies have greatly increased availability of information, transparency, possibilities of research, opportunities for higher-quality products, participation in public policy discussions, and transnational and universal communications. In fact, their most positive political impact may be found at the local level, where people can engage in interactive exchanges for demands and evaluation of local initiatives. On the other hand, a few private oligo­ polies and international hackers have found ways to manipulate flows of information in order to try and shape the public agenda on relevant issues; open access to the networks has sullied the difference between knowledgeable expertise and trolls’ slants; privacy has been decimated; and over-messaging has undermined reflection and generated responses and exchanges triggered by instant emotional reactions.

Referendums In addition to referendums promoted bottom-up by citizen ballot initiatives, which we discussed above, many referendums are called top-down by governments to ratify previously made decisions by representative institutions. They have also been praised for enhancing people’s direct involvement in public affairs, although they tend to be relatively more controversial. In most cases, government-called refer­ endums are, from a legal standpoint, merely consultative or advisory, but they tend to intertwine with party politics and elections, which sometimes makes them not responses to the reshaping of agendas or voters’ opinions but rather sources of new crises or magnifications of underlying ones.

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Switzerland, again, is the main reference and inspiration for supporters of refer­ endums as a method for people’s participation in major legislation. In Switzerland, referendum outcomes are always binding. The citizen initiatives, which are held about three times per year nationwide, require simple majority support to win. In contrast, the referendums called by the government on constitutional, foreign, or urgent federal legislation, which have been held at the rate of about ten per year in recent periods, require support from a double majority of voters and cantons, which promotes consensual politics. The permanent threat that legislation approved by a simple majority in the Assembly can be defeated by a referendum prevents the legislators from making certain decisions. For more than six decades it has moved four political parties to form very broad majority coalition governments supported by more than 75% of popular votes. As a result, less than one-fourth of governmental proposals previously agreed upon by the four parties are defeated by referendum. The famous Swiss consensual politics is more a consequence than a cause of highly demanding legislative referendums. The experience is different when referendums can be won by simple majority and are merely advisory, which fosters more risky calls by daring rulers. There were few referendums in European countries during the third fourth of the twentieth century, when political parties seemed able to respond to interest group expecta­ tions and people’s demands and democratic party systems were highly stable. But in the last few decades, the number of referendums has increased in parallel with a growing sense of dissatisfaction with democratic performance and a growing alienation between voters and traditional political parties in many countries. The optimistic argument relies on the assumption that referendums can increase people’s knowledge about public issues and incentivize political participation. This would strengthen representative government and the rulers would gain consent for their choices. Political scientist Matt Qvortrup (2005), who has studied the topic extensively, holds that—more or less as in Switzerland—“the mere risk of a refer­ endum will encourage the elected representatives to govern with close regard to the wills and the sentiments of ‘the people’, and they will legislate responsively for fear to be nullified by ‘people’s veto’.” In this perspective: Referendums should not be seen as an alternative to representative government. In fact, it was in order to prevent the degeneration of representative democracy and party government, that proponents of referendums … have advocated that the electorate be allowed to vote on laws already enacted by its representatives. The fact is that in about 50% of all referendums held at the national level in Western European countries since the end of the Second World War the position favored by the government that called them has been defeated. The proportion of governmental defeats has dramatically increased during the last ten or so years. Notable recent cases include Poland on the electoral system, Italy on constitutional reform, Greece on the EU’s bailout, and the United Kingdom on remaining in the EU.

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In the Netherlands, a new right to non-binding referendums on any piece of legislation—more or less inspired by the Swiss experience—was passed in parlia­ ment in 2015. One year later, a referendum was called about an association treaty between the EU and Ukraine, which was rejected. The following year, the Dutch Council of State claimed that referendums were a threat to democracy, and, just three years after it had been introduced, the parliament removed the provision for nationwide consultative referendums. From a critical point of view it has been argued that the outcome of the vote on many referendums at the national level is not driven by the issue at stake but by the leading prejudices and fears which are active within the population undertaking the debate before the vote. It has also been observed that some referendums do not settle the issues, which could be better dealt with in parliament. The polarization produced by the choice between just two alternatives as “better” or “worse” may jeopardize compromises between opposite opinions and increase conflict and confusion. In contrast with some of the experiences at local level reviewed in the previous pages, frequent referendums at national or higher levels are not always associated with high democratic quality and political stability. They are fairly called in new countries or new democracies to approve independence or a new constitution. In Europe, there have been 14 country referendums about membership in the Eur­ opean Union and 16 on EU treaties, the introduction of the euro and the failed Constitution. But since the first of this type in the early 1970s, “the risk of an electoral defeat in referendums has been growing,” as observed by political scientist Gerald Schneider (2018). The largest democratic countries and federations, India, the United States, Indonesia, Japan, and Germany, have had no referendums at national level and have no legal provisions for them. *** As many results of participatory democracy show, the small size of the commu­ nity and the relative simplicity of the issues involved can make some ways of people’s participation work in support of democracy. In local units, people’s direct political participation in decision-making on some issues can increase knowledge of and interest in public affairs and generate positive energy. The anti-ruler populist impulse can be tamed and rechanneled for more constructive purposes. Innovative experiences along these lines have developed at the local level in the last few dec­ ades. At larger scales, however, actions of this sort can work to the detriment of democracy. Complex policy issues need to be dealt with to a greater extent through elected representative bodies and with experts’ advice, as we discuss next.

Notes 1 The French Peugeot and Citroen, the German Opel, and the Italian Fiat, Alfa Romeo and Maserati became a single company, as did the German Volkswagen and Porsche.

9 NATIONAL DEMOCRACY NEEDS MULTIPARTY COOPERATION

All the ten best-governed countries of the world are democracies, all of them are organized as parliamentary regimes, and almost all of them work with multiparty coalition governments promoting consensus policy-making. Four of them, based on their large size or cultural diversity, are federations, while the rest can afford more unitary structures because they are relatively less culturally diverse than other larger countries and unions.1 The high quality of these countries’ governance is estimated by the World Bank’s Governance Indicators. On the basis of thirty data sources, the Bank eval­ uates six dimensions of governance. Three of them are essential to the definition of democracy: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence, and the rule of law. The other three closely match our discussion about the sources of people’s support to the way democracy works: government effectiveness, regulatory quality, and control of corruption. According to these indicators, the ten best-governed medium- or large-size countries are in Northern Europe: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden; in Central Europe: Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland; in North America: Canada; and in the Pacific: Australia and New Zealand. All these countries are also first-class in terms of freedom and external openness of their economies, which we have remarked as another condition for success in the currently globalized world. They are among the top regarding people’s satisfaction with the way democracy works and people’s trust that the national government is doing what is right for the country. As they have been notably impervious to recent political turmoil, their experience and institutional formulas may be the best reference and recipe for improving democratic governance at national level everywhere else.

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Multiparty consensus Eight of the ten countries mentioned (all except Canada and Australia) use electoral rules of proportional representation which allocate seats to each party on the basis of its votes and permits the representation of multiple parties in parliament. During the electoral campaigns in these countries, each party displays its own agenda of priority issues and holds notoriously different policy proposals from each other. This creates the occasion for introducing innovative policies on many issues. But after every election, a majority multiparty coalition has to be formed in parliament to appoint the prime minister and, usually, to share cabinet ministries and promote an agreed legislative agenda with sufficiently broad support. In post-electoral parliamentary negotiations, political parties tend to prefer coa­ lition partners with relatively close policy proposals to those that hold more distant or extreme positions. Centrist parties can be relatively advantaged to form a majority. In technical terms, this means that any majority coalition among multiple political parties tends to include the “median” party which, in proportional repre­ sentation elections, tends to represent the median voter. Let us remember from middle-school math that the “median” is defined as the position having no more than half of the votes on both its right and left. In some countries this position can be relatively inclined towards the right side of the ideological spectrum while in others it can lean more toward the left side, but it usually tends to be a moderate position. If parties are only ready to form a coalition with close or adjacent parties, then the moderate party containing the median seat is always a necessary partner in gathering a majority. For major issues, typically including macroeconomic policy, interior, and foreign affairs, multiple political parties tend to negotiate and agree upon common policy proposals around moderate positions. For other issues, the different partners of the coalition may have more room to introduce their favorite policies. The agreed government program is not likely to completely coincide with any of the pre­ ferences of the parties involved, but the agreements are needed in order to be supported by a parliamentary majority and become law. Elements of policy continuity in the mid- or long term can be introduced even if the party composition of successive governments changes. Continuity and rela­ tive stability is provided by several liberal, centrist or agrarian parties in different countries in which conservative or christian-democratic parties on one hand and social-democratic or labour parties on the other may hold the ride. Besides their influence on specific policies, centrist political parties within a coalition govern­ ment may play a role in checking and balancing collective decision-making on the broad set of government policy issues. We thus find the paradoxical result that interactions of multiple parties with different agendas tend to produce ideologically moderate governments. This differs from results in elections with alternative formulas, such as the typical AngloAmerican plurality rule in electoral districts with a single seat in which the winner takes all. In these settings, one single party can receive a majority of seats on the

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basis of a minority of nationwide popular votes, as has always been the case in the United Kingdom, often with a strong bias towards one of the ideological extremes. It has been demonstrated that multiparty cabinets based on proportional electoral representation are, on average, substantially closer to the median voters’ position than are single-party parliamentary cabinets based on plurality or majority rules. The middle positions have historically had a high reputation for socially efficient decisions. Aristotle stated that “The political community that is based on those in the middle is best. The best legislators come from the middle citizens.” Confucius preached about the ideal ruler that “took hold of their two extremes, determined the Mean, and employed it in his government of the people.” More recently, eminent political scientists like Robert A. Dahl held that a “reasonable justification of democracy” comes from its identification with the policies “most preferred” by the voters. Multiparty coalition governments foster inclusiveness of political representation, relative policy stability, and people’s broad satisfaction with the outcomes of the political process. Contrariwise, there has been a lot of conjecture that single-party governments can be more committed to responsible policies, while multiparty coalition governments are vulnerable to threats and shifts from minor, sometimes extreme parties. Much of the political, journalistic, and academic discussion about the supposedly bad effects of multiparty governments has focused on the experience of a few countries such as Israel or on anecdotal episodes. We have studied the relationship between the number of parties in government and the degree of policy instability in a systematic way with quantitative measures of the two variables for 295 elections and subsequent governments in 24 demo­ cratic countries since World War II. We have found an inverse correlation between the number of parties in government and the degree of party polarization and policy instability. The higher the number of parties in government, the less policy instability can be observed. High levels of policy change are found in systems with single-party governments and frequent alternations, such as the United Kingdom or Greece, where political polarization and adversarial and confrontational politics tend to prevail. In contrast, in countries with multiparty coalition governments, broad policy consensus is built. A series of two-party coalition governments can reduce policy instability to about half of that in alternating single-party governments, according to our measure. Three, four, or more parties in government, to about one third. These are the government features in the best-governed countries. In Germany, there have always been two-party governments, led by either the Christiandemocrats in partnership with the Liberals or the Social-democrats in partnership with either the Liberals or the Greens. More recently, a “grand coalition” of the two largest parties has been formed after three of the four elections since 2005. In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden there have also been alternations between coalition governments led by either the Conservatives, the Christian-democrats or the Liberals on one side, and the Social-democrats in partnership with either the Greens, the Left or the Center on the other. In Finland, the Center party plays a

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pivotal role, forming coalitions with either the Social-democrats and the Left or the Nationals and the Greens, while a grand coalition was also recently formed. Like­ wise, in the Netherlands, Liberal prime ministers have governed in coalition with either the Christian-democrats or the Social-democrats. In Switzerland, four-party governments with the Conservatives, the Liberals, the Christian-democrats, and the Social-democrats have been formed for more than sixty years.2 As we can see from these outstanding cases, low policy instability is compatible with somewhat different ideological orientations of public policies, which may be correlated with different socioeconomic and cultural characteristics of different countries and changing political priorities. In general, policy stability can be a positive factor for democratic consolidation and people’s satisfaction with the way democracy works. If the citizenry can expect only moderate redistributive decisions from government, the policy distance between electoral winners and losers on important issues is low, and there is broad consensus on some basic values, people tend to comply with higher probability than in situations prone to sudden drastic changes and recurrent policy swings. Our findings are consistent with analyses from other lenses. Political scientist Arend Lijphart (2000) concluded his extensive comparative analysis of democratic systems with the observation that “parliamentary government is preferable to presidential government and that proportional representation is preferable to majoritarian electoral systems.” John Huber and Bingham Powell (1994) found that multiparty parliamentary governments based on proportional representation elections include the median voter’s preference with higher frequency than typical single-party governments based on majoritarian electoral rules. This may imply that policy positions of mul­ tiparty governments can remain relatively more stable around a consensual point. In contrast, single-party governments are “essentially unconstrained by other parties in the policymaking process.” George Tsebelis (2002) measured the number of “veto players” in political sys­ tems, which in parliamentary regimes turns out to be equivalent to the number of parties in government. He consistently emphasized that an increase in the number of veto players increases policy stability, “impeding significant departures from the status quo,” since in order to change policies, more difficult multiparty agreements have to be attained. Economists Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini (2003) observed that in the typically British winner-takes-all model, “only one politician or party holds office and is free to set policy,” which predicts “policy divergence” between suc­ cessive governments. In alternative institutional settings based on proportional representation elections, “several politicians are in office and bargain over policy,” thus producing higher levels of policy convergence. The long-term effects of broad representation in government and policy con­ sensus on people’s support for democracy are clearly positive. In an empirical study of 25 advanced democracies, political scientists Quinton Mayne and Armen Hakhverdian (2016) concluded that “the closer the ‘congruency’ or match

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between the preferences of the public and those of elected elites, both in the leg­ islature and in the government, more likely are the citizens to be satisfied with the functioning of democracy.”

Two-party adversarial competition In contrast to the model of multiparty consensus just reviewed, few democratic countries use electoral systems based on single-seat districts in which the winner takes all. With this system, the other competitors are completely excluded from representation whatever the number of popular votes they may have received. Together with Great Britain, almost all these countries are former British colonies, which inherited the old and simple electoral mechanism that had been used in England since the Middle Ages. They include what are now the two largest democracies in the world, India and the United States, as well as a few islands in the British Caribbean. But only two of the ten best-governed countries listed above are former British colonies following variants of this system: Australia and Canada. In this kind of setting, there are strong constraints for more than two parties or candidates to effectively compete for power. In systems with only two parties, the number of policy issues in electoral campaigns is lower than in multiparty systems, as each party can introduce a limited number of preferred issues in which it can specialize and expect voters’ favorable inclination and support. Therefore, an elec­ tion may be won by a single party on the basis of a small set of issues that turn out to be prominent during the campaign and in voters’ information driving their vote. But the election is decisive for all the multiple policy issues that may enter the government’s agenda, including those that may not have been raised by any of the two parties or taken into serious consideration by many citizens at the time of casting their votes. The subsequent single-party government may have a free hand for approving and implementing its preferred policies on many issues, even if they have not been salient in the previous debate and campaign. The room for policy maneuver by a single-party government is spacious. If only two viable parties or candidates compete, polarization is fostered and the electorate is sharply divided. But if, in spite of the systemic constraints, more than two candidacies attract votes, the winner is likely to obtain only minority popular support. The winner takes all, whatever the number of votes it gets, while the majority of votes can be split among several candidates and not return any seat. In more than half the parliamentary elections held by this type of electoral system in the United Kingdom, Canada, India, and New Zealand over several decades, the largest party received a national minority of popular votes but was allocated an absolute majority of seats in parliament. In the US House of Repre­ sentatives, the distortion has happened in about one-third of the elections. On several occasions, the national loser in votes became the winner in seats. The higher the number of parties competing in elections and obtaining the voters’ support with this restrictive electoral system, the higher the likelihood that

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the typical minority-vote, parliamentary majority-cabinet will be socially biased and less socially efficient than any hypothetical alternative organized around the median voter’s preference. In these cases, in contrast to the conventional motto of the electoral system, it is the loser minority party that takes all. These biased results are frequent because nowadays two-party systems are in crisis almost everywhere. In the United Kingdom, the traditional two-party system in which the Conservatives and Labourites alternated in government was shattered by several hung parliaments and minority governments since 2010. In order to reduce or fix this peril, major changes have been introduced in the three former British colonies included in the above list of ten best-governed countries. Australia replaced plurality rule with a “preferential vote” system by which seats are allocated to the candidates with higher voters’ first, second, or further preferences. Still, relatively polarized competition has sustained between the Labour party on one side and a permanent coalition between the Liberal and National parties on the other side. However, in the election of 2010, the rise of the Greens produced a hung parliament without a single-party majority for the first time in a long period. The absence of a single-party majority is more common in the Australian Senate, which promotes some interparty cooperation. New Zealand was the best example of a plurality rule elections with only two parties in parliament for a very long time. But after two elections in which the loser in votes became the winner in seats, the electoral system was changed to proportional representation in the 1990s. Alternating multiparty coalition cabinets have been formed since then led by either the National conservatives in partnership with the Christian-democrats or the Liberals, or the Labourites in partnership with the Centrists or the Nationalists. In Canada, the Conservative and Liberal parties have alternated in government, but the rise of the New Democratic Party, the Bloc Québécois, and others have produced four minority governments in seats in six elections since 2004. That two-party competition tends to promote polarization was not always the standard observation. Several decades ago, economist Anthony Downs (1957), inspired by United States presidential elections, compared political competition with market competition among companies and elaborated his famous “median voter’s theorem.” He hypothesized that, more or less as two shops seeking the best location on Main Street would try to approach each other in a centric place, two competing parties or candidates interested in winning an election above all would approach each other and tend to “converge” around the median voter’s most preferred policy. According to Downs, the tight closeness of the two parties would be an “equi­ librium”—that is, it would involve stable parties’ or candidates’ positions from which there would be no incentive to move away. An implication is that if one party remains around the median voter’s position and the other takes a distance, the former will likely win the election. It was as if the median voter’s preference was always going to achieve a legislative and governmental decisive position, whether by multiparty coalitions producing consensus policy, as discussed above, or by convergence of two major parties.

