Oct 20, 2024 01:03 AM
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/unit...ne-science
EXCERPT: . . . More than 60 percent of U.S. respondents in another poll, from December 2023, believe that democracy in America is at risk depending on who wins the upcoming presidential election. Republican respondents see Democratic candidates as threatening the system and vice versa...
[,,,] The U.S. score on liberal democracy remains on par with countries like the United Kingdom, which also scored 0.77 in 2023, and Canada, which scored 0.76. But researchers such as Riedl say that even small dips in scores warrant serious attention because pinpointing precisely when a country begins shifting toward autocracy is challenging yet key to thwarting further backsliding.
And the U.S. dip is part of a larger global shift toward autocracy over the last decade, V-Dem researchers claimed in their 2024 annual report. More than 70 percent of the world’s population, or 5.7 billion people, lived in autocracies in 2023 compared with 50 percent in 2003, the team found.
Baseline electoral democracy scores provide further evidence of a global decline in democracy. In 2003, 11 countries were in the process of autocratizing. In 2023, that number nearly quadrupled to 42.
But some researchers question these findings. Earlier this year, a pair of political scientists found there is no global backsliding trend. Andrew Little of the University of California, Berkeley and Anne Meng of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville quantified purportedly objective measures of democracy (versus the more subjective V-Dem index), including Przeworski’s measure of incumbent losses at the polls, as well as executive constraints and attacks on the press.
There are over 200 countries in the world and, at any given time, some of them, such as Hungary and Venezuela today, will be undergoing democratic backsliding. But that does not make a trend, Meng and Little wrote in April in PS: Political Science & Politics. “The common claim that we are in a period of massive global democratic decline is not clearly supported by empirical evidence.”
Meng and Little refrain from commenting on whether the United States is in a period of democratic decline. But they speculate that intensive media coverage of the supposed decline could be biasing the judgment of experts, such as V-Dem’s raters. But Coppedge and his team say that they have found little to no evidence of such bias.
Regardless of how one calculates or interprets global trends, the odds of the United States turning into an autocracy are extremely low, political scientist Daniel Treisman of UCLA argued in 2023 in Comparative Political Studies. V-Dem data suggest that both wealth and duration protect a democratic country from reverting to autocracy. No democracy in the dataset that has survived for over 43 years has ever failed, Treisman notes.
Treisman’s work builds on political scientists’ long-standing observation that capitalism, and the wealth such a system generates, is linked to democracy. But trends over the last few decades suggest that the link might be weakening, Riedl and colleagues argued in a 2023 preprint in World Politics.
Treisman didn’t include countries that have democratized over the last several decades, and he took a narrow approach to understanding the process of autocratization, Riedl says. “Treisman and others tend to focus on full regime change, democratic death, which is indeed very rare.”
Subtler measures that look at the weakening of democratic systems paint a more nuanced picture. Riedl’s team analyzed more than 100 episodes of democratic erosion across all countries in the V-Dem dataset since 1990. Thirty-eight of the 202 countries in the dataset experienced statistically significant reductions in democracy scores. Roughly half of those countries exceeded wealth levels thought to protect against such erosion... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . More than 60 percent of U.S. respondents in another poll, from December 2023, believe that democracy in America is at risk depending on who wins the upcoming presidential election. Republican respondents see Democratic candidates as threatening the system and vice versa...
[,,,] The U.S. score on liberal democracy remains on par with countries like the United Kingdom, which also scored 0.77 in 2023, and Canada, which scored 0.76. But researchers such as Riedl say that even small dips in scores warrant serious attention because pinpointing precisely when a country begins shifting toward autocracy is challenging yet key to thwarting further backsliding.
And the U.S. dip is part of a larger global shift toward autocracy over the last decade, V-Dem researchers claimed in their 2024 annual report. More than 70 percent of the world’s population, or 5.7 billion people, lived in autocracies in 2023 compared with 50 percent in 2003, the team found.
Baseline electoral democracy scores provide further evidence of a global decline in democracy. In 2003, 11 countries were in the process of autocratizing. In 2023, that number nearly quadrupled to 42.
But some researchers question these findings. Earlier this year, a pair of political scientists found there is no global backsliding trend. Andrew Little of the University of California, Berkeley and Anne Meng of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville quantified purportedly objective measures of democracy (versus the more subjective V-Dem index), including Przeworski’s measure of incumbent losses at the polls, as well as executive constraints and attacks on the press.
There are over 200 countries in the world and, at any given time, some of them, such as Hungary and Venezuela today, will be undergoing democratic backsliding. But that does not make a trend, Meng and Little wrote in April in PS: Political Science & Politics. “The common claim that we are in a period of massive global democratic decline is not clearly supported by empirical evidence.”
Meng and Little refrain from commenting on whether the United States is in a period of democratic decline. But they speculate that intensive media coverage of the supposed decline could be biasing the judgment of experts, such as V-Dem’s raters. But Coppedge and his team say that they have found little to no evidence of such bias.
Regardless of how one calculates or interprets global trends, the odds of the United States turning into an autocracy are extremely low, political scientist Daniel Treisman of UCLA argued in 2023 in Comparative Political Studies. V-Dem data suggest that both wealth and duration protect a democratic country from reverting to autocracy. No democracy in the dataset that has survived for over 43 years has ever failed, Treisman notes.
Treisman’s work builds on political scientists’ long-standing observation that capitalism, and the wealth such a system generates, is linked to democracy. But trends over the last few decades suggest that the link might be weakening, Riedl and colleagues argued in a 2023 preprint in World Politics.
Treisman didn’t include countries that have democratized over the last several decades, and he took a narrow approach to understanding the process of autocratization, Riedl says. “Treisman and others tend to focus on full regime change, democratic death, which is indeed very rare.”
Subtler measures that look at the weakening of democratic systems paint a more nuanced picture. Riedl’s team analyzed more than 100 episodes of democratic erosion across all countries in the V-Dem dataset since 1990. Thirty-eight of the 202 countries in the dataset experienced statistically significant reductions in democracy scores. Roughly half of those countries exceeded wealth levels thought to protect against such erosion... (MORE - missing details)