How Stable Are Democracies? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'

["David Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Stable Are Democracies? 'Warning Signs Are Flashing Red'
Date: December 1, 2016 at 9:17:31 AM EST
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com

How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’
By Amanda Taub
Nov 30 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/americas/western-liberal-democracy.html?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits>

WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government 
at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a 
country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way.

His research suggests something quite different: that liberal democracies around the world may be at serious risk of 
decline.

Mr. Mounk’s interest in the topic began rather unusually. In 2014, he published a book, “Stranger in My Own Country 
<http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/15/books/how-yascha-mounk-grew-up-a-stranger-in-my-own-country.html>.” It started as a 
memoir of his experiences growing up as a Jew in Germany, but became a broader investigation of how contemporary 
European nations were struggling to construct new, multicultural national identities.

He concluded that the effort was not going very well. A populist backlash was rising. But was that just a new kind of 
politics, or a symptom of something deeper?

To answer that question, Mr. Mounk teamed up with Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of 
Melbourne in Australia. They have since gathered and crunched data on the strength of liberal democracies.

Their conclusion, to be published in the January issue of the Journal of Democracy, is that democracies are not as 
secure as people may think. Right now, Mr. Mounk said in an interview, “the warning signs are flashing red.”

Early signs of decline

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” which holds that once countries develop 
democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

For decades, global events seemed to support that idea. Data from Freedom House, a watchdog organization that measures 
democracy and freedom around the world, shows that the number of countries classified as “free” rose steadily from the 
mid-1970s to the early 2000s. Many Latin American countries transitioned from military rule to democracy; after the end 
of the Cold War, much of Eastern Europe followed suit. And longstanding liberal democracies in North America, Western 
Europe and Australia seemed more secure than ever.

[snip]





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