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The electoral appeal of the median voter was validated in the United States by a few presidential elections shortly after Downs’ book publication, in the 1960s and 1970s. Very close to a tie were the victories of Democrat John Kennedy over Richard Nixon by two-tenths of a percentage point, and of Democrat Jimmy Carter over Republican incumbent Gerald Ford by less than two percentage points. In between, Democratic president Lyndon Johnson blatantly beat Republican candidate Barry Goldwater by presenting him as a perilous extremist ready to launch a nuclear war. Republican president Richard Nixon also achieved a landslide victory over Democratic candidate George McGovern by profiling him as a radical left-wing extremist. Since then, a common claim was that elections between two parties are won by approaching the political center or, more generally, by adopting a relatively moderate position. Accordingly, in successive campaigns in US presidential elections the decisive voters were identified with pivotal voters such as the soccer mom, the hockey mom, Joe Six-pack, Joe the Plumber, Joe (or Jane) Public, Joe (or Jane) the Citizen, or, more recently, as a typical member of the declining middle class in the Upper Midwest. In the United Kingdom, successive middle-of-the-road voters were identified as Essex Man, Worcester Woman, or suburban carwashes in the West Midlands. However, the postulate of “convergence” between the two parties has some logical problems and has been invalidated by candidates’ strategies and results in further elections. Let us see the analytical incompleteness first. According to the model, in equilibrium, the two parties would converge and their major economic or social policies would be as distant from each other as Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola or Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Most voters would be fairly satisfied or just content with whoever wins since both would implement more or less the same policy. But it has not been emphasized that, in that kind of convergence, the parties or candidates would get a tie, a draw, 50:50 votes or something very close. The victory would be highly uncertain, and the break of the tie would depend on haphazard factors, as in the examples highlighted above. A bewildering question appears: How can anybody assume or presume that in such a situation, in which parties interested in winning elections tied, they would continue offering the same type of candidates and the same supply of policy proposals? Would they not try something different in order to obtain a clear majority of votes? The empirics also provide weak support. In some recent elections, the winner did not need to converge much because it benefited from the split of votes introduced by a third candidate (Nixon thanks to George Wallace, Bill Clinton thanks to Ross Perot) or from bonuses provided by the electoral college (George W. Bush and Donald Trump). There has not been clear policy convergence between the two major candidates for a long while.

Contesting agendas There are strong incentives for two competing parties not to “converge” but to promote distant policy positions and contentious campaigns that can foster polarization.

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As explained by political scientist William Riker (1986, 1993), the main electoral strategy for avoiding the hypothetical tie when two parties converge is changing the agenda of prominent issues. If the two main parties are saying almost the same things and approach a tie, they can try to change the subject of the conversation. In competitive markets, when companies compete on prices and reduce their profits, they tend to differentiate their product. Similarly, in politics, differentiating the product means introducing new policy proposals for issues which are not settled. This party strategy implies that some issues that will achieve high prominence during electoral campaigns will be those on which there is not convergence between parties but rather clear distance in policy proposals fostering voters’ polarization. Downs’ model assumed that the issues to discuss in an electoral campaign are given and then the parties or candidates would try to approach the most popular policy proposal on those issues. Riker’s model, in contrast, assumes that the parties cannot greatly change the traditional policy proposals with which they are already identified. The relevant issues to discuss are not given but they are the main object of choice by contenders in electoral campaigns. The median voter able to attract a majority can be a different person for different issues. People’s preferences and parties’ proposals on socioeconomic issues defining a left–right dimension tend to be consistent with cultural issues on a liberal–conservative scale. Those in favor of higher taxes usually favor personal freedom, while those more in favor of a free market may be willing to support traditional family values. But the emergence of some new issues related to globalization have created a new crossing dimension which does not fit the old left–right axis. Higher salience and new controversy have been given to immigration and its related issues of race, asylum, and border control, to the role of the European Union in addressing the Great Recession, or to climate change as some of its visible consequences aggra­ vate. When things change, some people change their minds. In addition, new generations may have different values from some of their progenitors. An outstanding case showing the new political landscape is the French pre­ sidential election of 2017. The two top contenders at the runoff were from new parties. Emmanuel Macron held a clear centrist position on the left–right dimen­ sion able to attract the median voter. But his determined pro-European Union stands located him in an extreme position on the globalization–nationalism axis. His rival, Marine Le Pen, was located at extreme positions on both axes as she represented both the far right and the most nationalist, anti-EU positions, which made her the ineluctable loser. The centrist Macron became the least bad candidate for many leftist voters and some rightist ones in spite of the fact that many of them did not share his pro-European and pro-globalization positions and some could even be closer to Le Pen on those issues. On a policy space with multiple issues, many voters have to choose one party or candidate on the basis of their proposals on the most salient issue in their campaign even if they prefer other candidacies on other issues. Many of us know this from our own experience of voting.

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The point about the formulas for good governance is that, under winner-take-all or second-round runoff rules with only two parties competing, this creates sizeable room for political maneuvering. Riker called this strategy agenda setting or, more graphically, agenda manipulation. What is reached is not a stable equilibrium around a single moderate median voter but permanent new opportunities for change by just modifying the priority issue in successive campaigns. In contrast, with multiple parties there is less room for manipulation because each of the parties can promote different issues and broaden the agenda and the public debate. Incumbent parties are more likely to emphasize more consensual issues and try to gain credit for their previous record in government. Opposition and new parties are more likely to campaign on newer and controversial issues on which there is no convergence. The main battle in an electoral campaign is over what to talk about. In a typical political debate, when a disadvantaged candidate on one issue cannot win the argument, his best tactics may be to trumpet, “That’s not the issue,” and try to change the subject. Nevertheless, the agenda of issues in the public debate is not always under con­ trol by manipulating politicians. The competition for selecting the issues that are going to be prominent is multilateral, including not only parties, office holders and candidates, but also lobbies, NGOs, social movements, skillful activists, or the media’s powerful influence. An issue can also become relevant as provoked by unplanned exogenous events for which the government’s mismanagement may be made responsible, such as an international financial crisis, a terrorist attack, a wave of new immigrants, or a natural disaster triggered by climate change. Whether the agenda is set by one of the parties and the other has to adapt to deal with it or the main issues in the debate are derived from external actors and events, the likely losers can try to avoid making those issues a salient topic in the campaign. If that is not viable, they may seek other elements of differentiation, including controversial alternative values on the policy proposals, which may work in their favor. For example, one of the parties may be reluctant to talk much about abortion because the majority opinion—especially among women, who care more about it—may be in favor of “choice.” In that situation, the opposer can raise the value of “life.” Or vice versa. Then there is no real debate because everybody is in favor of life rather than death and almost everybody would prefer choice to diktat, but the voters have to opt for one side. On international and global affairs, some can­ didates may emphasize the advantages of open foreign relations, while others may stick to defending the dream of national sovereignty. Against the value of com­ passion regarding welcoming immigrants and refugees, the opposers can raise the value of security. If the issue of climate change acquires great salience in the public debate, one party may remark upon the long-term chances and quality of human life, while the other party may emphasize that in the short term new regulations require new taxes and consumption restraint. Political polarization may revive and reappear even if parties or candidates cannot choose to focus on their favorite issues in debates and campaigns.

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Alternatively, a sudden new consensus can emerge. Legalization of same-sex marriage has been a most striking case. Other issues may experience a rather silent process of adaptation by adversarial camps around an expedient solution—which seems to be the case, for instance, with the death penalty in the US through a series of suspensions, moratoria, and legal suppression. With these insights, we can understand that, all across the world, policy con­ sensus on certain public issues is often achieved in the wake of keen political competition. Many policy proposals that were innovative and divisive at a certain moment eventually became consensual as a result of either convergence between the major parties, the consolidated defeat of the most eccentric alternative, or compromises among multiple parties compelled to share government. Think, for example, of the stories of the abolition of slavery, the opening of free trade, the launch of internationalist foreign policy, the diffusion of social security, the generalization of civil rights, the standardization of the persecution of crime in cities, the regulation of abortion, the suppression of compulsory military service, the acceptance of international justice for crimes against humanity, the achievements by ongoing movements on women’s equal rights, and so on. These and many other issues were highly controversial when they were pushed to the front of the political debate. It took multiple battles over long periods to settle these issues. All in all, good governance and progress in democratic policy-making may pass through two stages. The first is policy innovation on issues that are not yet settled or have newly appeared. Some of the issues that are artfully raised and made con­ troversial in electoral campaigns may be trivial or near irrelevant, producing just a small gain of electoral productivity for already established public officers. Fake news, campaigners’ spinning, and social media hate-speech can proliferate. How­ ever, the saliency of other new issues on which there had not been sufficient public debate can change people’s lives substantially. The second stage for democracy to make progress and achieve good governance is settling on consensual policies. Building policy consensus on important issues and putting aside old bitter conflicts is democratic progress. High political polarization in recent times has been partly the product of inter­ national, technological, economic, and cultural changes creating dilemmas and rising issues not settled by old political agendas. Unscrupulous politicians have taken advantage of the appearance of new issues and of some restrictive, polarizing institutions to promote extreme, disparate policy proposals. But there are times for innovation and times for building consensus. Complete democratic success is achieved only if the first stage of policy-making is completed by the second—that is, when an innovative proposal becomes a consensual policy.

Constitutional crisis in the United Kingdom The old democratic country that least fits the conditions for good governance is the United Kingdom. Let us see why.

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In order for democracy to be sufficiently inclusive of a diverse population in a large and complex country, there is usually the need for either multiple territories with a decentralized federalism or multiple political parties. A large number of territorial units in a federal structure can be the basis for a large, aggregative “union,” while a large assembly based on multiple parties can also be aggregative because it can form a broad government multiparty “coalition.” Both union and coalition can keep a large and varied country together by using democratic means of governance. In contrast, the political regime of the United Kingdom involves too much centralization and a too-restrictive electoral system that permits only two parties to alternate in single-party cabinets always based on a minority of popular votes. As we have said, it is the legacy of simple formulas that have survived for a very long period of political stability without adapting to the increasing complexity of a changing society The poor institutional fit began to be addressed in the 1990s, when several major institutional reforms were initiated regarding both territorial decentralization and the electoral system. They could have produced a significant reversal of the British political regime’s previous historical trends by moving it from high con­ centration of powers to a more pluralistic regime. But the first mistake was the simultaneous introduction in parallel of elements of both reforms, which limited the complete development of either of them and stopped the two initiatives mid-way. For territorial decentralization, local governments were strengthened, in parti­ cular by introducing the direct election of a London mayor and rules of propor­ tional representation for the separated election of the corresponding local assembly. Regional assemblies and governments were created in Scotland and Wales on the basis of proportional representation. An agreement between the British and Irish governments, together with all the parties in the region, led to conditional devo­ lution of self-rule to Northern Ireland and the establishment of the framework of a confederal-like relationship between the states of the two islands. It was initially planned that nine English regions would also be formed, but the project was abandoned after the failure of the first referendum in North East England in 2004. As should have been expected, the absence of provisions for the establishment of regional governments across England induced polarization between the central and Scottish governments, including calls for independence, rather than inter-regional cooperation. The two traditional British government parties have almost dis­ appeared from Scottish politics. Also, the Northern Ireland Executive, which was conceived as a broad platform for nationalists and unionists, has repeatedly been suspended and replaced by direct rule from London. For multipartism, an initiative for a major electoral reform was launched. As a first step, the United Kingdom ceased to be an exception in Europe when, in 1999, representatives to the European Parliament were elected by proportional representation (as in all the other member states of the European Union). At about the same time, the government had established an Independent Commission on

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the Voting System for the House of Commons, led by former Labour minister and leader of the Liberals in the House of Lords, Lord Jenkins of Hillhead (formerly Roy Jenkins), with collaboration from a selection of outstanding British political scientists specialized in elections (or “psephologists,” as they are called over there). The Commission issued a report recommending the replacement of the several centuries-old electoral system based on plurality rule with an “additional membersystem” able to produce higher proportionality in representation. However, the referendum that took place in 2011 was confined to the unassuming proposal of an Australian-style “alternative vote,” and it failed. In the end, the two diverse, incomplete, or frustrated institutional reforms pro­ duced more ungovernability. First, incomplete decentralization provoked high territorial polarization. A new referendum on Scottish independence appears to be on the horizon. At the same time, Brexit has clashed with the permeable border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Second, increasing multi­ partism without electoral reform has produced highly distorted representation. The Brexit crisis, which we discussed in a previous chapter, has increased polarization. Single-party cabinets keep being based on small minorities of popular votes, which alienate vast majorities of citizens. The subsequent uncertainty, paralysis, and bewilderment is menacing the vulnerable, unreformed institutional system, which, as The Economist (2019) warned, can “amplify chaos, division and the threat to the union.”

Presidential polarization in the United States Political polarization in the United States is also triggered by the two-party system. But it is strongly reinforced by the separate election of an executive president, which does not exist in the other countries of British inheritance mentioned above. It is mainly around presidential campaigns and elections that the electorate becomes polarized in the pursuit of a high concentration of power in the White House. The United States is a unique case in having the two most restrictive electoral formulas at the federal level: single-member districts for Congress and presidential elections. No other large democracy has this combination. The origins of institutional propensity to conflict are remote. The US constitutionmakers took some inspiration from the English model of separation of powers between king and parliament, which developed during the most conflictive period in the transition from absolute monarchy to a parliamentary regime. In seventeenth-century England, the parliament had increasingly asserted itself, it had challenged the monarch and established, for a period, a kind of mixed regime involving continuous strained interactions between the two powers leading to civil war, dictatorship, and revolution. However, when the US Constitution was adopted in 1789, the United Kingdom did not work that way anymore. It was already a parliamentary regime with a fusion of powers between parliament and cabinet reliant on the same political majority. The Founding Fathers’ sources were outdated.

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The formula adopted by the US Constitution and reinforced by further amendments was a democratized version of the obsolete mix. Like a king, the president would control all executive power, but there would be limits to pre­ sidential reelection, initially by convention and later by law. Like a king, the president would appoint his cabinet but with some congressional ratifications. He could also veto legislation, but Congress could potentially override it. As we have discussed, the conflict between president and Congress was atte­ nuated for a long while by political parties’ heterogeneous social support and leg­ islators’ low discipline, which permitted them to build flexible legislative majorities around the president’s party proposals. But since the 1960s, increasing polarization and higher party discipline have dominated. A divided government when the president’s party has no majority in Congress is no longer an opportunity for bipartisan cooperation but rather one for inter-institutional conflict and paralysis. Some compelling comparisons can be extended to the US’s close neighbor Canada and also with vast and diverse India. In these two former British countries, the electoral system for parliament is also, like in the United States, based on the old British model of single-seat districts by plurality rule. Yet both Canada and India are parliamentary regimes in which the head of government is elected by a legislative majority in parliament. They do not hold separate presidential elections. There are multiple parties in both parliaments and, in India, frequent coalition governments. In the US, it is mainly the presidential election that deters the for­ mation of more parties. In turn, the two parties in control discard changes to congressional electoral rules. The political and institutional system of the US is blocked at federal level around two polarized parties. The consequences for the quality of governance are enor­ mous. With only two parties, it is difficult for the president to work out deals with the opposition; adversarial politics and gridlock flourish. Political scientist Juan Linz (1990) insightfully analyzed some of the implications for the political game: The plebiscitarian component implicit in the president’s ‘authority’ is likely to make the obstacles and opposition he encounters seem particularly annoying. In his frustration he may be tempted to define his policies as reflections of the popular will and those of his opponents as the selfish designs of narrow inter­ ests. This identification of leader with people fosters a certain populism that may be a source of strength… The president may lead to ill-conceived policy initiatives, overly hasty stabs at implementation, unwarranted anger at the lawful opposition, and a host of other evils [such as] to spend money unwisely or risk polarizing the country for the sake of seeing his agenda become reality. The US system’s inclusiveness of the very large and diverse population of the country is not achieved through the presidential office and the narrow two-party system but rather through the autonomy of a very high number of states which in many cases function like “territorial parties.”

