Democracy at a Crossroads: Trends, Threats, and Backsliding – Exploring Structural Solutions
Q&A with Pippa Norris
Pippa Norris is a comparative political scientist who has taught at Harvard for three decades and published over 50 books. She is the Paul F. McGuire Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Founding Director of the Electoral Integrity Project, Director of the Global Party Survey, Co-Director of the TrustGov Project, Co-Principal Investigator for Trust in European Democracies (TrueDem), and Vice-President of the World Values Survey.
Her research compares public opinion and elections, political institutions and cultures, gender politics, and political communications in many countries worldwide. She is ranked the second-most cited political scientist worldwide, according to Google scholar. Major career honors include, among others, the Skytte prize, IPSA’s Karl Deutsch award, fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, APSA’s Charles Merriam award, Warren E. Miller award, and the Samuel Eldersfeld award, George H. Hallet award, and the PSA’s Sir Isaiah Berlin award, as well as several book awards and honorary doctorates. Recent books include Electoral Integrity in America, Cultural Backlash and In Praise of Skepticism: Trust but Verify. Her latest book is forthcoming with Oxford University Press on The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.
The 2024 presidential election in the U.S. has brought increased attention to challenges to democracy. Pippa Norris has spent over 40 years studying democracies throughout the world. In this conversation, she offers her unique perspective on the threats to democracy, as well as how to preserve and improve it.
Rex VanMiddlesworth: Professor Norris, you've been studying democracy for over 40 years. What are the major trends globally that you've seen over your career?
Pippa Norris: There are waves of democracy, both forward progress and reversals. In the late eighties and early nineties, the Berlin Wall fell, and there were positive developments, not just in Eastern Europe, but also throughout the world. In many parts of Latin America, the military was staying in the barracks, and there was democratic progress in West Africa, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. These events generated tremendous optimism about democracy, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History.
Many believed that things were getting better and better for democracy as a long-term trend. The 1970s to the 1990s saw a steady expansion of democratization, and it seemed to some as if it might go on forever.
VanMiddlesworth: When did that change?
Norris: Well, there are disputes about that. But most people say it was around 2004. Since then, we’ve often seen either a reversal in democracy around the world or, as some people argue, a plateau. Any decline is quite subtle, however, and it's not a universal phenomenon. There are clearly cases of democratic backsliding in the U.S., Hungary, India, Turkey and Venezuela. So, declines are happening around the world, absolutely.
But when we study the threats of authoritarianism, we need to be careful about cherry picking, because if we give too much emphasis to such cases, then we don't actually see the whole global picture. And again, I think in America, it's difficult to understand that perspective. We want to generalize. We see all the problems in U.S. politics, such as polarization, legislative gridlock, increased threats to elected officials, and so on. And we often think that is universal.
But it's more accurate to see more of a checkerboard in the rest of the world. Of course, some democracies have eroded, but there are also cases of democratic advancement. So, the worldwide trends present a more complicated picture than many assume.
VanMiddlesworth: You co-founded the Electoral Integrity Project, which publishes reports showing growth in the integrity of elections worldwide, but that hasn't necessarily resulted in the spread of democracy. What is the relationship between electoral integrity and democracy?
Norris: Almost all countries around the world now have elections of one form or another. That's a tremendous change. If you look back 30 years, authoritarian regimes often had a single party. Or there'd be a dictator such as Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), or a monarchy in some traditional societies, or a strong man leader, like in North Korea. Regimes stayed in power without multiparty elections.
But now, almost every country has multiparty elections, with a few exceptions. And the international community has provided technical assistance that has improved the integrity of the elections. Most elections are not being rigged or votes stolen at the ballot box. Instead, however, there's a wide range of more hidden techniques that can interfere with a free and fair contest. Things like the abuse of campaign funding and how money is used in elections, whether the media is controlled by the state, and whether there are stacked electoral laws that favor the incumbent party.
So, the problems with elections are much more subtle today than they used to be. In the past, for example, in some countries if the president didn't like the results, he'd simply nullify the elections, declare that there's a crisis of the Constitution, and bring the military out of the barracks. Now although military coups do occur, that's become less common. But there are still major problems, both in long-standing democracies like India and the U.S., and in countries that have transitioned to democracy more recently. And the mere existence of free elections does not mean that a country cannot slip toward autocracy.
VanMiddlesworth: What do you see as the principal threats to democracy today?
Norris: Many people assert that the greatest threat to a democracy is the rise of particularly effective demagogues and strongman leaders, backed by elite enablers, exemplified by Viktor Orban (Hungary), Recep Erdogan (Turkey), Vladimir Putin (Russia), and others.
