‘Keeping up appearances’

“Democracy is undergoing a global recession,” according to a warning from the European Union’s own foresight network last November. U.S. President Joe Biden said much the same at his inauguration in 2021: “This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge.” He kept saying so for the rest of his term.

The trouble isn’t only American. “India has a democratic form, emptied of democratic content,” Omair Ahmad says here in The Signal. “It looks like a democracy, but it works in opposition to democracy.”

The German sociologist Steffen Mau put it plainly: “Reports, academic studies, and the available indicators all point in the same direction: democracy is not in particularly good shape.” Things are bad enough, he writes, that “even established democracies can be said to be in crisis.”

Is that right?

Adam Przeworski is the Carroll and Milton Petrie emeritus professor of politics at New York University and the author of Crises of Democracy. Przeworski says it depends where you look. In Poland and Hungary, voters threw out ruling parties that had looked entrenched for good. The United States is another matter. Donald Trump came back to the White House bent on revenge against his opponents. But the threat to American democracy, he says, is bigger than one man—and it defies what he spent a career establishing: that democracy survives in rich countries with long records of peaceful transfers of power …

This feature is open-access, courtesy of the Marlborough House Foundation.

Gustav Jönsson: Is the world really going through a democracy crisis?

Adam Przeworski: I don’t think so. But “crisis” is truly an ambiguous word. I think I counted more than 20,000 books in the Harvard library, published in the 20th century, that contain the word “crisis.” Let me quote two people who defined it. One was the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács, who said that crises are but an intensification of the everyday life of bourgeois societies. From time to time things get bad, we think there’s a crisis, then it evaporates, and later on things get bad again. And then there’s Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist, who said that crises occur when the old world is dying and the new world is not yet born, and in the meantime all kinds of morbid symptoms appear.

Still, there are crises here and there, and in some countries the crisis is obvious. But I don’t think there’s a general crisis of democracy. I don’t think it’s true of Western Europe, for example.

Jönsson: Where is it true?

Przeworski: There’s a whole literature on “democratic backsliding” in countries like Venezuela, Turkey, and India. Depending on how people define “backsliding,” the list runs to as many as 37 countries. In these countries, elected governments use every possible trick to stay in power, often repressing the opposition but still keeping up appearances.

As Americans, we’re very sensitive to it, in part because we’re projecting what’s happening in the U.S. onto other countries. It opens our eyes.

Jönsson: Hungary has fewer than 10 million people. India has 1.4 billion. How do you measure backsliding across countries that different?

Przeworski: The unit of analysis should be countries, because we’re thinking of governments. We’re counting the governments that undermine democracy even as they preserve its trappings. These are countries where, first, the executive monopolizes power at the expense of other institutions, and second, the ruling party makes it next to impossible for the opposition to win elections.

Even so, it’s not easy to be sure how far the backsliding has gone. There are surprises. My native country, Poland, was the first surprise—it managed to replace its government in 2023. You mentioned Hungary. Everybody thought that Viktor Orbán and his party were there to stay, but lo and behold, they lost in April.

“Crisis” is truly an ambiguous word. I think I counted more than 20,000 books in the Harvard library, published in the 20th century, that contain the word “crisis.”

Jönsson: What’s new about these governments?

Przeworski: In the past 25 or 35 years, several countries have preserved the trappings of democracy. They hold regular elections and allow some opposition to form, so they’re not the kind of one-party systems that existed before the fall of communism. They don’t kill citizens en masse—they repress selectively and pretend that they’re democracies. That’s a new phenomenon. In 1989, the Chinese government killed the protesters in Tiananmen Square. But in the past 25 years, massacres of the opposition have become the exception. Following Vladimir Putin’s lead, a lot of governments learned that they could keep the trappings of democracy and still stay in power.

Jönsson: Then what counts as a democracy?

Przeworski: My view is minimalist. Democracies are regimes where the current opposition has some chance of winning elections. I think of it that way because I ask myself: How do societies handle conflicts? Some people start from what I call the maximalist point of view: They expect democracy to implement or realize some values, norms, or interests. The problem is that those interests or values can come into conflict. Different people want different things. So I ask myself: How do societies handle these conflicts—not resolve them, but handle them for a while? My answer is through elections. That’s why elections are quintessential. To me, the possibility that the people out of power might someday come into office is what defines democracy.

Jönsson: What’s putting democracies under pressure now?

Przeworski: Let me dispel something first. In recent years, right-wing parties in several countries have either increased their vote share or actually come into office. I’m thinking of Italy, Chile, Argentina, and perhaps, later this month, Brazil. Much as I dislike these forces, it’s very important to understand that this can happen under democracy. As long as these parties don’t try to abolish or weaken democracy, we just have to accept that that’s what democracy may produce.