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In general, we have observed that the larger the country, the more important federalism is—rather than the party system—to make the inclusion of a diverse population viable and avoid democracy being challenged. The very high number of fifty states of the US somehow compensates for the smallness of single-seat dis­ tricts and a two-party system. Like other large countries with comparable govern­ ance challenges, the US has a dispersed population, with low average population density and relatively homogeneous groups in many of the territories. Much poli­ tical action focuses on state and local institutions, which reduces the pressure to form multiple political parties at national level. Nevertheless, the drawbacks of the presidential system subsist. Some constitu­ tional reforms in a few other countries may suggest possible alternative designs. The president could appoint a head or coordinator of the cabinet who would be ratified by Congress and be accountable to it. Congress legislative powers could be strengthened to the point of being able to prevent a unilateral government shut­ down by the president. The aim of these and other devices would be the forma­ tion of cooperative political majorities in Congress and the presidency for a satisfactory exertion of legislative and executive powers, inter-institutional coop­ eration, and effective collective decision-making. Ultimately, the expected con­ sequence would be a contribution to consensus policy and more satisfying democracy.

From competition to consensus A hopeful future for effective and satisfactory democracy requires the design and choice of political institutions that can favor cooperative behavior and consensual policy outcomes. Already in the eighteenth century, David Hume (1742) masterfully set out the fundamental approach for institutional reform: In contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to public good. More than 250 years after Hume’s crude suggestion, we know something about how to make participants in politics, whatever their motivations, cooperate for public good. As we discussed, an efficient allocation of powers to local, regional, national, continental, and global institutions improves the quality of policy-making and reduces the opportunities for opportunistic campaigns on a few biased issues. Then, in mid-size countries, parliamentary regimes, elections by proportional representation, multiparty systems, and majority coalition governments are able to provide good governance, policy consensus, and political stability. For countries with a diverse or disperse population and for large unions, a federal-like formula of decentralization and union is a must.

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With the same logic, exclusionary national sovereignty and external closeness hinder governments’ performance. Separate presidential elections for an executive president and the subsequent divided government with different political majorities in the legislative and the executive can produce paralysis and conflict. National plebiscites and referendums on complex issues tend to generate polarization and spread dissatisfaction. Yet rightly designing, building, and reforming institutions is never an easy endeavor. It also involves self-interested behavior by participants, like when the sake of the game is office acquisition or public policy-making. Constitution-makers can anticipate future effects of different institutional rules and choose those more attuned to their special interests. Once inefficient institutions exist, they can rein­ force themselves and make their replacement difficult. Institutions producing exclusionary outcomes can survive as a consequence of actors’ learning by use, their adaption to institutional regularities, and the costs of their replacement, as analyzed by Nobel laureate economic historian Douglass North (1990). As long as national representative democracies keep controlling many policy issues and remain focused on competitive party elections, we need hope. Political parties, activists, politicians, and public officers—notwithstanding the insatiable avarice and ambition of some of them, as Hume would put it—should respond to people’s expectations and demands and the public debate by cooperating to public good. That is how democracy at the national level could provide good govern­ ance, obtain people’s satisfaction with the way the political system works, and be preferred to any other system that has been tried from time to time.

Notes 1 Seven of the ten countries are also monarchies, which in democracy is a guarantee against presidentialism and the subsequent high concentration of power. 2 Government policy positions have been collected from the Party Manifesto Project sources, where the values allocated to each party and partisan government are the result of encompassing collection, reading, and codification of party and government pro­ grammatic policies for at least 57 policy variables, with several leading indicators based on combinations thereof. The government “ideology” is built as a weighted average of government policy positions on twenty dimensional spaces for socioeconomic (including macroeconomic, labor, agriculture), moral-religious, ethnic, foreign, regime, postmaterialist, and other policies. See sources at the end of the book.

10

CONTINENTAL UNIONS PROSPER America, India, Europe

In the long term, and in spite of notorious ups and downs, the globalization of human relations, including economic exchanges, cultural tastes, and moral senti­ ments, is inescapable. The scale of human relations recurrently increases under the driving force of technological innovation. Transnational corporations, technologi­ cal platforms, e-commerce networks and social media spread worldwide, they cross borders and elude state-based regulations. Yet some other interactions have more limited territorial bounds. Most international trade still runs within continental areas such as North America, the European Union, or the Southeast Asian and Transpacific countries. Mass migrations, whether moved by economic destitution or by violence and wars, also tend to travel, naturally, between neighboring world regions. At the moment, the restructuring of political institutions focuses on great con­ tinental unions of “imperial” size rather than on global institutions. The current intermediate stage in the tortuous process of political globalization is most intense in modern non-colonial “empires” like the United States, the European Union, China, India, and Russia, which configure a multipolar world with no single great power dominance. The scope of continental unions shows the flaws of isolated nation-states: those that are outside plead and fight for their inclusion, or at least the formalization of open relations with any of them; those that try to leave, like Britain from the European Union, sadly fail. The United States of America, the Union of States of India, and the European Union, in order of historical appearance, comprise more than half the people living in democracy on the planet. They are strong proof that democracy can exist and prosper, with appropriate institutional formulas, at the largest scales. The blossoming of democracy in these three unions is an extraordinary achievement because the larger and more diverse a country is, the more difficult it is to govern and even more difficult to govern by democratic means. Large

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countries tend to come with complex societies and diverse inhabitants with dis­ cordant interests. Until the late eighteenth century, nobody conceived that democracy—or “rule by the many”— could exist beyond small, homogeneous cities or towns. The experiment of creating the United States of America brought about a new formula with multiple levels of government which involved both democracy in small units—the former towns and colonies and the new states—and a new great federation innovatively ruled on the basis of democratic elections. Some American experience lies behind further endeavors elsewhere to extend democratic institutions and practices to large territories beyond traditional nation-states. None of these three unions fits the model of a culturally homogeneous nation. All display high ethnic, religious, and language diversity and exhibit relevant mul­ ticultural or multinational traits. America, India, and Europe work as democratic unions based on 50, 29, and 28 states, respectively. Besides their political differ­ ences, the three share some underlying institutional mechanisms able to include diversity in the union and prevent one state from dominating the rest. They are: asymmetries in the relations between the member states and the center, vertical division of powers between the center and the states, and multiple channels of people’s representation at the union level. With some variants, these three mechanisms should be sufficient to enable any sizeable democratic union to flourish.

Broad cultural diversity The people living in America, India, and Europe show diverse ethnical traits, are affiliated with different religions, and speak multiple languages. In the United States, while most of the population is of European origin, the ethnic minorities, mostly of African, Hispanic, or Asian descent, encompass near one-third of the total population, and increasing. Besides nearly three-fourths of Christians affiliated to more than a dozen Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church, the next largest congregations include Buddhists in the West, Muslims in the Midwest and South, and Jews in the Northeast. In India, most of the population is from various Indo-Aryan groups and castes, while Dravidians abound in the South and Mongols in the North. Most Indians practice Hinduism, but there is also a large Muslim minority and significant groups of Christians and Sikhs. In Europe, a few remote ethnic groups, such as the Franks, the Latins, the Germans and the Britons, gave way to multiple nationalities in modern attempts to build relatively homogeneous states. The majority of Eur­ opeans who identify as Christians are affiliated to the Roman Catholic Church, several Protestant denominations, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, while a Muslim minority increases. Out of all cultural characteristics, such as ethnicity and religion, a common lan­ guage has emphatically been considered the most necessary condition for a work­ able democracy. John Stuart Mill (1861), for example, ventured: “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a

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people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.” However, this assertion has been undermined by the blooming of democracies in numerous multilingual and multicultural countries and, especially, in oversized unions. The extremely large India is an extreme case. In India there is no single national language but two official languages at federal level and 17 at state level. The Northern-born Hindi language is the mother tongue of only about one-fourth of the Indian population, its 26 dialects are spoken by an additional one-fifth (although sometimes they may be mutually incomprehensible), and it is the second or third language of about one-tenth. In total, this makes a little more than half the population more or less able to communicate in Hindi. English is the official language in federal government institutions as a legacy of the British colonial administration, and it is also highly advantageous in interna­ tional business and higher education. A colloquial hybrid called “Hinglish” is widely used. At least one state is assigned to each of the other major languages, including Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, and a dozen others, which are required in their administrative and education systems. The members of the broadly educated minority that communicates across the Indian union and keeps it together, thus speak between two and four languages, depending on whether their mother tongue is Hindi, a state official language, or another of the few hundred non-official parlances. In general electoral campaigns, candidates for prime minister of India touring the country speak at rallies with an interpreter, who translates into the local language, next to them on stage. Hindi, followed by English, is the language of most press and TV broadcasts, while regional and local languages dominate on the internet and are growing in other media (even the BBC transmits in several state languages). The popular blockbusters from Bollywood, which contains much music and dance, have their compressed dialogues mostly in a colloquial dialect of Hindustani, which can be understood by both Hindi and Urdu speakers, and increasingly also in English, in Hinglish, and in Tamil, Telugu, and other regional languages. There is also a high degree of diversity in Europe, where an array of about fifty local, statewide, and transnational languages coexist with a few lingua francas. The institutions of the European Union recognize 23 languages as official, basically coinciding with the state official languages. However, the most common languages in the European Parliament and European Commission are English and French. Communication between European Union officers and the media is regularly done in English, French, and German, sometimes followed by Dutch, Italian, Polish, and Spanish. In campaigns for the European Parliament elections, transnational TV debates among the top candidates from the major Europe-wide parties are in English, with some occasional passages in French. In search of a common language, most Europeans have skipped the old rivalry between French and German and favored English as a more neutral option. More than half of Europeans can speak two languages and more than one-fourth, three.

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About half of Europeans can speak English as either a first or additional language, while about one-third can speak German and one-fourth can speak French. In countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands, or Sweden, more than 80% of the people can speak additional languages, including English in almost all cases. There are other selections of lingua francas at the European level. The TV channel Euronews broadcasts in seven languages—English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish (which replaced Russian)—which can be selected by just clicking on the remote control. In the popular Eurovision song contest, a broad variety of national languages have also been used, but since con­ testants were permitted to choose the language to sing in, most winners have come from non-English speaking countries singing in English. Even in the United States there is a wide spread of multiple languages. There has never been a national or official language at the federal level. After recent waves of Spanish-speaking and Chinese-speaking immigrants, California and 28 other states adopted, in reaction, English as the official language, while in three more states English was officialized together with several indigenous languages. Yet only about 70% of the total population speak English at home. A large minority speak Spanish (one-third of whom cannot speak English), especially in California (where it amounts to 45%), Texas and New Mexico; others speak Chinese (half of whom cannot speak English), and many other languages. In numerous states, local gov­ ernments provide election ballots in languages other than English, bilingual or multilingual official documents and public signals are broadly used, translation is made available for important public services such as court proceedings, and public schools accommodate non-English-speakers. The American case can be taken as confirmation that a common language among near-all citizens is a solid sustainer of a democratic government, but it also proves that a common language is compatible with extended plurilingualism. Both the Indian and the European experiences support the alternative proposition, as in these two democracies barely half the population shares a common language (respectively Hindi and English) and, nevertheless, democracy works.

Federal asymmetries In large unions, cultural asymmetries such as those just reviewed run together with institutional asymmetries in the relations between the center and the member states. The building of a union usually involves long processes of territorial expan­ sion from an initial core of a few countries towards its peripheries. In the begin­ ning, the core establishes high asymmetric relations with new members or potential joiners. The asymmetries tend to decrease in favor of more institutional homo­ geneity as the union’s expanding borders become more stable, the number of members is fixed, and the center of the union is more institutionalized—a process that can take a long time. The United States holds the least asymmetrical relations of the three unions. But the annexation of the bulk of its current territory since the initial 13 British

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colonies became independent states took more than sixty years (approximately from 1787 to 1850). Adjacent or relatively close territories to the initial core were integrated by peaceful means, while coercion and violence increased for territories farther away and more different to the founding ones. President Thomas Jefferson had envisaged an “Empire of liberty.” In the end the initial area had been multiplied by four, the population by only two. The process of building the US may be a useful reference for comparing more recent experiences. Typical asymmetries in the US were held between formal member states of the Union and territories under direct control by the central authority in Washington, officially as a provisional measure but usually for sev­ eral decades. Immediately after the approval of the US Constitution with 13 states along the East coast in 1789, the land taken from the British was doubled, west­ ward, up to the Mississippi River. The formation of new US states there took sixty years. Meanwhile, the United States purchased Louisiana from France—again doubling its area and leading eventually to 11 new US states—as well as Florida from Spain and Alaska from Russia. More violence was used for further expansion at greater distances from Washington. A typical sequence included infiltration of American traders, explor­ ers, or settlers into foreign lands, followed by internal rebellions against the local rulers and external interventions of the US Army. Texas, California, Oregon, and Hawaii experienced this type of process. Finally, the military occupation of half of Mexico’s territory, where five new US states were eventually formed, consolidated the border. There was no “manifest destiny” to expand across all North America. The expansion stopped when the rulers in Washington felt that the US would not be able to assimilate more distant and different populations. The annexation of other neighboring lands such as Quebec, Mexico, or Cuba were considered but dis­ carded, as were Panama and the more remote Philippines. A few internal splits from existing states during the Civil War completed the list of territorial units. The New Mexico and Arizona territories became states as late as 1912, followed by the noncontiguous Alaska and Hawaii territories in 1959. The current asymmetries in the United States federal system are relatively lim­ ited and mostly residuals from that long experience: the islands of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands remain ter­ ritories whose inhabitants are US nationals or citizens but cannot vote in elec­ tions of federal authorities. A few hundred Indian reservations, unevenly distributed throughout the country, are recognized as having tribal sovereignty and are self-governed by different rules. The asymmetry is somewhat greater in India. The union of the states of India was initially created after independence in 1947 through the integration of pre­ viously existing princely states (which originally covered 40% of the country’s area) and provinces inherited from the British colonial period. But a general reorgani­ zation began to replace them with new states created on ethnic and linguistic grounds since 1956. The first 14 states included the large Uttar Pradesh, Bihar,

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West Bengal, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Madras (later renamed Tamil Nadu), Mysore (later renamed Karnataka), and Andhra Pradesh. During the following decades, 15 new states were also created, including the split of Bombay between Maharashtra and Gujarat, the separation of Haryana from Punjab, and the statiza­ tion of several territories formerly ruled directly from New Delhi. There are still many pending demands for regions to be recognized as separate states, as well as seven territories still ruled from the capital of the union. Formal constitutional asymmetries of powers in the Indian union exist for the small bordering states of Nagaland and Mizoram in the Northeast and Sikkim in the North, with the intention of accommodating diversities and facilitating positive discrimination in the federal distribution of fiscal funds. The biggest asymmetry is with the mostly Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, on the northwest border with Pakistan. The Constitution of India approved in 1949 included “temporary provisions” with respect to this state, which was conferred a separate constitution, state citizenship, autonomous recruitment of public officials, and a bar on foreigners purchasing property. However, the expected referendum to ratify special status was never held, partly due to disagreements between mostly Muslim Kashmir and the other regions, mostly Hindi Jammu and multi-ethnic Ladakh, which demanded self-rule within the state. Several formulas of coalition governments, including between Muslim- and Hindi-inspired parties, have been tried. But Jammu and Kashmir has been under direct rule from New Delhi and governed by appointees of the central government for decades. Insurgencies for independence and conflicts with neighbor Pakistan intermittently convulse the state. The European Union is the most recently created of the three unions compared here, and as such it holds higher asymmetries in its institutional arrangements, although they are decreasing too. The initial core of six member states of the thencalled European Community, in 1957, was located at the center of the continent. The main axis was built between France and Germany to prevent the replication of preceding wars. Four successive waves of membership enlargement towards all peripheries took place over 35 years (from 1973 to 2007). First, the EC expanded westward with Denmark, Ireland, and the United Kingdom. Then south after the end of dicta­ torships in Greece, Portugal, and Spain. Eastwards after the demise of the Soviet Union, including the absorption of East Germany and the accession of Austria, Finland, and Sweden which had remained neutral during the Cold War. Later, the European Union adopted three former members of the Soviet Union in the Bal­ tics, the two former members of the federation of Czechoslovakia, two former members of the federation of Yugoslavia, and four independent states, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, and Romania. Two small, recently independent British colonies on islands in the Mediterranean were also incorporated. The territory and the population of the six founding members had been multiplied by three. Significant asymmetries within the European Union have resulted from the exclusion of some member states from increasing integration, provisionally but usually for several decades. Most notorious is the absence of six states from the

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Schengen agreements on border control, police and judicial cooperation, as well as the “opt out” of Denmark and the United Kingdom and the conditional adjournment of seven other states from the common currency, the euro, and the common monetary policy of the European Central Bank, pending compliance with economic and financial conditions of stability. The United Kingdom asked to leave the European Union after a fateful referendum in 2016, which we analyzed in the first part of the book. Since, till recently, the European Union has taken major steps towards increasing integration and others lie ahead, asymmetries regarding common commitments are likely to persist for a while. Future integration of new issues may be based on “coalitions of the willing”—that is, groups of countries prepared to pool more powers and resources in specific areas, open to late joiners. Membership, though, may be near completion, even if a few more countries on the southeast border of the Union may still be considered. Tentative campaigns for leaving the EU or the euro in some member countries have been withdrawn after contemplating the Brexit self-damaging affair.

