Lots of People Will Vote This Year. That Doesn’t Mean Democracy Will Survive.
The greatest paradox of modern politics is that there are more elections than ever before in human history, and yet the world is becoming less democratic.
Voting will take place in more than 60 countries this year—an unprecedented number—containing roughly half of the global population. But even with all this voting, democracy is under severe threat, endangered by predatory politicians who rig elections and disgruntled voters willing to hand over power to autocratic leaders. The most pivotal election will take place in November, when the world’s most powerful democracy decides whether to turn itself over to an avowedly authoritarian demagogue.
To make sense of this paradox requires understanding why democracy is on the decline. Recent shifts in geopolitics, technology, and economics, alongside the rise of authoritarian populism and innovative election-rigging techniques, have created a tsunami that threatens to sink democracies across the globe.
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After World War II, democracy was scarce and deeply flawed. Most democracies were in Western Europe and North the United States a full democracy until the Civil Rights Act of 1964). Much of Latin America in the 1970s and ’80s. Then, in the 1990s, large swaths of sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe began to hold multiparty elections for the first time.