But I think that the problems are much more structural and much less about a single individual.
VanMiddlesworth: What are these problems?
Norris: Many relatively affluent post-industrial countries have experienced tremendous structural changes in recent decades, and these have changed the focus of politics from socioeconomic to cultural cleavages. In other words, bread-and-butter issues about class, taxes, welfare and the like, have gradually been replaced in recent decades by growing emphasis on cultural issues that are not resolvable through economic redistribution. So, in the U.S., issues like reproductive rights, abortion, euthanasia, LGBTQ rights, gender equality, and climate change have come to dominate politics. And this has created new political cleavages in the electorate.
In America and in Europe, political parties from the 1950s to the 1980s were based largely on the old left-right divisions. Broadly speaking, in the U.S., the Democrats generally supported the working class, the poor, and minorities, whereas the Republicans at the time were by and large considered pro-business. What's changed since the 1980s has been the ascendance of new cultural issues, which have divided both the traditional left and the right in new and interesting ways.
In the U.S., for example, the Democratic party has increasingly become concerned with identity politics and with moral and cultural issues. And that has, of course, alienated some of its blue-collar supporters, while the Republican party has increasingly attracted social conservatives.
VanMiddlesworth: What is it about the new cleavages that seems to create greater polarization and intensity?
Norris: Well, partly it's that when we think about issues like tax cuts, the size of social welfare programs, and healthcare, those redistribution issues don’t necessarily involve competing absolute principles. But when you get to issues like reproductive rights, for example, it's far more difficult to cut the pie in different ways. Divisions seem absolute. So, people see their own side as righteous and the other side as immoral, and there is little opportunity for bargain and compromise. And the party-primary system in the U.S. has reinforced these divisions, because the most active groups in America who participate in the caucuses and primaries are the true believers. Middle America is still there, but increasingly “the center doesn't hold,” to quote William Butler Yeats, and what we can see is that candidates appeal not to the moderate middle but to their own base. And that's the only way that politicians can win their party nomination and ultimately get elected.
VanMiddlesworth: What structural solutions would you recommend to address these issues?
Norris: I believe that “mixed-member electoral systems” hold significant promise. If adopted for the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, a mixed-member system might add, say, 200 members to the existing 435. The new members would be elected from larger multi-member districts, which would each elect several representatives based on the total proportion of the vote for each party in that district, so that members of smaller parties could get elected. That would create the need for parties to govern through coalitions, as we see in many European countries, rather than through single-party dominance.
Many countries have mixed-member systems, and they are generally quite popular. New Zealand adopted it overnight in 1993, and there are many other cases of new democracies that have successfully used this system.
I should note that you might get very extreme third parties represented in Congress through a mixed-member system, as we’ve seen in other countries. But my view is that it's better to give such parties some representation than to suppress them. Because, if there are real issues that people care about and you give them a voice within the legislature, supporters are more likely to work within the system rather than create eruptions such as January 6th.
You need to have some real hard thinking about how to do this, not just in those Democratic states that have supported electoral reform. You need incentives for Republican states as well, and Republican officeholders.
VanMiddlesworth: What would be such incentives?
Norris: Parties are typically willing to entertain major reforms when they have repeatedly lost elections. In Britain, for example, why did the Labour Party finally modernize and adopt sweeping electoral and constitutional reforms under Tony Blair? Because for 18 years, they had been defeated in elections by Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives.
In the U.S., for the Republican Party, an incentive to entertain reforms would arise if former-President Trump were to lose in the upcoming election by a decisive majority. Such an outcome would mean that the Republicans had lost the popular vote in the last nine presidential elections, except for 2004. That development could prompt the Republicans to seriously consider how best to expand their base.
Reform not only requires the realization that Republicans are losing badly under their current strategy. It also requires the Democrats to not just blame the problems with our electoral system on one individual, because it isn't just about former President Trump and his influence in the Republican party. The problems are much more endemic, and we need ways to create incentives for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to entertain structural electoral reforms.
VanMiddlesworth: How would your proposals address the growth of partisan polarization, where each side views the other as illegitimate or incapable of governing?
Norris: If parties are forced to create coalitions to govern, as in many European countries, then you can’t claim that your party is the only legitimate party and demonize all the others. Many countries have, as we know, authoritarian populist parties representing the same type of ideas and values and extreme policies as Donald Trump. But these forces don't necessarily threaten democracy. If you look, for example, at levels of democracy in Western Europe, you'll find that in most countries, there's been very little change in recent years. And where there has been significant backsliding, it tends to be in majoritarian systems that create one-party rule rather than systems that create governing coalitions.