Vertical division of powers Both the United States and the European Union have been built from the bottom up—that is, from previously existing states that have transferred some of their powers to the union. In all large unions, most people feel a double allegiance, to their state and to the union, as also happens to some extent in less extensive federal countries. The state allegiance tends to prevail early on, but the union becomes more emotionally important as it receives more transferred powers in politics, finance, and communication. At the approval of the United States Constitution, James Madison (1787) observed, “beyond doubt, that the first and most natural attachment of the people will be to the governments of their respective states,” rather than to the new Union. At the same time, he prognosticated that the people’s devotion would turn in favor of the government that “will be able to enlarge its sphere of jurisdiction at the expense of the other.” He specified: “If the people should in future become more partial to the federal than to the state governments, the change can only result from such manifest and irresistible proofs of a better administration, as will overcome all their antecedent propensities.” It took strenuous efforts over a long period for the federal government to overcome its antecedent propensities and give proof of a better administration. As we mentioned, the Constitution reserved all powers for the states, except those transferred to the Union regarding war and peace, foreign affairs, trade, currency, weights and measures, justice, and the promotion and defense of the rule of law in the states. Some major federal institutions such as the Federal Reserve and the Federal Bureau of Investigation were not created until the second decade of the twentieth century. Even now, the state powers permit a remarkable legislative disparity, especially regarding contract, property, family, and criminal laws.

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In the beginning, the bulk of the public spending, including for the wars against the British, came from the states. But the US Treasury, led by Alexander Hamil­ ton, decided to mutualize the enormous debts of the states—that is, to create fed­ eral debt able to absorb the state debts. The federal government gradually increased its strength at the expense of the states by exchanging debt payments for power. The US stopped giving financial aid to states or cities in bankruptcy from 1840. It is frequently noted that before the Civil War in the 1860s, the usual parlance was “the United States are,” which changed soon afterward to “the United States is.” Yet the federal government only achieved control of more than half of total public expenditure for the first time in 1940—that is, about 150 years after its creation—as a consequence of the expansion of the public sector in response to the Great Depression. US citizens’ priority attachment to America, rather than state, increased further on, in the twentieth century, together with the growing powers of the federal government, involvement in two world wars against a common enemy, and extensive internal migrations across states. Currently, US public expenditure is distributed roughly half-and-half between the central government and the state and local governments (in percentages of gross domestic product, respectively about 20%, excluding federal transfers to the states and the cities, 11%, and 9%). In many states, people’s allegiance is also quite balanced between the federal and state governments. “The [current] European Union is similar in many ways to the United States in the nineteenth century,” observe both political scientist Alberta Sbragia (2010) and economic historian Randall Henning (Henning and Kessler 2012). While in the US Constitution all powers are reserved for the states, except those transferred to the Union, the EU has adopted the principle of subsidiarity by which every issue should be handled at the lower possible level—that is, at the local level rather than at the state level, and by the states rather than by the union. However, EU law already has primacy over the laws of the member states, including their constitutions, a principle developed by the European Court of Justice. The EU has a relatively tiny budget equivalent to 1% of the gross European product and can draw additional resources from the Central Bank, the Stability Mechanism, and the Investment Bank, while the average member state spends more than 45% of its gross domestic product (including national, regional, and local expenditures). Precisely because the EU public finances are so meager, the EU overregulates many economic activities and has to intervene, control, and eventually rescue the public finances of the member states, as extensively hap­ pened, in particular, during the Great Recession. The EU is too interventionist because it is too weak. As happened in a long process in the United States, the fiscal and financial strengthening of the European Union should increase in the foreseeable future. The EU effectively promotes individual, economic, labor, and intellectual property rights, fights corruption, and protects the rule of law and judicial independence. In addition to its achievements regarding the private sector of the economy on trade, currency, market, and banking unions, the EU plans to increase its powers for the

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provision of public goods such as large-scale infrastructures, common borders, and defense. A stronger union would be less interventionist. As Brussels strengthens itself, the states should be less controlled and recover some legislative autonomy on the issues of their concern. In particular, they should be responsible again for their finances and comply with their laws and constitutions which prescribe balanced budgets. In comparison, now, in the twenty-first century, Washington is much more powerful than Brussels and, thanks to that, it does not need to regulate, oversee, supervise, and protect the states as much as Brussels does in Europe. The European citizens’ allegiance is increasing, and it should become more intense as the EU becomes stronger and more self-confident. India has not followed the same path, as it already existed as a unitary country before independence. However, as mentioned, the new states that form the union of states of India are mostly based on previously existing tribes, castes, and, espe­ cially, language groups. The people’s attachment to traditional groupings was so strong that a survey in the early 1950s about the British legacies “was aborted when it was discovered that a majority didn’t know that the British had even arrived,” as reported by historian William Manchester (Manchester and Reid 2013). The constitutional division of powers was established top-down. The central government retains control not only of foreign affairs, defense, and currency but of all residuary powers, including the recruitment of civil servants for the states. But increasing powers have been given to the states on health, education, agriculture, and police, as well as some concurrent powers on civil and criminal law. As a consequence, public expenditure is highly decentralized: the central government spends about 13% of gross domestic product compared to the state and local gov­ ernments’ 15%. While, as mentioned, the people’s allegiance to the states is strong, the identification with India as an encompassing nation seems to be out of the question for almost every citizen.

People’s multiple representations The citizens of large unions are represented through multiple channels to multiple institutions at the union level. Formally, the central government of the United States is organized as a separation of powers regime, while both the union of states of India and the European Union work more as parliamentary regimes. The insti­ tutional design of each union is somewhat characteristic, and they also have visible differences in the ways political parties are organized. Yet an important, common feature of all the three unions is that the citizens are represented at the union level through multiple, parallel electorates. The United States regime is based on separate federal elections for the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency—which aim to represent all the citizens from district, state, and national constituencies, respectively. Most elec­ tions are held by plurality rule with only two major parties or candidates. However, the two main parties are “umbrellas” or “big tents” covering multiple

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and varied pre-candidates, activists, and registered voters at the state level. The nationwide parties are loose federations of state and national political groups which include people with a broad range of policy preferences and strong territorial attachments. The system of primary elections, which is a substitute for a multiparty system, simplifies the political supply to only one viable candidate per party. Poli­ tical inclusiveness of a diverse population is largely achieved on the basis of people’s attachment to their state, as discussed in the previous chapter. Democratic repre­ sentation in the US, as in other unions and most federal states, involves repre­ sentation of both a diversity of policy advocates and a diversity of territorial interests. India uses the same basic electoral system for parliament as the United States: single-member districts with plurality rule. However, the parliamentary regime, in which both the executive prime minister and the ceremonial president are indir­ ectly elected by parliament, together with the huge diversity of the country, favors the formation of a more pluralistic party system. Two parties have alternated in holding the prime ministership, but the electoral, parliamentary, and cabinet coa­ litions around the most voted party have included multiple regional parties. In India too, the representations of both varied policy preferences and diverse territorial interests mix up. The mix is even more explicit in the European Union. The Council represents the territorial governments of the state members, while the Parliament is formed by multiple political parties elected with proportional rules. The European parties and the European Political Groups in Parliament, which display very high internal voting discipline, work as federations of national parties, mixing policy advocacy and territorial representation within. Like the American parties, they are also “umbrellas” or “big tents” covering a diversity of state-based groups. But while in the US the pre-electoral primaries simplify the political supply, in Europe the mess is after the election when a multiparty majority must be formed. The legislative majority in the European Parliament and the composition of the European Com­ mission are usually based on a three- or four-party coalition supported by a broad majority of popular votes and seats. Alexander Hamilton (1788) said that for a good government, “the great desi­ derata are free representation and mutual checks.” In democratic unions such as the United States, the Union of States of India and the European Union, the vertical and the horizontal divisions of powers aim at creating mutual checks both between the states and the center and between the different branches of the union government, all based on free representative elections. In this type of institutional arrangements, cooperation and broad majorities are often necessary to make collective decisions on major policy issues. Yet temptation always arises to play several versions of the “blame game.” The blame can be shot “horizontally,” as in frequent relations between the presidency and Congress in the US, among the parties in federal coalitions in India, or between the Parliament and the Council in Europe, when the parties accuse each other of illegitimacy and block decision-making. The blame can also be shot “vertically,” between central

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government and the states: bad management would always be the responsibility of “the other.” The mix of rival and cooperative relations shows that there is no “sovereignty” of any single institution. Collective decisions can be hard-won, as they need to be broadly consensual. Even more than at the national level, in large, diverse, and complex unions, democracy needs inter-party, inter-institutional, and inter-territorial cooperation.

11

GLOBAL INSTITUTIONS PREFIGURE A WORLD GOVERNMENT

A certain form of world government already exists in the current world. It is formed not by a single body or regime but by a set of specialized global institutions dealing with different issues. The specialized institutions that are meant to provide global public goods include the United Nations Organization and its agencies such as the UNESCO or the International Atomic Energy Agency, plus the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the International Labor Organization, the Interna­ tional Criminal Court, and a few technical bureaus like the Universal Postal Union or the International Telecommunication Union. There are up to three-dozen entities that can be strictly considered “inter-governmental, universal membership organizations,” according to the Union of International Associations. Each specialized agency deals with different issues. In contrast to national states, no global institution can claim “sovereignty” because each of them provides only some global collective goods, such as prevention of war and nuclear arms pro­ liferation, measure standards, transport and communication networks, economic development aid, financial stability, regulation of transcontinental trade, protection of the environment, preclusion and elimination of pandemics, labor standards and elimination of child labor, protection of cultural sites and traditions, transfer and sharing of scientific knowledge, or prosecution of terrorism and crimes against humanity. The multiplicity of specialized institutions reflects the extensive scope of their activities and the complexity of the global agenda. A large part of state tasks consists of adopting and executing decisions previously made in international and global institutions. A major institutional innovation lies precisely in their specialization. As the creation of the United States of America brought about a new formula with multiple “vertical” levels of government, so global institutions have been developing a new method of governance with multiple “horizontal” sectoral agencies.

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Such a diversity of issues could not be dealt with effectively by a single institu­ tion on a single stage. Imagine how it would be, in another context, if the same companies tried to provide the best movies competing for the Oscar, the best music for the Grammy, the best television for the Emmy, and the best theater for the Tony, and only one competition among multifaceted companies existed. In contrast, like specialized companies in pop culture, the formula of specialized sectoral agencies for global public policies on different issues promotes higher technical competence of decision-makers. It also permits clarification of the degree of conflict or consensus among the participants and helps achieve firmly settled consensual global policies on each issue. The outcomes provided by the global institutions also help states accept them as anchors of stability, away from short-term political maneuvering and myopic par­ tisan fights. Governance at state level has benefited from adopting a similar approach by giving more representation and autonomy to government depart­ ments and specialized sectoral agencies dealing with different issues. It began with the independence of the central banks and has continued with agencies of telecommunications, nuclear security, data protection, and many others. In practice, each issue policy requires varying degrees of technical expertise, argumentation, or negotiation to reach effective decisions. With separate institu­ tions, shifting electoral results in any of the sectors would be less disruptive for the enforcement of established policies and long-term programs in other sectors dealing with different issues. The global institutions, together with their informal but highly powerful coor­ dination by the Group of Seven and the Group of Twenty, are often criticized for suffering from a “democratic deficit.” As they may prefigure a global government, we need to discuss their democratic features and deficits. In our assessment, they rate differently on three dimensions of democracy: they are still weak on repre­ sentation, have medium but rising effectiveness in delivering public goods, and run high in accountability for their performance. Most of them have improved their democratic qualifications during the last few decades.

Indirect, partially democratic representation The first dimension, democratic representation, is more difficult to achieve the greater the scope of the political community. In a large population, which tends to be more heterogeneous, it is usually more difficult to aggregate diverse preferences and arrive at a decision acceptable to all than in small, more harmonious commu­ nities. Democratic representation is therefore relatively more difficult at global than at state level, as well as more difficult to achieve satisfactorily in larger unions or federations than in medium-size states and, generally, at the state level than at the local level. At present, the representation of the citizens of the world in the existing global institutions is indirect, based on the existing states, and less democratic than at other levels. With the current settings, the global institutions can obtain democratic

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legitimacy regarding representation only as long as they rely upon a previous democratic selection of representatives at the local or state level, which is now available for only a little more than half of the world population. Almost all global institutions use a double tier of indirect representation: one giving equal vote to every state, and another qualifying the size and the interests of their members. For the first, they are organized with an assembly of all member states. Yet giving equal vote to all states entails huge inequality among individuals living in different states. Some current members of the United Nations have population sizes more than one hundred thousand times higher than others, like elephants and mosquitoes, from China and India to Nauru or Vanuatu. Then, most global institutions also use a variety of rules and procedures for qualified country representation on councils or boards. They include the selection of some permanent members, turns by rotation within certain world regions, or weighted votes, depending on the population size of the countries and the degree of heterogeneity and conflict of interests among them. A notable example of this type of institutional design can be found in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. In these institutions, each country member is given a few equal basic votes plus a quota of votes that results from a mathematical formula, currently based on the country’s production, open­ ness, variability, and reserves, which should somehow represent the importance and the interests of each country’s population in the economic and financial issues that the institutions are set to serve. On the executive boards, which are formed of 24 and 25 seats respectively for the Fund and the Bank, eight countries with relatively high numbers of votes appoint or elect their own executive director (United States, Japan, Germany, Great Britain, France, China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, which encompass together about 30% of the world population and 80% of the world economy). The other 180 or so members with fewer votes need to form multi-country coalitions to share the remaining seats. The use of qualified-majority rules, such as those that require 70% or 85% of the votes to make important decisions, reduces inequalities in the distribution of voting power as it can give relatively small countries and coalitions a decisive role. In practice, all major public policy decisions are made after long deliberations, per­ manent meetings, negotiations, and agreements by near unanimity. This type of formula—weighted representation and qualified decisions—produces efficacy in decision-making and some degree of consensus. It can fit different country sizes, availability of resources, and degrees of conflict of interests on different global issues. Nevertheless, it would not be unfeasible to form an elected world parliament based on the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.” Chambers of repre­ sentation based on pre-existing territorial units were typical of late medieval and early modern kingdoms. They brought the leading prominent men from fiefs, counties, boroughs, and towns with the king for ceremonial, legislative, and deliberative purposes. Eventually, they were replaced with nationwide representa­ tive parliaments. Today’s large federal states or unions have replicated upper

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chambers of territorial representation to work together with the lower chambers based on equal individual vote. In a long-term perspective, the representation of states in the global institutions could also become a variant of territory-based upper chambers to be complemented by new ways of people’s direct representation. A democratic world parliament would entail the right to vote for at least two billion people from democratic countries, if we assume voting rights for approxi­ mately 70% of the population (excluding children and other groups), as tends to be the case in state-based democracies. A turnout of between one and one a half bil­ lion could be considered acceptable. It would not be an objective very far from present democratic experiences since hundreds of millions of people vote in the elections to the Parliament of India and the European Parliament. As it would happen globally, the campaigns are decentralized, especially because they are run in several languages, and the voting would not be held in one day but over more extensive periods. (See sources at the end of the book).

