Judge democracy on its results, not pretty-sounding ideas

The question has relevance when the US human rights organisation Freedom House warns of a “crucial test” for democracies in 2024, recording that democracy has suffered an aggregate decline in every one of the past 18 years. Its Freedom in the World Report 2024 records that political rights and civil liberties were diminished in 52 countries last year while only 21 countries experienced improvements.

In a recent Financial Times article, Robin Harding raised concerns about “elections without ideas, full of politics without policy and fierce debate over values but none over direction”. Many of the elections we will watch over the course of this year will suffer this malaise. We are not just talking about flawed elections marred by coups, violence or armed gangs, nor about manipulation or controls over electoral competition.

We are talking about political contests full of sound and fury focused on big-picture differences of vision, concepts of nationhood and preferences over the role of the state. But for voters who expect their leaders to focus on and deliver better lives for ordinary citizens, the electoral process has for some countries become an empty shell and a hollow echo chamber for polarised social media to fill.

Except that the current disarray makes one wonder whether it really is the worst save for all the others.

The irony that Harding identifies is that the world is as densely populated today with think-tankers and policy wonks as it has ever been. However, those policy wonks and boring career bureaucrats have little value if no one is listening, in particular our political leaders.

For any democracy, whatever its precise architecture, there needs to be people capable of filling the essential technocratic policy