I often cite Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratic prime minister, who said, “The future is not written, because only the people can write it.” He said it with hope. I think we’re learning that sometimes the people write things that many of us, myself included, don’t like. That’s still democracy.

Jönsson: What has changed, then?

Przeworski: Something puzzles me—and it really is a puzzle. People have grown more dissatisfied with democracy over the past 10 years or so. I’m not a great believer in surveys, but there are just so many pieces of evidence that people are increasingly dissatisfied. The most observable recent evidence is that incumbents are losing elections at an incredible rate. There’s a gentleman at the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch, who showed that in the national elections held in developed Western countries in 2024, every incumbent party lost votes, and some of them lost office too. There’s clearly a great deal of dissatisfaction.

People look for economic causes, and that’s where I become puzzled. Per capita incomes in the U.S., Latin America, and Western Europe are far higher now than they were 30 years ago. People are living better. Even poor people in countries where inequality has increased are living better than they were then. And yet dissatisfaction has increased. It’s a puzzle I can’t quite resolve.

Jönsson: The Swedish prime minister Tage Erlander had a name for that: “the dissatisfaction of rising expectations.”

Przeworski: There may be something to this. But all of the economic theory and a lot of data show that people with higher incomes are happier. And yet incomes go up, and dissatisfaction seems to go up with them.

Jönsson: What do you make of America?

Przeworski: America surprises me. And I mean that seriously. I’ve worked a large part of my life on the question of when democracy survives and when it fails. The principal finding, which I think is generally shared, is that democracy survives in wealthy countries. No democracy has ever fallen in a country richer than Thailand was at its coup in 2014—before that, the record was Argentina’s in 1976. And democracy survives in countries that have a long tradition of peaceful transfers of power. By these criteria, democracy shouldn’t be under threat in the U.S. But it is. And it’s hard to tell why. People tell all kinds of stories, but that would take me into speculation, and I’m not a speculating person. I like to be able to see the data and confirm it.

I often cite Adolfo Suárez, Spain’s first democratic prime minister, who said, “The future is not written, because only the people can write it.” He said it with hope. I think we’re learning that sometimes the people write things that many of us, myself included, don’t like.

There’s something peculiar about Trump’s second term. He had his first term, he lost, and then he came back—that hadn’t happened since the 1890s. And he came back full of revenge. I think this feeling of revenge is one of the more important aspects. But I don’t think you can reduce the U.S. situation to Trump’s preferences and actions. The forces he brought into office with him came prepared. Many of the discussions in the U.S. concentrate on Trump himself, but I was struck that Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term—basically, the plan of the MAGA crowd—ran to some 900 pages. This is a force that came into office very well prepared, and it sees its mission as ushering in real revolutionary change in the role of the state in the economy and society. This is a real threat of democracy to democracy.

But why has it happened? I don’t know.

Jönsson: If a long tradition of peaceful transfers of power matters that much, when did America become a democracy?

Przeworski: Again, one can play with words. There’s a famous book by Robert Dahl, Polyarchy, which sets a threshold of participation for democracy. By that measure, democracy appears in the U.S. only in the 1950s. But what I want to emphasize is that electoral integrity has never been completely undermined in the history of the country. The U.S. held elections even during the Civil War. Those elections were full of violence: Professional gangs traveled from city to city trying to intimidate opponents. Democracy is full of events like that. But the principle of election itself was never in question.

The rise of executive power, though, may be unprecedented. Some people compare it to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, but it may go further.

Jönsson: Americans tend to credit their institutions for the country’s wealth. Are they right?

Przeworski: That’s the big question about the U.S. Is it really the institutional framework? This country had such unique resources when it was born and when it developed in the 19th century that maybe some other institutional framework would have worked as well, or even better.

Jönsson: What are the first signs that a democracy is under threat?

Przeworski: The first is that the government tries to make it impossible for the opposition to win elections. Trump uses the language of “internal enemies.” He’s attacked law firms, universities, and individual political opponents. Richard Nixon tried to do things like that, but the scale of Trump’s efforts is truly unprecedented. You also have to look at sources of finance. But if you’re looking for emerging threats to democracy, begin with all the measures that make it impossible, or at least difficult, for the opposition to win elections.

Democracy works because the current losers can reasonably expect that at some point they’re going to win. When I think about the U.S., I always think of the 2000 election, where the winner was totally unclear. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush, and the Democrats accepted that defeat because they thought they were going to win in 2004. Then in 2004, Bush won again. What did the Democrats think? “We’re going to win in 2008.” And in 2008, they won. That expectation of winning in the future is what feeds the commitment to democracy. So when an incumbent begins to destroy that possibility of future victory, that’s when democracy is in danger.