Growing effectiveness Regarding the second dimension of democracy, effectiveness in delivering public goods, the global institutions have achieved substantial improvements in the ways they work and adapt to new requirements in the last few decades. Let us briefly review the number one, the United Nations Organization. The UN was plagued for a few decades by the Cold War, but it has managed to develop broad multilateral cooperation and more effective activity in multiple fields and regions of the world in the post-Cold War era. Let us examine a few data. The vetoes by permanent members of the Security Council, especially the United States and the Soviet Union, have decreased from about six to less than one per year on average. The number of binding resolutions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which regulates “Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression,” has multiplied by more than thirty (from about one every two years to about 15 per year). The General Assembly, in spite of its limited role, has almost doubled the average number of annual resolutions approved (from 157 during the Cold War to 291 afterward), and it has substantively enlarged its agenda, especially with issues related to human rights. At the same time, the number of United Nations peacekeeping missions per year has multiplied by 12. During the Cold War years, there was one about every three years, while from 1990 on there have been about four new ones per year, with up to 16 set up at the same time. Since the adoption of the “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine by the General Assembly in 2005, peacekeeping missions to protect civilians from atrocities have been sent to the most difficult conflicts. The total number of officers and soldiers with the iconic “blue helmets” deployed all across the world in peace-making and peace-keeping missions under the cover of the United Nations has multiplied by ten (from about 13,000 to near 125,000 at any given moment).

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The coordination of global institutions has developed through the Group of Seven or G7, which had emerged in the 1970s with the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan, to which Canada and Italy were added. Rather than reforming the United Nations Security Council, the G7 chose to replace it by its own action, although it has achieved collaboration with the United Nations as well. The G7 “system” includes a threefold set of concentric circles of decision-making: the small core G7 with the largest democratic economies, the broader G20 involving some world regional balance, and the implementation of agreed initiatives through global institutions such as the World Bank, the Interna­ tional Monetary Fund, the International Labor Organization, the World Trade Organization, and others. As a “directorate of industrial democracies,” to use Henry Kissinger’s expression (1999), the G7 did not consider dictatorial China’s membership. After the dissolu­ tion of the Soviet Union and during the initial period of liberalization, the G7 was enlarged to include the Russia Federation. But the frustration of democratic evo­ lution in the country and the Russian government’s attempts at regaining control over new neighboring countries ended in its exclusion. New low-key mutual confrontation policies emerged again from both sides, although the possibility of readmitting Russia into a renovated G8 has not been off the table. The primary role of the G7 is setting the agenda of issues and defining priorities for the world, precisely the tasks for which it has been repeatedly blamed. But beyond this, it effectively promotes policy coordination and collective management of the world economy through exchanges of information and ideas, deliberation, adjustment of policy differences, concessions, and negotiations to build consensus and concrete agreements. The issue content of the Group’s agenda is boundless as it has gradually encompassed the global economy, food security, energy, nuclear safety, disarmament, terrorism, climate change, and many other major affairs. In the most recent process, the G7 system has also involved regular specialized high-level executive meetings for different issues that somewhat mirror the model of governance by “horizontal” sectors above reviewed. The seven countries’ min­ isters of finances, foreign affairs, development, employment and labor, health, interior and justice, science, trade, and so on meet separately between one and four times per year. This makes the G7 system the closest thing to a world government that has ever existed. It is not only the top of a complex structure of multiple levels of government, it also sets the model for specialized governance on separate issues, each involving diverse degrees of conflicts of interests, requiring different expertise, and working with specific rules to be able to achieve policy consensus.

Experts’ high accountability While the global institutions’ democratic representation is weak and their effec­ tiveness in delivering global public goods is limited but increasing, their democratic quality regarding accountability is very high; in some aspects, superior to many democratic states. In the following we show how the institutions’ accountability

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can be evaluated with three criteria: the recruitment standards of senior officers and employees, the enforcement of mandatory mandates to pursue previously designed and approved goals, and the transparency and control of the work carried out. In the global institutions there are no messianic leaders or professional politicians who are supposed to be valid for everything. There are not many generalist diplomats either. There are, by contrast, many economists, jurists, engineers, physicians, etc., depending on the subject matter of each institution. For the recruitment and decision-powers of non-elected experts, some global organizations have significantly refined and improved received practice and norms from member states. The United Nations is on the one hand dominated by generalist professional politicians and diplomats. On the other hand, the Charter of the United Nations states that the employment of the staff will secure “the highest standards of effi­ ciency, competence, and integrity.” More specific criteria for recruitment of per­ sonnel are lower-ranked and less explicit than for other organizations. A Joint Inspection Unit of all United Nations organizations reported in 2012 that a number of interviews conducted with members of appointment bodies, managers, and staff representatives showed “a lack of confidence in the process [of staff recruitment] by those most closely involved in its implementation.” A minority of interviewees perceived the recruitment process as “free from bias.” More explicit and enforceable requirements of expertise are instituted for some managers and staff of other global institutions. In the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, the members of the executive boards are not considered repre­ sentatives of their states but responsible for the conduct of the general operations of the Bank or the Fund. As they are not running in elections and cannot be reap­ pointed after their fixed terms, they operate with high levels of independence. The appointment of officers and staff is also “subject to the paramount importance of securing the highest standards of efficiency and of technical competence,” as stated in both organizations’ articles of agreement. A monographic study of the Fund by James R. Vreeland (2007), a rather critical political scientist, concluded that “The IMF is staffed by some of the world’s best, brightest and well-intentioned econo­ mists who forgo lucrative private sector opportunities to dedicate their lives instead to improving the conditions of people in the developing world.” Similarly, the members of the Executive Board of the World Health Organiza­ tion must be “technically qualified in the field of health.” In the International Labor Organization, “the paramount consideration in the filling of any vacancy shall be the necessity to obtain a staff of the highest standards of competence, efficiency and integrity.” The Food and Agriculture Organization conceives its mission to be “serving as a knowledge network; we use the expertise of our staff—agronomists, foresters, fisheries and livestock specialists, nutritionists, social scientists, economists, statisticians and other professionals—to collect, analyze and disseminate data that aid development.” And so on for other specialized entities. Nothing comparable can be observed in most democratic states, where many high executives and top officers are recruited on a partisan basis rather than for their professional expertise.

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The global high officers and staff are submitted to explicit imperative mandates on missions and goals by both their foundational charters and broad consensual decisions. Global officers also have limited discretion to choose the appropriate means to pursue the mandated aims. Under conditions of liberty and responsibility, expertise and learning can produce consensus policy, as well as critical revision and improvement of policy-making in the mid- and long-term. That is why they can account for the results of their work. In recent years, two manager directors of the International Monetary Fund, Rodrigo Rato and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and a president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, were forced to resign on charges of inefficiency or dishonesty. Many senior officials of state and local governments could learn from these examples of accountability. Finally, transparency and evaluation of performance have been openly addressed in most global institutions over the last few decades. In the United Nations, for example, several innovative bodies and procedures have been introduced to enhance access to information, the evaluation of programs, and the appraisal of officers by their performance and fulfillment of standards of conduct. They include the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the Independent Audit Advisory Com­ mittee, the Ethics Office, the Internal Justice System, and several norms and reg­ ulations. More straightforwardly, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon initiated the biennial submission of a comprehensive personal report of most senior officials on accountability and public disclosure of their financial assets. Likewise, the World Bank has made all documents available to the public via its external website, including minutes of meetings, key decisions on missions, peri­ odical reports, and performance reviews. An independent inspection panel was set up to respond to complaints from people and communities who may have been adversely affected by World Bank-funded projects. Similarly, the International Monetary Fund adopted a code of good practices and transparency, a new code of conduct and an ethics office that undertakes investigations on misconduct. It also created an independent evaluation office, which the managing director at the time, Christine Lagarde, considered “critical to both credibility and effectiveness” while noting—probably thinking of many state-based bureaucracies—that “not many organizations would tolerate such an entity.” The basic mechanisms of accountability at the global level operate ex-post—that is, global rulers can be examined, evaluated, and sanctioned only after they have made decisions, on the basis of the outcomes and consequences of their choices and beha­ vior. Ex-post accountability cannot prevent a harmful action or change an actual blunder or its consequences. But it can exert effects on future actions, as the antici­ pation of sanctions may induce critical revisions of past performances, favor better decisions, and reduce the probability of repeating the same mistakes. In spite of not being submitted to periodic elections, the top officers of most global institutions can anticipate judgment of their decisions and behavior by external pressures and internal supervision. These mechanisms of accountability can induce them to choose those policies and conduct that, in their estimate, will be positively evaluated.

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In some respects, many global rulers are also more accountable than most rulers of democratic states as the latter are not subject to imperative mandates, have more room for discretionary behavior, and are not formally evaluated for performance. Global rulers render account by being subject to means of scrutiny and control that are different from the legal immunity and limited electoral judgment to which representatives at the state level are usually submitted. The transparency and accountability of global institutions show that some tenets of democratic governance can be respected by non-electoral means.

Towards a global democratic government The basic institutional formulas adopted by the global institutions are certainly different from both the typical people’s assembly in small cities and the usual political party competitive elections in states. They can be summarized as follows: •

•

•

The representatives in the general assembly are selected by the parliaments or governments of the member states, with the notorious drawback that nowadays only about half are democratic. The member states are indirectly represented in boards or councils by relatively efficient rules such as turns or weighted votes. Recruitment of high officers and staff is not based on partisanship but on expertise and independence. They pursue explicit imperative mandates on policy. Consensual policy-making is achieved through deliberation, negotiation, and near-unanimous agreements. Transparency of information is a hallmark. Accountability includes internal and external evaluation of performance and conduct.

These basic rules of global institutions reflect a notion of governance based on social consent, enforceable collective decision-making, and accountability based on results. Improving representativeness is their major democratic challenge.

12

THERE WILL BE MORE DEMOCRACIES, BUT IT MAY TAKE A WHILE

Global democracy cannot prosper without support from robust democratic national and local institutions across the world. However, the diffusion of democracy has stalled since the beginning of the century. While developed democracies were hurt by the consequences of the Great Recession, many dictatorships remained almost impervious. Some renewal movements, like the Arab Spring, proto-reforms in several post-Soviet republics, or attempts at calling open elections in sub-Saharan countries, were crushed or pushed back toward authoritarian modes. Yet the vul­ nerability of nondemocratic regimes is still to be tested. While democratic pressures remain alive in many countries, the likelihood of upcoming democratization will largely depend on authoritarian failures and favorable international environments. A relatively optimistic prospect for regime change can be developed if we accept a trichotomous classification of political regime types that includes an intermediate category between democracy and autocracy, which is called “anocracy,” as well as “partly free,” “mixed,” or “hybrid” regimes in the academic literature. The regimes of this type hold regular elections but with either constrained suffrage, restrictions on civil rights, limited political competition, or scant government accountability. A mixed regime may not be a brief transitional situation but a dis­ tinct type of regime that may last for a few decades. Eventually, most of them tend to evolve towards democratic forms of government. Mixed regimes were abundant during the last 200 years, before full democracy was established. In the United Kingdom, it took more than 150 years for the par­ liament to democratize and ultimately achieve its central role in the political system. A semi-democratic regime with significant suffrage restrictions also existed in the United States for a few decades after the approval of the Constitution, where the word “democracy” does not appear. In Germany and Spain, universal male suffrage was introduced by the late nineteenth century, but the emperor or the king appointed the cabinet. Comparable regimes existed later in some Latin American

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republics, such as Chile, Colombia, or Mexico by mid-twentieth century. Nearly three-fourths of the countries of the world have experienced durable intermediate regimes, which have lasted on average for about two generations. The large majority of mixed regimes resulted from the liberalization of auto­ cracies or colonial domination, thus implying a relative increase in the degree of freedom in the world. Moreover, as illustrated by the cases mentioned, most countries with this type of intermediate regime ultimately evolved into democ­ racies. Actually, attempts at democratization in a long-term perspective were about equally successful when they were tried directly from autocracies and when they were established from intermediate regimes. Nearly half of the current democracies in the world resulted neither from wars and revolutions nor from short, direct transitions from autocratic regimes but from relative long processes of evolution, opening, and reform from some form of intermediate regime. A broad study of 158 regimes for the most recent period since the 1970s by political scientist Jason Brownlee (2009) shows that, in the current international environment, “hybrid regimes have better prospects for democratization than fully closed regimes.” There are now about fifty regimes of this type in the world, including, with some variants, in countries such as Albania, Serbia, Ukraine in Europe, Morocco, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria in Africa, Armenia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Georgia, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey in Asia, Bolivia, Guatemala, Paraguay in Latin America, or even Russia according to some evaluations. The currently existing intermediate regimes have been differentiated from hard autocracies for about twenty years on average, which is less than the average in the past. This might suggest that they could still last for a while, but also that they could follow further processes of opening to democracy in the not too distant future (perhaps in one more generation) as did so many of their predecessors. We bet on the prospect that future new democracies will be established by dif­ ferent means. Wars and revolutions able to establish a democratic regime have disappeared from the horizon. The most traveled roads in the foreseeable future may include short and negotiated “transitions” of the type that became popular thirty or forty years ago, together with longer processes of liberalization, partial reforms, and gradual openings from authoritarian or mixed regimes. Let us expand a little on these basic ideas.

Politics is not in black and white Most of the available typologies and classifications of political regimes are either dichotomous or trichotomous. The former considers only dictatorship and democracy as if the political world could be depicted in black and white. The most popular ones acknowledge several shades of gray. In particular, the annual reports diffused by Freedom House since 1972 provide a seven-point measure of political and civil rights, from which three types are distinguished: “free”, “partly free,” and “not free” countries. The Polity project provides scales of democracy and of autocracy from +10 to -10, which are the basis for a threefold classification of

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regimes as “democracies,” “anocracies,” and “autocracies” for a more extended period since 1800. The relevance of changes from dictatorships that stopped short of full democracy was already observed by political scientist Samuel Huntington (1991) with his dis­ tinction between liberalization and democratization. He conceived the former as the “partial opening” of an authoritarian system short of choosing government leaders through freely competitive elections. Subsequently, a halfway category of political regime, which was also called “semi-democracy,” was envisaged as the result of numerous processes of “liberalization” or “reform” in the late twentieth century. More than a few political scientists followed this path. Terry Karl (1995) introduced the notion of “hybrid” regime, which was defined as a combination of democratic and authoritarian elements. One of us, Colomer (1991, 2000), made a distinction between ‘dictablandas’ (soft dictatorships), referring to situations with an appreciable degree of liberty but unfair, irrelevant or non-existing elections, and ‘democraduras’ (hard democracies), corresponding to regimes that hold regular multiparty elections but in which the rule of law is not secure and civil rights are commonly violated. Larry Diamond (2002) coined the expression “electoral authoritarianism,” a cate­ gory that includes both regimes with non-competitive elections due to a limited franchise, restricted entrance, or skewed incumbent advantage and those with competitive and open elections but no government electoral accountability because the effective power of elected officials is heavily limited. Robert Bates and co­ authors (2006) emphasized that “leaving autocracy is not the same as entering democracy” and that “partial democracies emerge as among the most important and least understood regime types.” Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2010) char­ acterized such regimes as those “that are sufficiently competitive to guarantee real uncertainty (and even turnover) but which fall short of democracy.” Looking at the beast from the other side, other authors used the expression “defective democracy” for regimes holding elections with insufficient degrees of franchise and participation rights, political freedom, or government accountability. Alternative proposals to deal with similar phenomena include labels such as “illib­ eral democracy,” “semi-authoritarianism,” and “semi-dictatorship.” Matthijs Bogaards (2009) concluded that “hybrid regimes are neither a subtype of auto­ cracies nor of democracies, but a regime type of their own,” which “are not to be confused with regimes in transition” or with transitional phases. A reasonable criterion to distinguish durable mixed political regimes from temporary situations during processes of change may be to consider only those formulas having lasted for more than five years. A non-transitional regime lasting for more than five years usually includes at least two elections, which may imply a minimum appreciable degree of institutional stability. With this criterion, political

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scientists David Banerjea and Fernando B. Mello have found 185 cases of nontransitional mixed political regimes in 124 countries during the period since 1800 from the worldwide data set provided by the Polity project. Near three-fourths of the currently existing mixed regimes were established from dictatorships rather than from democracies (37 and 13, respectively). We can update and confirm the observation by political scientist Andreas Schedler (2013) that what he and other authors call electoral authoritarianism “has not spread primarily at the expense of democracy, but of non-electoral autocracies.”