For example, the U.K. has by some measures experienced democratic backsliding under both Rishi Sunak and previously under Boris Johnson. But the U.K. has a plurality/majoritarian system. I would also suggest that there is a risk of an authoritarian populist in France, with Marine Le Pen gaining power, and France also has a majoritarian system.
If you look, however, in most European countries, they also have these authoritarian forces and populist parties, but they are less of a threat to democracy. For example, in Sweden and Norway, which are two of the most liberal and affluent countries in the world, these extreme parties are in government and ministerial offices, but always as minorities within coalitions. Therefore, they are able to articulate issues on immigration and nationalism that they and their supporters care most about. But these forces don't threaten democracy in the same way that they do in the U.S. and other countries with pure majoritarian or plurality systems that tend to entirely exclude third parties.
VanMiddlesworth: The U.S. has slipped in recent years on most measures of democracy and now ranks below countries like Slovakia, Chile, and Costa Rica on the widely used V-Dem rankings. What needs to be done to begin to reverse this apparent downward slide in America?
Norris: Unfortunately, you can't change culture rapidly. You can't change parties easily. But you can change the incentives through the rules of the game. Now, this process in America is admittedly quite difficult, partly because of the stickiness and rigidity of the Constitution. But there are opportunities for progress.
Structural reforms, such as the mixed-member system we discussed earlier, are what we should be focusing on. It isn't enough to protest individually. It's not enough to try to support one party as the way to produce these reforms. There must be a bipartisan – or at least a cross-party – coalition. But we also need to better understand what the problems are. And in America, it's often seen as if only Trump is defeated, everything will go back to normal. I do not believe that is the case.
In America, many of these problems started in the early 2000s. For example, many of the doubts about electoral integrity started and grew during the Obama administration. If you look at the increasing polarization in, for example, Congressional voting, that gap has been expanding for the last 20 years. It's not something that commenced in 2016. So, I see the extremism and polarization in our leaders as the consequence of a political system that fosters polarization. And that means you can't just change the leader. You have to change the structural system to produce more incentives for moderation and cooperation.
VanMiddlesworth: Do you see opportunities for making these changes?
Norris: It’s a cliché, but every crisis creates an opportunity. The response to the Watergate crisis was a slew of campaign finance and ethics reforms. The response to the election debacle in Florida in 2000 was the passage of the Help America Vote Act. So, this election too may be an opportunity to improve American democracy, whatever happens in November.
But unfortunately, we also know that the pressures are much worse than they have been in the past, and there is nothing about democracy that guarantees that it will continue. We know that many countries have experienced democratic backsliding. We also know that when authoritarian populists come to power through elections and they've learned the first lessons through, for example, having one term in office, it's always in the second or third term when things get worse. They know how to manipulate the system. They change the law in particular ways. They persecute their enemies. They put pressure on the free media. They put pressure on other checks and balances in society. And so, this election is even more worrying, of course, than 2016.
I think the last thing is, we in America need to get outside of our bubble. America is not very good at looking at other countries to see what works and what doesn’t. How have other countries run, for example, campaign finance reform? Or how do elections work in Canada? Or how do multiparty coalition governments work in Sweden or Norway? There are lots of models around the world, and most electoral democracies – whether they are young democracies setting systems up for the first time or more mature democracies in need of reform – will look to what has been successful in other democracies.
So maybe one of the first things we in the U.S. could do after the 2024 elections is to bring in groups of politicians and policymakers and think tanks from other places for an international conversation about how they do things. How does democracy work in Canada? In Australia? In France? In Germany? We have many, many democracies, and the only way you know how institutional forms work is to look at many cases. We just don't have enough variations across American states. But we have enough cases in the world, so I'd internationalize our debate and strengthen our comparative understanding.
VanMiddlesworth: Thank you so much for your thoughts, Professor Norris.
About the Author:
Rex VanMiddlesworth is a 2023 Harvard Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow and current Senior Editor for Democracy, Law, and Human Rights for the Harvard ALI Social Impact Review. He has practiced public law and litigation for over 40 years and is currently Of Counsel to the law firm of O’Melveny & Myers. VanMiddlesworth serves on the national executive board of the pro-democracy organization Keep Our Republic and as co-chair of that organization's 2024 Anti-Subversion Task Force, where he leads efforts to prepare for threats to the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Cover Photo Credit: By Elvert Barnes, CC BY-SA 2.0