Government & Governance – Ideology, Autocracy & Democracy May 2024-

Governance and good governance
Council of Europe
Centre of Expertise for Good Governance
The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict
International IDEA
Difference between Tyranny and Dictatorship

Major elections NPR correspondents are watching
Elections have consequences.
2024 is an extraordinary year of global elections. Half of the global population are voting in their elections. They include people in the world’s three largest democratic countries: India, the United States and Indonesia.
This great democratic exercise takes place at a time when concerns of democratic backsliding are on the rise, with technology turbocharging the process.
Freedoms Denied as the World Enters a Consequential Year of Elections
Freedom in the World 2024 finds that global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year in 2023. The breadth and depth of the deterioration were extensive—political rights and civil liberties diminished in 52 countries and improved in only 21.

17 September
The Global State of Democracy 2024: Strengthening the Legitimacy of Elections in a Time of Radical Uncertainty
(International IDEA) In this report, we take a close look at elections, and we find that the credibility of elections around the world was worse in more than one fifth of the countries we cover (39 of 173) in 2023 (the most recent year for which we have complete data) than it had been five years before, in 2018. The way that people engage with electoral processes has also been changing over the past several decades: turnout has been going down while the incidence of protests and riots has been going up.
Democracy declined for 8th straight year around the globe, institute finds
(AP) — Last year had the worst decline in credible elections and parliamentary oversight in almost a half-century, driven by government intimidation, foreign interference, disinformation and the misuse of artificial intelligence in campaigns, an organization promoting democracy said Tuesday.
The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, said election credibility is threatened by turnout dropping and results are increasingly being contested. One in three elections are being disputed in some way, it said.
The organization with 35 member governments said the average percentage of the voting age population who actually cast ballots has declined from 65.2% in 2008 to 55.5% in 2023.
“Elections remain the single best opportunity to end democratic backsliding and turn the tide in democracy’s favor,” said International IDEA’s Secretary-General, Kevin Casas-Zamora. “The success of democracy depends on many things, but it becomes utterly impossible if elections fail.”

6 September
The End of Democracy Has Already Begun
In the first episode of our new podcast, a look at how lies prime a society for a fall
By Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev
(The Atlantic) The corruption of democracy begins with the corruption of thought—and with the deliberate undermining of reality. Stephen Richer, an election official in Arizona, and Adam Kinzinger, a former Republican congressman, learned firsthand how easily false stories and conspiracy theories could disorient their colleagues. They talk with hosts Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantsev about how conformism and fear made it impossible to do their jobs.

4 September
The West’s Stealthy Assault on Democracy
Brahma Chellaney
Regime change brought about by popular uprisings rarely leads to democratic breakthroughs. Yet Western powers have often supported coups and takeovers – regardless of the new regime’s democratic credentials – in order to advance their own geopolitical and economic interests.

Takeaways from AP’s report on JD Vance and the Catholic postliberals in his circle of influence
By Peter Smith and Michelle R. Smith
What is postliberalism?
It’s a movement primarily among Catholic intellectuals that rejects both the progressive left, with its focus on individual rights and identity, and “economic liberalism,” the ideology that favors a free market and small government.
Postliberals do share Catholic conservatives’ longstanding opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights
But Catholic postliberals want a muscular government — one that they control.
They envision people who share their views taking over government bureaucracies, universities and other institutions from within, replacing entrenched “elites” and acting upon their vision of the “common good.”
“What is needed … is regime change — the peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class and the creation of a postliberal order,” wrote Patrick Deneen, a prominent author in the movement, in his 2023 book, “Regime Change.”
JD Vance’s Catholicism helped shape his views. So did this little-known group of Catholic thinkers
(AP) His conversion also put Vance in close touch with a Catholic intellectual movement, viewed by some critics as having reactionary or authoritarian leanings, that has been little known to the American public until Vance’s rise to the national stage as the Republican vice presidential nominee.
The professors and media personalities in this network don’t all agree on everything — even on what to call themselves – but most go by postliberal. …

23 August
Is Democracy Really in Retreat?
Helmut K. Anheier , Edward L. Knudsen, and Joseph C. Saraceno
Is state capacity sufficient to deliver consistent improvements in quality of life, even in the absence of robust democratic accountability? While Westerners long insisted that the answer must be no, China and other socioeconomically successful autocracies have demonstrated that the question is far from settled.
(Project Syndicate) Liberal democracy is again under threat around the world. In many ways, we have seen such challenges before, and democracy has ultimately emerged victorious. Is a similar confidence warranted this time? Anti-democratic threats certainly do not mean the end of the system. But rather than clinging to the optimistic belief in democracy’s inevitable global triumph, its defenders must now adopt a realistic mindset grounded in empirical evidence – especially when the data challenge long-held assumptions and raise uncomfortable questions.
Evidence of a global “democratic recession” has mounted since it was first identified nearly a decade ago. Research institutes like Freedom House and V-Dem, and leading publications such as The Economist, have found that liberal democracy continues to lose ground to autocracy and illiberalism. Such regimes – which include China, Hungary, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and many others – are increasingly self-confident and promote their economic and political models as being more conducive to stability and prosperity than those of democratic countries.
…there are 36 successful democratic states in the world today, a cohort that includes Australia, most European Union countries, Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Members of this group perform the strongest across all three governance dimensions. But while all have highly globalized economies and high per capita GDPs, they increasingly differ in terms of political and social stability. Estonia, for example, has continued to perform well in these dimensions, whereas the US in recent years has not. We believe the future of democracy in this cluster depends on how governments manage the global economy, and whether they build the domestic state capacity needed to achieve both social cohesion and adequate provision of public goods in a competitive international environment.
No, the world isn’t heading toward a new Cold War – it’s closer to the grinding world order collapse of the 1930s
(The Conversation) The past decade and a half has seen upheaval across the globe. The 2008 financial crisis and its fallout, the COVID-19 pandemic and major regional conflicts in Sudan, the Middle East, Ukraine and elsewhere have left residual uncertainty. Added to this is a tense, growing rivalry between the U.S. and its perceived opponents, particularly China.
In response to these jarring times, commentators have often reached for the easy analogy of the post-1945 era to explain geopolitics. The world is, we are told repeatedly, entering a “new Cold War.”
But as a historian of the U.S.’s place in the world, these references to a conflict that pitted the West in a decades-long ideological battle with the Soviet Union and its allies – and the ripples the Cold War had around the globe – are a flawed lens to view today’s events. To a critical eye, the world looks less like the structured competition of that Cold War and more like the grinding collapse of world order that took place during the 1930s.
… The Great Depression defined the 1930s across the world. It was not, as it is often remembered, simply the stock market crash of 1929. That was merely an overture to a large-scale unraveling of the world economy that lasted a painfully long time.
Persistent economic problems impacted economies and individuals from Minneapolis to Mumbai, India, and wrought profound cultural, social and, ultimately, political changes. Meanwhile, the length of the Great Depression and its resistance to standard solutions – such as simply letting market forces “purge the rot” of a massive crisis – discredited the laissez faire approach to economics and the liberal capitalist states that supported it.
The “Lesser Depression” that followed the 2008 financial crisis produced something similar – throwing international and domestic economies into chaos, making billions insecure and discrediting a liberal globalization that had ruled since the 1990s.