Gradual openings from authoritarian rule The threefold classification of political regime types permits us to identify a way towards democratization that is associated neither with wars and revolutions nor with short negotiated transitions directly from dictatorships. Over a long process, a dictatorship can partially open up to a mixed regime, which in turn can eventually complete its opening towards democracy. About 40 of the 93 currently existing democracies were established during the last few decades through this type of smooth evolution from intermediate regimes, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, where the previous mixed political structures had lasted on average for about 34 years. There are reasons to believe that, in the foreseeable future of the current inter­ dependent world, this kind of process is more likely to engage, and can be more successful, than other traditional ways of democratization. In mid-income coun­ tries, there is nowadays a rather broad popular rejection of revolutions, which have been rightly identified with civil wars (just won by one of the sides, which writes the further successful history). Also, open economies in countries in development are particularly vulnerable to political instability such as the one produced by quick, usually improvised political transformations. If unanticipated major political changes moved the country away from international exchanges and networks that are sources of economic prosperity and made the future extremely uncertain, local business might not invest, young professionals would look elsewhere, foreign companies would not come or they would move away. In contrast, a more gradual, slow succession of partial legal and institutional reforms with international support may diminish insecurity, reduce fear, and favor education, foreign trade, and capital investments. Somehow, the problem was already identified many years ago. The leader of the Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s, Adolfo Suárez, explicitly avowed that economic disruption would be the price for fast political reform. In an address as prime minister to the parliament in 1978, he recounted: The government is frequently asked to construct the building of the new State over the building of the old State, and we are asked to change the water pipes while providing water every day; we are asked to change the ducts of light, the power line, while providing light every day; we are asked to change the

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roof, the walls and the windows of the building, while preventing the wind, the snow or the cold from damaging the inhabitants of the building; we are all asked that not even the dust raised by the works of that building stains us, and we are also asked, to a large extent, that the concerns that that construction causes do not produce tensions. Suárez’ message implied that there was an unavoidable choice between two types of demands: changing the rules and trying to maintain the regular delivery of public services. Later on, he expressly acknowledged that while his agenda was strongly focused on political reforms, he took less care in facing the economic “stagflation” of the 1970s triggered by the so-called international “oil crisis.” As a consequence, Spain, in parallel to successful democratization, was strongly hit by recession and inflation, which, among other results, left a unique legacy of twodigit percentages of unemployment that would never disappear—they became “structural,” in the jargon of economists. Thirty or so years later, the Great Recession in an environment of much higher globalization and interdependence proved everywhere that lack of effi­ cient economic management can provoke enormous damage. Nowadays, in countries in process of development, many people may not be willing to risk economic opportunities offered by external openness, foreign trade, and invest­ ment for the sake of drastic political changes. Many may prioritize having water and light every day and protection from the wind and snow, to follow Suárez’ metaphor, while still aspiring to improve their fate, including being able to change the water pipes, the ducts of light, the roofs, the walls, and the windows by affordable means. In a seminal article which was published just before the beginning of the “third wave” of democratic transitions in the 1970s, political scientist Dankwart Rustow (1970) had already modeled democratization as “a complex process stretching over many decades.” Along the process—he specified—“both politicians and citizens learn from the successful resolution of some issues to place their faith in the new rules and to apply them to new issues.” The whole thing follows a sequence “through struggle, compromise, and habituation, to democracy.” Rustow’s rumi­ nations fit the historic experience of gradual change in the United Kingdom and the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, his model did not suit the most common, faster ways to democratization during the following 25 or so years after his article was published. More than thirty years later, when the wave of fast, relatively peaceful, nego­ tiated transitions had receded, Thomas Carothers (2002) vindicated Rustow’s foresight and observed: Some of the most encouraging cases of democratization in recent years—such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Mexico—did not go through the paradigmatic process of democratic breakthrough followed rapidly by national elections and a new democratic institutional framework. Their political evolutions were

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defined by an almost opposite phenomenon—extremely gradual, incremental processes of liberalization with an organized political opposition (not softliners in the regime) pushing for change across successive elections and finally winning. A successful gradual process lasting for a few decades may involve multiple steps. Initial changes can be triggered by a regime’s defeat or an economic crisis, which can reduce the rulers’ resources for patronage and the acquiescence of the popula­ tion. A new international scene may demand reforms to access the benefits of for­ eign trade and investments under the conditions imposed by external deals and pressures. A further step may be, as mentioned, a political regime holding regular elections with significant restrictions on participation. In the hardest cases, the incumbent rulers may at the same time tightly control the bureaucracy, the judi­ ciary, the media, and the local governments. In general, the electoral competition may be unfair and the opposition rather weak, but both may exist to some extent. Rather than a full turnover, relatively modest electoral reforms may follow. Alter­ native parties can be admitted to compete, perhaps first in local elections and later on nationwide. Fraud may be lessened; suffrage rights and vote recounts can become more transparent. Throughout the process, top-down concessions by the government can be replaced by consultation and negotiations with the opposition. A slow path can allow more time for democratic actors to organize. As the opposition gains posi­ tions at local and national levels, its initially radical proclamations may give way to more moderate, potentially winning proposals. At some moment, the opposition can win an election and the rulers accept the result. In fact, at inauguration, most democracies in the world have still been operating under a constitution inherited from their nondemocratic predecessors, as extensively documented by political scientists Michael Albertus and Victor Menaldo (2018). In contrast with triumphal wars and revolutions or even successful negotiations changing the political landscape almost overnight, this kind of gradual transforma­ tion does not usually create a glorious day which can become a national holiday or an event to commemorate every year. The path is grayer and less epical and heroic than in classical, sometimes mythical, democratic revolutions.

Democratization by steps The three just mentioned, recent examples of gradual regime change, South Korea, Taiwan, and Mexico, illustrate our main points. South Korea’s so-called “economic miracle” during the last decades of the twentieth century has been attributed to policies aimed at opening the country to foreign markets and incentivizing investment in innovation. Meanwhile, the country was under military rule after coups in 1961 and 1980. In response to a series of political protests and tensions, an open presidential election by which a civilian government replaced military rule was called in 1987. But it took ten more

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years for the democratic opposition candidate to win an election, and ten more for a political heir of the former authoritarian rulers to come back into power by democratic means. The Chinese nationalists had ruled the island of Taiwan since the 1950s. The country, like South Korea, became one of the few newly industrialized Asian countries in the 1970s, recognized for their successful economic development. In the 1980s, a mix of repression and political concessions included the appointment of an electoral authority and the legalization of new political parties. Later on, the ruling Nationalist party split, the opposition began to win local elections, a series of constitutional reforms were unilaterally imposed by the government without real bargaining and compromise, and a direct presidential election was first held in 1996. The Asian financial crisis precipitated the process that led to the victory of an opposition presidential candidate with a minority of votes in 2000. The following elections, however, occasioned incidents and reversals when the losers questioned the legitimacy of the result. “There were many zigs and zags in the road and numerous crisis points when things could have easily gone wrong … . There was nothing foreordained about Taiwan’s transition to democracy,” as analyzed by Linda Chao and Ramon Myers (1998). Mexico had remained insular for many decades. The long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had been skillfully holding regular elections with “patriotic fraud.” But after a period of violent repression, the tolerated opposition boycotted the elections in 1976. A series of reforms followed, beginning with the concession to the opposition of a minority of seats in Congress to be filled by proportional representation. A presidential candidacy formed around a recent split from the PRI claimed to have won the popular vote in 1988, which put the regime at the edge of collapse. The country was also shaken by successive defaults of the public finances and currency devaluations. As in so many other cases, international factors triggered more dynamic developments, especially after Mexico’s opening to foreign trade and investments with the other countries of North America in 1994. Resistance to changes from entrenched authoritarians within the ruling PRI led to the assassination of both the party’s secretary-general and the party’s reformist candidate for president during an electoral campaign. Yet this generated even more dissidents and turncoats and further up-down political reforms. More explicit negotiations between the PRI and the opposition led to the creation of an “impartial, honest and apt” council of the electoral authority in 1996, which pro­ duced systematic registration of voters, control of campaigns and monitoring of vote counting. Four years later, in 2000, the opposition won the presidential election. Compared with some transitions in Southern Europe and South America in the 1970s and 1980s, in Mexico—as in the other cases mentioned—there was “no collapse, no foundational elections, no big pacts, no constitutional assembly, and no alternation in power [until 2000],” as recapitulated by Andreas Schedler (2000).

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“The beauty of Mexico’s transition to democracy was the way it evolved gradually and peacefully over the course of a decade,” in the view of Robert Pastor (2000). It must be noted, nevertheless, that in contrast to revolutions or sudden collapses, this type of gradual change may leave more significant authoritarian legacies in the new political arrangement. Even the oldest experiences of this type, in the United Kingdom and the United States, left medieval relics such as the Crown, the unelected House of Lords, or the Presidential Electoral College standing until the present time. In more recent experiences, even when authoritarian rule has been eliminated, accounts and reprisals against former authoritarians have been ignored. The military may not have been fully controlled by the civil government, the independence of the judiciary has not been definite, some hyper-presidentialism may still exist, ethnic or territorial conflicts can subsist unresolved. Only a durable experience of practicing freedom and elections, the introduction of further institutional revisions, together with a sustained opening of the economy outwards and appreciable gov­ ernment performance in providing public goods and economic growth, can—also gradually—attract social consent, diffuse liberal values, and complete more fulfilling democratization. None of this is, of course, predetermined or guaranteed. A process of successive reforms may bring about reversals of changes. At some point the rulers may feel less threatened by uncertainty and block the sequence. After a decisive election, the incumbent losers may not accept the results. Arriving at democracy is not by any means the only possible outcome of such experiences. In some cases, a mixed regime may look like an unconcluded or never-ending transition. At one of those moments during the long process of ups and downs in Mexico, political scientist Soledad Loaeza (1996) reflected: The Mexican experience belies the idea that liberalizations have only two possible outcomes: the hardening of authoritarianism or democratization. Contrary to the widespread idea that liberalizations tend to be temporary for­ mulas, Mexico has an experience of openings during more than twenty years whose success has meant the cancellation or at least the postponement sine die of democratization. Mexico eventually democratized. But this kind of stalling can happen anywhere. The other way around, it also sometimes occurs that a full democracy deterio­ rates to the point that it becomes a partly free political regime, which in turn might even become a dictatorship. Some democratic regimes that appeared “con­ solidated” have proven to be reversible, or at least vulnerable to “deconsolidation.” This type of backward evolution has been identified in countries with a recent and frail liberalization, such as Turkey, and as a danger for some recent democracies such as those in Poland, Hungary, or the Philippines. Yet, as we have seen, a long­ term historical perspective shows that gradual evolutions of mixed regimes towards increasing opening, liberalization, and democratization have been much more frequent than authoritarian reversals.

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In this light, the disappointment with recent expectations of democratization after failed openings in certain regions, such as in Russia, the Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, the Arab Spring, or some of the largest countries of subSaharan Africa, might be moderated. The current “modest harvest” collected in these and other cases should not necessarily produce only pessimism regarding the prospects for democracy in those lands. We should bear in mind that most coun­ tries of the world have experienced durable mixed political regimes and that many of these countries have eventually evolved into a democracy. The intermediate regimes that existed prior to their democratization lasted an average of about two generations. So far, the current ones have lasted less long. They could still persist for some time before ending up liberalizing and democratizing as happened in the past.

Islam should not be associated with dictatorship There seems to be an empirical correlation between Islam and dictatorship in the current world. The majority of countries with a majority of Muslims, which are mainly located in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the former Soviet Union, have dictatorial regimes. More than half of all nondemocratic countries in the world have a Muslim majority. Some of them—such as Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, or Turkmenistan—have been among the most violent dictatorships. However, overwhelming shares of people surveyed in Muslim-majority coun­ tries agree that “despite drawbacks, democracy is the best system of government,” and that “having a democratic system would be good for our country” (according to Democracy Barometers in the Arab World). In fact, the most brutal political regimes in the Muslim world are not religious governments but military or personalistic dictatorships, including several singlecrop oil producers in the Arabian Peninsula, occasionally using interpretations of the Muslim doctrine in some of their policies. In the Middle East and North Africa, a high obstacle for a viable democracy derives more directly from the colonial inheritance of arbitrary interstate borders which cross well-rooted tribal, language, or factional affiliations. In places such as Lebanon and some sub-Saharan countries, rival Muslim branches cooperate with different Christian churches without implying a neat breach between the two faiths. But the most ethnically heterogeneous countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, are violence-ridden. The patchwork of the colonial map has made state-building a particularly challenging endeavor. Peace-making and democratization in the Arab world and the Middle East would likely be more successful if they ran in parallel to the establishment of largesize areas of free trade and military and security cooperation with much decen­ tralization into local powers and varied ethnic and religious groups. Yet so far, the Arab League, which was created in the mid-1950s, or the much more recent Arab Maghreb Union have been revelations of intention and hope more than effective institutional networks.

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Ethnic bordering plights and economic problems can largely explain sustained conflict and the resilience of dictatorial regimes in the region. The apparent incongruity between democratic politics and Islam may not be any more solid than the traditional wisdom that denied democratic capacity to troubled countries with a Catholic majority. A succession of democratic failures in Latin European and Latin American countries during most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave some ground to the suspicion that a redeeming and proselytizing religion such as Catholicism, with a long tradition of intolerance behind, could not acknowledge legitimacy to governments not committed to its morals and doctrines. In fact, the popes prohibited the participation of Catholics in elections and political parties until as late as 1931. There were a few early experiences of parties and movements of Catholic inspiration that participated in liberal politics in France and Italy, but Christian democratic parties, including both Catholic and Protestant inspirations, became widespread only after the Second World War. From that moment on, however, not only did those parties become important components of democracy in several countries, but the Catholic Church itself helped processes of democratization in places such as Spain, Central America, and Poland. In some Arab countries in process of liberalization, some Muslim candidacies that were suspected of insufficient liberal democratic allegiances won elections. They were responded to with a military coup d’état and the subsequent repression and violence, most prominently in Algeria and Egypt. But during the last few decades, other Muslim democratic parties, somewhat comparable to the primitive Christian democrats, have participated in competitive elections and the subsequent governments in certain countries, including Albania, Bangladesh, Comoros, Indo­ nesia, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mali, Morocco, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Turkey. If together with these we count the Muslim minorities living in India and other countries, about one-third of the 1.5 billion Muslims of the world may have lived under more or less democratically elected governments. If anything, this fact sug­ gests that there may not be an intrinsic incompatibility between individual Muslim faith and collective democratic rule. Some readings of the Qur’an remark that the Shari’a law includes freedom of religion, speech, property, and privacy and implies consultation among Muslims on secular affairs. Other interpretations favoring Jihad (interpreted as Holy War) differ, of course. Islam is not a monolithic ideology and movement. Actually, it could take advantage of not having a single imam with supreme doctrinal and organiza­ tional power, but a decentralized structure which should be more amenable to accept different interpretations of sacred texts and be adapted to different local conditions. A viable democracy does not require an ideological commitment by the citizens and should thus be compatible with any religion or creed. It requires religion, like any other ideology, to be only one source of opinion among others in the public debate and political contest. Nobody should be banned from participation in public affairs for their faith or their religious affiliation or practices, or for their lack of it. The “Jewish state” of Israel is a democracy as long as it permits Muslims, Christians,

More democracies, but it may take a while 133

atheists, and whoever else to participate with equal rights in the country’s public affairs. The example of the third-largest democracy in the current world, Indonesia, which we discussed in the first part of the book, demonstrates that these criteria can also be met when the vast majority of the citizens and politicians are practicing Muslims.

When China will become democratic If China democratized, the share of the world population living in democracy would approach near three-fourths, decisively tipping the balance. Yet in the eyes of some observers, China appears the most outstanding case of successful dictatorship. Many Chinese trust that the current government “is doing what is right for their country” and either support it or passively acquiesce to accept its results. According to our discussion at the beginning of this book, people’s support of the Chinese government can be attributed to its effectiveness in delivering high rates of economic growth for several decades. It can be suspected that, like late Soviet statistics on economic results, which turned out to have been inflated by 30% or 40%, China’s official data on growth and investment rates may be over­ stated. But the success of the liberalizing economic course launched by Deng Xiao Ping since 1978, and especially its acceleration since the 1990s, cannot be questioned. Economic development does not necessarily imply that democracy is close, as we have also discussed, rather the opposite. In the typical exchange under an authoritarian regime, the subjects can renounce to choose or control its rulers in return for some favorable economic performance. In China, a crucial element of the rulers’ hold on power is the warning lesson implied by the Tiananmen Square slaughter of democratic protesters in 1989. For many people, the costs of a new mass revolt would jeopardize too many palpable material gains. Deng had said that there would be national elections only after fifty years of development, so by about 2037. The acceleration of the Chinese economic experiment was strongly motivated by fear of a collapse like the Soviet Union. The Soviet experience was especially dreaded by the Chinese rulers because it involved not only the disintegration of the country but also the breakdown of the communist party and the privatization of state assets. The Chinese alternative has been officially labeled with oxymorons such as “socialist market economy” and “people’s democratic dictatorship.” The active role of the communist party in reforming the economy has transformed the party-state into a state-party, as put by some close observers. Gradually, the party has strengthened its grip not only over the state political institutions but also over business decisions and personnel in state-owned firms. It has also favored registra­ tion and access to credit by private business but increased the number of party bodies inside them. More recently, the party has been pushing for introducing its

134 The global future: Hope

agents onto the managing boards of foreign firms. And it has endeavoured to seize foreign technology through wide intelligence networks, which has triggered unfriendly reactions from the US and EU. To preserve its credibility, the communist party would need to maintain the perception that China’s long-term economic growth trend is inevitable and that the government has the capacity to respond to internal crises and external shocks. But by concentrating power in the party, the system has become more corrupt and more vulnerable to unanticipated backlashes. The fate of authoritarian China will arrive when the economic process in the country derails or simply when company managers and investors realize that the country’s present is overrated and its future walks on precarious ground. If the economy cracks, the vulnerability of the Chinese regime may manifest as national disunity. China is a very old empire whose huge size and relatively high diversity is comparable, also in this sense, to the former Soviet Union. China has indeed expanded and contracted across the territory with no a priori fixed boundaries. During the twentieth century, the borders of the country were redrawn a few times, in particular after the formation of a new republic of Mon­ golia in 1911, the separation of Taiwan after 1949, the annexation of Tibet in 1951, and the handover of Hong Kong and Macau in 1997 and 1999. The appearance of quite a high degree of unity and ethnic homogeneity in China may be deceptive since relevant religious, race, and language differences exist among its inhabitants. Although about half of the population officially reports no organized religious affiliation, apparently hundreds of millions practice folk religious traditions and have informal ties to local temples and house churches. While Mandarin-speaking ethnic Han make up the majority of the population, its distribution is highly uneven; they are a minority in large parts of western China. The common written language acts as the standard used by an actual minority of the population over a continuum of spoken languages and dialects—apparently with differences as notable as those between, say, different Latin-derived languages in Europe, which may make difficult for people from different places to understand each other. The compactness of the existing regime is already challenged from several countries’ peripheries. The recent liberalization and democratization of Taiwan appears to many Chinese as an example of processes that could also be developed in mainland China. It can make the official vindication and threats of annexing the island backfire. The occupation of mostly Buddhist Tibet made the region a regular scene of repression and unrest. In the west, the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region, whose population is mostly Muslim, has become a focus of turbulence, leading to harsh control of the population from Beijing and its confinement in internment camps and closed villages, with forced labor. For the former British colony of Hong Kong, which is a “special administrative region,” the communists’ promise to facilitate the development of the capitalist economy for fifty years, that is, until 2047, should not be a problem, since this is what they are trying to do in mainland China too. But the promise of “one country, two systems” included the

More democracies, but it may take a while 135

“ultimate aim” to introduce universal suffrage elections, whose noncompliance has provoked recurrent mass protests. As in so many other places, nationalist tensions and conflicts can be exacerbated if there is a slowdown or an economic recession. As was rightly predicted—against the dominant opinion of the time—by historian Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (1978) for the also huge and very diverse Soviet empire, the Chinese empire can also explode.

CONCLUSION Should we still call it “democracy”?

If democracy is “government of the people, by the people, and for the people,” as postulated by Abraham Lincoln, there is no democracy in the current world, and there has barely ever been such a thing. This was anticipated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau when he openly asserted: “There never was and never will be a real democracy in the strict sense of the word. It’s against the natural order for the many to govern and the few to be governed.” We support a less “strict sense” of the word democracy, which we conceive as one form with multiple formulas. The democratic form of government displays three dimensions that we have analyzed across this book: participation, governance, and accountability, which roughly correlates with government by, of, and for the people. Participation by the people may imply either direct decision-making or the election of representatives to make decisions on their behalf. Governance of the people refers to effectiveness in solving social conflicts and providing public goods, which may also require action by independent public bodies run by professional experts. And accountability for the people entails control of the rulers and high officials for their performance and results, including procedures for their replacement by peaceful means. Different democratic formulas at the local, national, or global level can give priority to either citizens’ participation, effective governance, or rulers’ account­ ability. Any institutional compound can satisfy some democratic tenets and, at the same time, suffer from some democratic deficit. More specifically, direct democracy is strong on participation: it spreads relevant information on public affairs and promotes people’s involvement. But it is unsui­ table for or even counter-effective when dealing with complex issues in large communities.

Conclusion 137

In turn, representative democracy characteristically holds frequent elections giving the citizens some choice. But in many countries it suffers from declining effectiveness in fulfilling electoral promises and from limited accountability of rulers for their management. Finally, international and global institutions are increasingly effective in delivering public goods according to explicit policy and action mandates for which they are accountable. But they are marred by having only partial and indirect representation by the citizens of the world. In practice, a variety of alternative democratic formulas are used in disparate settings, such as meetings and assemblies of housing condominiums, neighborhood associations, town halls, school and university boards and delegates, professional organizations, corporation boards, workers’ unions, juries, courts, or literary or academic award committees. These groups or organizations use different rules and procedures, depending on the complexity of the issues under consideration and the potential conflict of interests or values among the participants. But it can be estimated that all of them make decisions by democratic means. The same can apply to governments of towns, cities, counties, regions, states, nations, federations, continental unions, or the global world. Based on the statebased experience, democracy has been associated with a model of representation grounded in elections, while policy-making is transferred to elected representatives, expert bodies, and the bureaucracy. In many discussions about the viability of democracy at a global scale it has been implicitly taken for granted that it would also require political party electoral competition. But democracy is not necessarily linked to the institutional formulas adopted by sovereign states. Democracy as a form of government is based on the ethical principle of governance by social consent, which can be used as an evaluative reference for different institutions, rules, and procedures. In early modern times, the response to the challenge to scale democracy up from the city level to the state level was the design and adoption of new institutional formulas replacing people’s local assemblies with elections of nationwide representatives. In current times, a similar challenge to scale democracy up to the global level must be addressed via a reallocation of powers and new institutional rules for the multiple levels of government.

From direct democracy to representative government We are far away from the settings of classical city-based democracy, which lay behind the notions held by Rousseau, Lincoln, and many other theorists and practitioners until early modern times. In some famous ancient and medieval cities, such as Athens, Florence, or Geneva, people first voted on policy and, second, selected delegates by lots to implement their decisions. The delegates were not representatives of the people but only mandataries to execute the assembly’s imperative instructions. They rendered counts of their job and could be sanctioned for their performance.

138 Conclusion

This formula of government was considered to be viable only in small and homogeneous communities and not in larger-scale units such as most early modern states. Aristotle had defined democracy as “the rule by the many,” but the point is that those “many” cannot be too many. In larger areas with complex societies and difficult problems, direct and participatory democracy tends to degenerate into demagoguery, as we can see in some referendums and a variety of populisms in present time. The viable formula turned out to require “the rule by the few,” typically elected representatives and specialized officers. The modern formula of representative government implied the replacement of democracy as government by the masses with the promise of government by the best, that is, the classical Aristotelian “aristocracy.” In contrast to direct democracy, in state-based representative governments the people, first, elect representatives without any imperative mandate on public policy, and second, the elected representatives make decisions on behalf of the people. This crucial difference was bluntly stated by a member of the British House of Commons, Edmund Burke, in the late eighteenth century. He dismissively rejected that voters could give their representatives “authoritative instructions, mandates issued, which a member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and to argue for.” His message would become the standard that is enshrined in all constitutions of democratic states, which discard voters’ imperative mandates for elected representatives. An early warning about the autonomy of elected politicians was issued by James Mill, one of the intellectual fathers of modern liberal democracy whom we cited at the beginning of this book. “If power is granted to a body of men, called repre­ sentatives,” he said, “they, like any other men, will use their power, not for the advantage of the community, but for their own advantage, if they can.” Indeed, the transition from direct democracy with selection of mandated dele­ gates to indirect democracy with election of representatives that would act merely on behalf of the voters was widely experienced as a democratic loss. By the early nineteenth century, the two models were associated with “the liberty of the ancients” and “the liberty of the moderns,” respectively. The expression was coined by Benjamin Constant, a member of the French Chamber of Deputies and an influential constitution-maker across Europe. He noted that the ancients were nearly always sovereign in public affairs but slaves in all their private relations, while the moderns, deprived of direct decision power in public affairs, aimed to be secure in their enjoyment of private life (which in his liberal romantic view con­ sisted basically of commerce and love). For Constant, the trade-off might have been beneficial for both the ancients and the moderns, as he estimated that “when the ancients sacrificed individual independence in order to keep their political rights, they were sacrificing less to obtain more; whereas for us [the moderns] it would be giving more to obtain less.” With this approximation, Constant astutely pointed out a fundamental condition for the social consent of any political-institutional regime: provided benefits must compensate for losses. All is a question of perception, of course, as benefits and

Conclusion 139

losses imply subjective emotions. His warning is also valid for current states and any possible formula for global democracy. If losses are located in the realm of political participation, as is the case with institutional arrangements covering increasingly larger areas and population, compensation must be obtained in the realm of economic opportunities and private liberty. Benjamin Constant vehemently warned, nevertheless, against a Faustian bargain by which the entire soul of public affairs would be lost. In his words: The danger for modern liberty is that we, absorbed in the enjoyment of our private independence and the pursuit of our particular interests, might surren­ der to the people who resort too easily our right to share in political power. The holders of authority encourage us to do just that. They are so ready to spare us every sort of trouble except the trouble of obeying and paying! Thus, under representative democracy, the people enjoying their liberty “should also exercise an active and permanent surveillance over their representatives, and reserve for themselves the right to discard them if they betray their trust, and to revoke any powers they have abused.”

Party democracy’s unfulfilled promises Close accountability of elected representatives has proven to be the most difficult tenet to implement. In practice, voters face not only the problem of choosing the right representatives by estimating whether they will do the job appropriately. The problem is also that once elected, the representatives have significant discretion in their decision-making, monitoring their actions is costly, and there are few institutional checks to limit their ability to act unilaterally as they are subject only to the possibility of being denied reelection for a further mandate. In most democratic regimes, new imperative mandates for legislators and executives actually come from the political parties, which can emit their unilateral directives without much popular deliberation. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, German sociologist Robert Michels acidly noted that it was party organization that “gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators … . We find everywhere that the power of the elected leaders over the electing masses is almost unlimited.” More recent developments can confirm and expand such a diagnosis. Nowadays many political parties largely rely upon big donors or state subsidies, as well as marketing and electioneering professionals and the media, rather than mass orga­ nizations and movements representing broad social groups and their interests. Elections become procedures to choose the best speakers or campaigners, rather than the best legislators and executives, which turns out to be a frequent source of voters’ illusions, disappointment, and frustration. Many members of legislatures have become professional politicians with scarcely proven alternative professional

140 Conclusion

skills who tend to be not much more than specialists in general affairs and public relations. Voters may punish incumbents for past bad performance in the ballot box, but they can hardly anticipate to what degree the candidates’ promises will be unfulfilled. Political parties running in elections and holding government positions do not usually display high levels of transparency or keen evaluation of their record. Rarely, a political party develops understandable analyses supported by systematic data of the mechanisms by which every proposed policy may produce the desired outcomes. Political parties hardly ever provide self-critical reviews of their legislative and executive performance leading to explicit corrections and improvements. Most frequently, if a party in government loses an election because it has failed to manage important collective issues, it just waits in opposition, perhaps changing its leader, until its next turn. Politicians’ and activists’ self-praised party’s or personal “ideological consistency” basically implies lack of empirically grounded knowledge, an absence of self-critical revision of decisions for their actual results, stickiness to previous prejudgments, and seeking confrontation rather than policy consensus. The desirability of certain goals is rarely reconsidered in the light of the likely consequences of the chosen means. When efficient policy-making, together with the representatives’ qualification and honesty, fail, the “aristocratic” promise of rule by the best is unfulfilled. With the monopoly of representation and governance by political parties, in many places representative government has degenerated into a new oligarchy—the perverse form of aristocracy, in classical terms. The only mechanism for accountability is the following election, which has to deal with both past performances and new future promises at the same time. The most essential evaluative criterion left is merely that, in contrast to civil wars and dictatorships, the rulers can be dismissed by the ruled without bloodshed, according to Karl Popper’s classical words. A leader of modern political science, Maurice Duverger, wrote a sharp summary: We live with a totally surreal notion of democracy forged by jurists, following the philosophers of the eighteenth century: ‘Government of the people by the people’, ‘government of the nation by its representatives’; beautiful formulas, proper to lift the enthusiasm and facilitate oratory developments. Beautiful formulas that mean nothing. Never has a people been seen to govern itself, and it will never be seen. Every government is oligarchic since it necessarily implies the domination of a small number over the majority […] The formula ‘government of the people by the people’ must be replaced with this: ‘government of the people by an elite originated from the people’.

From national to global democracy The ongoing reallocation of powers to different levels of government makes national politics overrated. All the permanent propaganda and campaigns, the media obsession with domestic politics, and having thousands of continuous news

Conclusion 141

stories about what politicians and parties do, say, or tweet, is disproportionate to their real capacity to make important decisions on many issues. There is much less media information about the global institutions or, in Europe, about the European Union than there should be in proportion to their importance in managing increasing numbers of policy issues with an international scope. The stubbornness of domestic rulers in vindicating their “sovereignty” and their resistance to accepting the constraints, incentives, and opportunities derived from globalization is largely rhetorical. In practice, they largely yield; actually, most of them have yielded their powers to international organizations in an impressive way. Media information and people’s attention should adapt. In contrast to both ancient city-based direct democracy and modern state-based representative democracy, the rising global institutions use specific rules to deal with different sectoral issues. They deliver unequally on the three dimensions of democracy: only indirect representation of the citizens of those member states that are organized as democratic regimes, increasing effectiveness in performing their policy mandates, and high accountability of their top rulers and officers. People’s representation in the international and global institutions is indirect, through the member states’ rulers, as long as no universal parliament exists. They would gain further legitimacy with broader diffusion of democratic elections across the world. As we remarked, traditional states have lost many of their sovereign powers and cannot fulfill their foundational claim to be self-sufficient in providing some basic collective goods. But the democratic electoral mechanisms they can implement have become indispensable for legitimating the filling of some offices at international and global levels. This does not deny that in the long term, the representation of democratic states in the global institutions should be complemented by innovative ways to establish people’s more direct representation. So far, the crucial democratic dimension of international and global institutions lies in their effectiveness in promoting peace, freedom, and prosperity and deli­ vering global public goods. They have been largely replacing state governments in assuming responsibility for important issues. Each of the specialized global institu­ tions operates under imperative policy mandates derived not from rehearsed ban­ alities and demagogic electoral promises but from more solid grounds of knowledge and experience. People’s acceptance of their new enhanced role and their subsequent legitimacy ultimately depends on their performance. We see the trade-off identified by Benjamin Constant about two hundred years ago for the transfer from local units to national governments reproduced in the current transfer of tasks and responsibilities from national governments to interna­ tional and global institutions. As Constant remarked, the social consent on any political-institutional regime depends on its effectiveness in compensating losses with the provision of new benefits. The international and global institutions must compensate losses of people’s participation in selecting their rulers with the supply of better economic opportunities and more secure liberties. This was the type of trade-off initially trialed by modern representative democracy which global democracy should also pursue.

142 Conclusion

Yet Constant’s additional warning should not be forgotten. He said that modern citizens in representative democracy should “reserve for themselves the right to discard the rulers if they betray their trust, and to revoke any powers they have abused.” Likewise, contemporary world’s citizens, with the help of the media and global networks, should also exercise an active and permanent surveillance over the rulers of global institutions.