19 July
What is Catholic Integralism?
Mathew Schmalz,Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross
(The Conversation) The basic position of Catholic Integralism is that there are two areas of human life: the spiritual and the temporal, or worldly. Catholic Integralists argue that the spiritual and temporal should be integrated – with the spiritual being the dominant partner. This means that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies.
Catholic Integralists disagree about how to achieve this integration between the spiritual and temporal. Some argue that Christians, particularly Catholics, should have advisory roles in government and lead by example. Other Catholic Integralists want a more comprehensive approach to organizing society along Christian principles.
Catholic Integralists share an opposition to liberalism. Generally, liberalism is understood as a political philosophy that supports limits on the government’s authority and constitutional protections for the rights of individuals and minorities. But Catholic Integralists argue that liberalism is incapable of establishing deep forms of human community because it values individualism and liberty above all things.

18 June
The Specter of Neo-Fascism Is Haunting Europe
Slavoj Žižek
With mainstream parties and politicians already preparing to accommodate the far right following this month’s European Parliament election, the axiom of post-World War II European democracy has been quietly abandoned. “No collaboration with fascists” is being replaced by a tacit acceptance of them.
(Project Syndicate) The surprise in this month’s European Parliament elections was that the outcome everyone expected really did come to pass. To paraphrase a classic scene from the Marx Brothers: Europe may be talking and acting like it is moving to the radical right, but don’t let that fool you; Europe really is moving to the radical right.
The message of this election is clear. The political divide in most EU countries is no longer between the moderate right and the moderate left, but between the conventional right, embodied by the big winner, the European People’s Party (comprising Christian democrats, liberal-conservatives, and traditional conservatives) and the neo-fascist right represented by Le Pen, Meloni, AfD, and others. The question now is whether the EPP will collaborate with neo-fascists. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is spinning the outcome as a triumph of the EPP against both “extremes,” yet the new parliament will include no left-wing parties whose extremism is even distantly comparable to that of the far right. Such a “balanced” view from the EU’s top official sends an ominous signal.

28 May
The New Propaganda War
Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.
If people are naturally drawn to human rights, democracy, and freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned.
By Anne Applebaum
(The Atlantic 24 June issue) While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen, 1989, and June 4, but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “Measures for Managing Internet Information Services” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.
… Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society.

11 May
The West’s multi-racial societies cannot survive woke doctrines being promoted on campuses (Pay wall)
Intolerant and illiberal, the identity politics that has taken root in our universities will ultimately have to be stamped out
Daniel Hannan (Lord Hannan of Kingsclere)

7 May
Putin sits at the heart of the West’s illiberal axis
(WaPo) Vladimir Putin’s sympathizers share an aversion to the West’s perceived liberal establishment, and see a positive vision in the Russian president’s rejection of it.

5 May
Just How Dangerous Is Europe’s Rising Far Right?
Anti-immigration parties with fascist roots — and an uncertain commitment to democracy — are now mainstream.
Roger Cohen
(NYT) Across Europe, the far right is becoming the right, absent any compelling message from traditional conservative parties. If “far” suggests outlier, it has become a misnomer. Not only have the parties of an anti-immigrant right surged, they have seen the barriers that once kept them out crumble as they are absorbed into the arc of Western democracies.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has political roots in a neo-fascist party, now leads Italy’s most right-wing government since Mussolini. In Sweden, the center-right government depends on the fast-growing Sweden Democrats, another party with neo-Nazi origins, for its parliamentary majority. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders, who has called Moroccan immigrants “scum,” won national elections in November at the head of his Party for Freedom, and center-right parties there have agreed to negotiate with him to form a governing coalition.
… This year the far-right surge across the continent looks dramatic. The latest polls show the National Rally with a clear lead, set to take some 31 percent of the vote in France compared with about 16 percent for the centrist Renaissance coalition of President Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Bardella is the only politician among France’s 50 “favorite personalities,” according to a recent ranking in the Journal du Dimanche newspaper.
The result is that anti-immigrant parties may win as many as a quarter of the seats in the 720-seat European Parliament. This could lead to a hardening of immigration regulations Europewide, hostility to environmental reform, and pressure to be more amenable to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.