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INDEX

Acemoglu, Daron 23

Adams, James 34

Afghanistan 131

Africa 28, 29, 38, 49, 126, 131

Akershus 81

Alabama 30

Alaska 108

Albania 124, 132

Albertus Michael, 128

Algeria 132

America See United States of America,

Central America, Latin America

American Civil War 58, 78, 108, 111

American Samoa 108

Amsterdam 81

Andalusia 30

Andhra Pradesh 109

Andorra 111

Andreotti, Giulio 17, 47

Antonucci, Lorenza 82

Antwerp 81

Arab League 131

Arab Maghreb Union 131

Arab Spring 24, 123, 131

Aristotle 91, 138

Arizona 28, 84, 108

Arkansas 60

Armenia 124

Asia 29, 38, 126, 131

Aspinall, Edward 70

Athens 137

Atlee, Clement 50

Austin 81

Australia 79, 89, 90, 93, 94

Austria 79, 109

Azerbaijan 13

Bahrain 81

Baltics 109

Banerjea, David 126

Bangkok 81

Bangladesh 124, 132

Bannon, Steve 61

Bar, Moshe 14

Barbados 81

Barber, Benjamin 82, 86

Barcelona 73, 81

Bardi, Luciano 20

Bartels, Larry 56

Bartolini, Stefano 20

Basilicata 30

Bates, Robert 125

Beijing 81

Belgium 48, 79

Bentham, Jeremy 22

Berlin Wall 5

Berman, Sheri 47

Bezos, Jeff 27

Bihar 65, 109

Bloomberg, Michael 27

Bodin, Jean 76

Bogaards, Matthijs 125

Bogdanor, Vernon 54

Bolivia 124

Bologna 47

Bombay 109

158 Index

Borneo 68

Boston 81

Botswana 81

Bourguignon, François 38

Bowman, Carl D. 57

Brader, Ted 16

Brass, Paul 65

Brazil 67

Brexit 6, 49–54, 77, 100, 110

Brin, Sergey 27

Brookings Institution 31

Brownlee, Jason 124

Brunei 81

Brussels 73, 112

Bryan, Frank 83

Bubic, Andreja 17

Budapest 47

Bueno de Mesquita, Bruce 10

Buffett, Warren 27

Bulgaria 30, 42, 45, 49, 79, 109

Burke, Edmund 138

Bush, George W. 95

Butler, Gillian 14

California 27, 28, 60, 73, 84, 85, 107, 108

Cambodia 124

Cameron David 50

Cameron David 53

Canada 79, 89, 90, 93, 94, 101, 119

Carothers, Thomas 127

Carrère d’Encausse, Hélène 135

Carson, Ben 35

Carter, Jimmy 95

Casal Bértoa, Fernando 44

Case, Karl E. 35

Castile-La Mancha 30

Catalonia 46

Catholic Church 132

Celebes 68

Central America 132

Chao, Linda 129

Chetty, Raj 35

Chile 124

China 36, 39, 10, 25, 26, 31, 67, 69,

103–105, 117, 119, 133

Christian-democrats 19, 45

Churchill, Winston 12, 49

Civic Alliance (Fidesz) 46

Clarke, Harold 51

Clinton, Bill 95

Clinton, Hillary 60, 61

Cold War 5, 10, 19, 66, 109, 118

Colombia 124

Colomer Josep M. 125

Colorado 84

Commonwealth 79

Comoros 132

Congo 24

Connecticut 83

Conservatives 19, 45, 51

Constant, Benjamin 138, 139, 141

Corbyn, Jeremy 54

Corneo, Giacomo 28

Costa Lobo, Marina 43

Costa, Robert 62

Cramer, Katherine J. 33

Croatia 30, 79

Cuba 108

Cuzán, Alfred 42

Cyprus 30, 79

Czech Republic 42, 45, 48, 79

Czechoslovakia 109

Dahl, Robert A. 63, 91

Davis, Darren 33

Davis, Gray 85

de Tocqueville, Alexis 15

Delhi 65

Democrats US 19

Deng Xiao Ping 133

Denmark 79, 89, 91, 107, 109, 110

Detroit 30

Diamond, Larry 125

Dominica 81

Downs, Anthony 94, 95

Downs, George 10

Dubai 81

Dubrovnik 81

Duverger, Maurice 140

East Germany 109

East Macedonia-Thrace 30

Edinburgh 81

Egypt 13, 24, 31, 132

Ellison Larry 27

England 51, 93

Estanque, Elísio 36

Estonia 47, 79, 81

Europe See European Union European Central Bank 35, 110, 111

European Commission 35, 49, 50, 77,

106, 113

European Community 50, 109

European Court of Justice 50, 79, 111

European Parliament 48, 50, 73, 99, 106, 113

European People’s Party 50

European Union, 25, 26, 28, 29, 31, 35, 37,

38, 45–77, 64, 73, 77–79, 81, 87, 88, 99,

104, 105, 109–111, 141

Extremadura 30

Index 159

Federal Bureau of Investigation 110 Fianna Fail 45 Finland 48, 79, 89, 91, 109 Fiorina, Morris 18 First World War See World War I Five Star Movement 47 Florence 137 Florida 60, 108 Food and Agriculture Organization 120 Ford, Gerald 95 France 27, 41, 42, 45, 49, 79, 109, 117, 119, 132 Frankfurt 81 Frankfurt, Harry 40 Freedom House 124 Friston, Karl J. 15 Funke, Manuel 44 Gaggi, Massimo 36 Gandhi, Indira 64 Gates, Bill 27 Gdansk 47 Geneva 137 Georgia 124 Germany 27, 49, 79, 84, 88, 89, 91, 109, 117, 119, 123 Gingrich, Newt 58 Gini index 41 Goldwater, Barry 95 Goodwin, Matthew 51, 52 Great Britain 27, 35, 49, 59, 93, 117, 119 Great Depression 19, 81 Greece 28, 30, 35, 36, 41, 42, 45, 47–79, 79, 87, 109 Group of Seven 50, 66, 119 Guam 108 Guatemala 124 Guilluy, Guillaume 32 Gujarat 65, 109 Habib, Marianne 16 Haggard, Stephan 37 Hakhverdian, Armen 92 Hamburg 81 Hamilton, Alexander 111, 113 Hanan, Djayadi 70 Hardin, Russell 3 Haryana 65, 109 Hawaii 108 Hellebrandt, Tomas 41 Hellwig, Timothy 43 Helsinki 81 Henderson, Ailsa 52 Henning, Randall 111 Hernández, Enric 44

Hernández, Esteban 36 Hobbes, Thomas 76 Hochschild, Arlie Russell 34 Hong Kong 81, 134 Hooghe, Lisbet 74 House of Lords 130 Huber, John 92 Hume, David 102 Hungary 35, 42, 45, 46, 79, 109 Hunter, James D. 57 Huntington, Samuel 125 Iceland 42 Idaho 60 Ignazi, Piero 20 Illinois 34 India 36, 12, 13, 25, 26, 31, 33–68, 40, 69, 88, 93, 101, 104, 105, 113, 117 Indian National Congress 64, 66 Indian People’s Party (BJP) 66 Indiana 34 Indonesia 36, 25, 26, 31, 38–70, 68, 88, 132 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) 129 International Atomic Energy Agency 115 International Criminal Court 115 International Labor Organization 115, 119, 120 International Monetary Fund 35, 115, 117, 119–121 International Telecommunications Union 115 Ionian Islands 30 Iowa 55 Iraq 131 Ireland 35, 42, 79, 81, 109 Islam 70, 101–103, 131 Israel 77, 132 Istanbul 81 Italy 19, 28, 30, 35–67, 41, 42, 46–79, 79, 87, 119, 132 Jamaica 79 Jammu and Kashmir 109 Japan 19, 25, 27, 41, 88, 117, 119 Java 68 Jeanne, Olivier 28 Jefferson, Thomas 108 Jenkins of Hillhead, Lord (Roy Jenkins) 100 Johnson, Boris 54 Johnson, Lyndon 95 Jones, Bruce 67 Jordan 124 Juncker, Jean-Claude 50, 77

160 Index

Kaczynski, Jaroslaw 46

Kahneman, Daniel 16

Kansas 60

Karl, Terry 125

Kashmir 67 cf

Kaufman, Robert 37

Keltner, Dacher 16

Kennedy, John F. 95

Kentucky 30, 60

Kenya 124

Kharas, Homi 31

Ki-moon, Ban 121

Koch, Charles and David 27

Kriesi, Hanspeter 17, 44

Labour UK 45, 51

Labourites 19

Ladakh 109

Lagarde, Christine 121

Las Vegas 34

Latin America 36, 28, 31, 41, 126

Latvia 35, 42, 45, 79

Lausanne 81

Law and Justice 46

Le Pen, Marine 48, 96

Lebanon 132

Left Bloc 48

Lerner, Jennifer 16

Levitsky, Steven 125

Liberal-democrats 19

Liberals 19

Liberini, Federica 52

Liechtenstein 81

Lijphart, Arend 63, 92

Lincoln, Abraham 58, 136, 137

Linz, Juan J. 10, 11, 101

Lipset, Seymour M. 9, 10, 23

Lithuania 42, 45, 48, 79

Loaeza, Soledad 130

Lodz 47

London 51, 81, 99

Los Angeles 34

Louisiana 28, 108

Lupia, Arthur 84

Luxembourg 79, 81

Ma, Jack 27

Ma, Pony 27

Macau 134

Macron, Emmanuel 77, 96

Madhya Pradesh 109

Madison, James 78, 110

Madras (Tamil Nadu) 109

Maharashtra 65, 109

Maine 83

Mair, Peter 20

Malaysia 124, 132

Maldives 81

Mali 124, 132

Malta 79

Manchester, William 112

Mansbridge, Jane 83

Marcus, George 16

Marí-Klose, Pau 48

Marks, Gary 74

Massachusetts 83

Matsusaka, John 84

Mauro, Paulo 41

May, Theresa 53

Mayne, Quinton 92

McGovern, George 95

McManus, Freda 14

Mehta, Pratap Bhanu 67

Mello, Fernando B. 126

Menaldo, Victor 128

Mexico 108, 124, 127–130

Miami 34

Mian, Atif 19

Michels, Robert 139

Michigan 30, 34, 55

Middle East 28, 49, 131

Mietzner, Marcus 69

Milan 47

Milanovic, Branko 27, 38

Milazzo, Caitlin 52

Mill, James 138

Mill, James 22, 105

Mississippi 28

Mitra, Sumatra 65

Mizoram 109

Monaco 81

Mongolia 134

Montana 60

Montreal 81

Moore, Barrington 23, 63

Morlino, Leonardo 17

Morocco 124, 132

Mumbai 65

Munich 81

Murcia 30

Murray, Charles 28

Myers, Ramon 129

Mylonas, Harris 36

Nagaland 109

Naples 47

Narduzzi, Eduardo 36

National Front (National Rally) 48

Nauru 117

Nebraska 60

Index 161

Nehru, Jawaharlal 64

Netherlands 48, 79, 88, 89, 92, 107

New Delhi 65, 109

New Hampshire 83

New Mexico 28, 107, 108

New York 60, 81

New Zealand 79, 89, 93, 94

Nigeria 24, 124

Nixon, Richard 58, 95

North Carolina 30, 34

North Dakota 60

North Korea 19

North, Douglass 103

Northern Ireland 51, 99, 100

Northern Mariana 108

Norway 13, 89, 91

OECD, Organization for Economic

Cooperation and Development 21, 32

Ohio 34, 55

Oklahoma 60

Olson, Mancur 74

Orban, Viktor 46

Oregon 84, 108

Oslo 81

Ostrom, Elinor 74, 82

Page, Larry 27

Pakistan 64, 109, 124

Palestine 77

Panama 108

Papua New Guinea 68

Paraguay 124

Paris 81

Party for Freedom 48

Pastor, Robert 130

Pennsylvania 34, 55

Perot, Ross 95

Persson, Torsten 92

Peru 85

Petersen, Roger 33

Peterson Institute 41

Pew Research Center 3, 11, 26, 56,

63, 75

Philippines 108

Phoenix 34

Piketty, Thomas 38

Poland 46, 49, 79, 87, 109, 132

Polity project 124, 126

Popper, Karl 140

Porto Alegre 85

Portugal 30, 35, 36, 42, 46, 48, 79, 109

Powell, Bingham G. 92

Poznan 47

Przeworski, Adam 64

Puerto Rico 108

Puglia 30

Punjab 109

Quebec 108

Qur’an 132

Qvortrup, Matt 87

Rajasthan 109

Rato, Rodrigo 121

Reagan, Ronald 58

Republicans US 19

Rhode Island 83

Ridout, Travis 61

Riker, William H. 96, 97

Robinson, James 23

Romania 30, 35, 48, 49, 79, 109

Rome 47

Romer, Paul 26

Rotterdam 81

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 136, 137

Russia 36, 67, 104, 117, 119, 124, 131

Rustow, Dankwart 127

Saez, Emmanuel 27, 38

Samuel, Lawrence R. 35

Samuels, David 43

San Francisco 34, 73, 81

Sanders, Bernie 60

Sardinia 30

Sassen, Saskia 82

Saudi Arabia 117, 131

Sbragia, Alberta 111

Schedler, Andreas 126, 129

Scheidel, Walter 38, 39

Schneider, Gerald 88

Schubotz, Ricarda 17

Schularick, Moritz 44

Schultz, Wolfram 15

Schwarzenegger, Arnold 85

Scotland 51, 99, 100

Searles, Kathleen 61

Second World War See World War II

Sen, Amartya 64

Senegal 132

Seoul 81

Serbia 124

Seychelles 81

Shanghai 81

Shiller, Robert J. 35

Sicily 30

Sierra Leone 132

Sikkim 109

Singapore 81

Singh Sidhu, Waheguru Pal 67

162 Index

Slim, Carlos 27

Slovakia 42, 45, 48, 79

Slovenia 42, 45, 48, 79

Smith, Adam 26, 28

Social-democrats 19, 45

Socialists 45, 46

South Africa 67

South America 38

South Dakota 60

South Korea 127–128 Soviet Union 5, 19, 109, 118, 119,

131, 133

Spain 25, 28, 30, 35–67, 41, 42, 46, 48, 49,

79, 109, 123, 132

Spinelli, Altiero 78, 79

Squires, K. C. 14

Sridharan, Eswaran 66

St Kitts & Nevis 81

Stephan, Klaas E. 15

Stockholm 81

Strauss-Kahn, Dominique 121

Suárez, Adolfo 126

Sudan 131

Suharto 68

Sukarno 69

Sumatra 68

Sweden 19, 48, 79, 89, 91, 107, 109

Switzerland 13, 84, 87, 89, 92

Sydney 81

Syria 24, 131

Syriza 47

Szceczin 47

Tabellini, Guido 92

Taiwan 127–129, 134

Tampere 81

Taylor, Graham 52

Tennessee 60

Tesle, John M. 56

Texas 27, 60, 107, 108

Thailand 6, 31, 124

Tiananmen Square 133

Tibet 134

Toronto 81

Toulouse 81

Trebesch, Christoph 44

Treschel, Alexander 20

Trump, Donald J. 6, 55–62, 95

Tsebelis, George 92

Tsipras, Alexis 47

Tunisia 31

Turin 47

Turkey 6, 124, 132

Turkmenistan 131

Tversky, Amos 16

UK Independence Party (UKIP) 51

Ukraine 88, 124

UNESCO 77, 115

United Kingdom 13, 40–72, 45, 77, 78, 87,

91, 94, 98–100, 109, 110, 123, 127, 130;

See also England, Wales, Scotland, Great

Britain, Northern Ireland, Brexit.

United Nations Charter 120

United Nations Organization 77, 81, 115,

117, 118

United Nations Security Council 50, 66,

118, 119

United States of America 5, 12, 13, 19, 25,

26, 28, 29, 31, 33, 38, 40, 41, 55, 64, 73,

77, 78, 81, 84, 88, 100, 104, 105, 110,

117–119, 127, 130

Universal Postal Union 115

Uruguay 81

US Congress 73

US Constitution 78, 100, 101, 123

US Constitutional Convention 78

US Federal Reserve 110

US House of Representatives 93

US Presidential Electoral College 55,

59, 130

US Supreme Court 78

US Treasury 111

US Virgin Islands 108

Uttar Pradesh 65, 109

van der Meer, Tom W. G. 3

Vance, J. D. 34

Vanuatu 81, 117

Varshney, Ashutosh 65–97

Vavreck, Lynn 56

Venezuela 24

Venice 81

Vermont 83

von Cramon, Yves 17

Vreeland, James R. 120

Wales 51, 99

Wallace, George 95

Warsaw 47

Warsh, David 26

Washington State 84

Washington, DC 108, 112

Way, Lucan 125

We Can (Podemos) 47

Weber, Till 44

West Bengal 109

West Virginia 28, 30, 60

Whitley, Paul 51

Wilkinson, Steven 64

Wisconsin 30, 33, 34, 55

Index 163

Wolfowitz, Paul 121

Woodward, Bob 62

World Bank 11, 27, 29, 31, 38, 89, 115,

117, 119–121

World Health Organization 115, 120

World Trade Organization 115, 119

World War I 38

World War II 39, 40, 49, 78, 91, 132

Wuthnow, Robert 33

Wyoming 60

Xinjiang Uyghur 134

Yeats, W. B. 33

Yugoslavia 109

Zaitchik, Alexander 34

Zimmerman, Joseph 83

Zuckerberg, Mark 27

Zucman, Gabriel 27

Zurich 81