Is this how democracy ends? After the Cold War, scholars were quick to proclaim the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy over its ideological rivals. A wave of democracy was washing across the world and by 2002, according to the Varieties of Democracy project, the number of democracies outnumbered the number of autocracies for the first time ever.

Today, however, the tide seems to have turned. Liberal democracies around the world are now struggling to respond to increasing levels of disinformation, polarisation, erosion of political norms, lack of media plurality, and even full-blown democratic backsliding (including the undermining of civil rights and rule of law). History, it seems, may outlast liberal democracy after all.

What do our readers think? We had a comment sent in from Sara, who wonders what it would actually look like if democracy were genuinely under threat. How could we tell? How can we measure the ”health” of a democracy?

To get a response, we put Sara’s comment to David Runciman, Professor of Politics at Cambridge University, author of the book How Democracy Ends, and host of the Talking Politics podcast. How would he respond?

At the risk of being pedantic, I think ‘measuring the health of democracy’ and ‘democracy being under threat’ are not the same thing. So, I think there are lots of ways we could measure the health of democracy, and there’s not one measure, there are many, and there’s lots of polling data: trust, engagement, participation, and so on.

The thing that’s harder is democracy being under threat, that is the idea that it might fail or cease to function. Because democracy can be – like human beings – unhealthy but still functioning. But there’s that wider anxiety at the moment: ‘How would we spot the signs of impending collapse?’, and my own view is that we are over-sensitive to that. I don’t see an impending risk of collapse, and I’ve felt for a while that what we tend to view as the signs are out of date.

So, we have a 20th century perspective on this; we are preoccupied with the 1930s and 1970s, this feeling that when democracy goes wrong it kind of collapses in a historically-recognisable way. And I think the big mistake we make is to assume that what we’re looking for are the signs of a re-run of the 1930s: fascism, war, violence, and so on. I don’t think that’s coming; I think if it goes wrong for us, it will go wrong in new ways, so we should be alert to new kinds of signs, not the familiar ones.

Next up, we had a comment sent in from Esther, who argues that democracy is about more than just voting in elections every few years. She believes elections must go together with human rights and the rule of law, and democracy cannot sustain itself if one of those is missing. Is she right?

We put Esther’s comment to Annika Silva-Leander, Head of Democracy Assessment and Political Analysis (DAPA) Unit at International IDEA, where she oversees the Global State of Democracy Report.

Next up, we had a comment sent in from Joseph, who argues:

The major problem is that most people… misunderstand what true democracy is. It is not simply having a vote every 4 or 5 years and then, in between, whomever wins doing anything they please. That is a one-party state, an elected dictatorship.

True democracy is having debates with the opposition, having an independent judiciary who block unconstitutional changes and having the freedom to express every viewpoint. This is frustrating for the supporters of the ruling party because it slows and even stops some of the things they want to do. While that may seem ‘undemocratic’, as the ruling party were elected by a majority, it means that decisions are made carefully considering the differing viewpoints throughout the country.

How would Annika Silva-Leander respond?

Finally, we had a comment sent in from Eleni, arguing that our conception of democracy needs to change:

First of all, we need an actual, contemporary redefinition of the term ‘democracy’, one that takes into account current social and political needs, trends, changes, developments… Today’s democracy cannot and should not be the same as yesterday’s.

How would Professor David Runciman respond?

I don’t think we need to do some big redefinition exercise. People often say the problem with democracy is that we don’t all agree what it means – well people have never agreed on what it means, and you’re setting the bar too high if you’re waiting for everyone to agree what it means. But, I think where we do go wrong is we take this democracy we’ve had for about 100 years (and, in most places, it’s much younger than that) and we think that’s what democracy is, this particular kind of politics: representative, party-based, primarily happens at the national level, runs through elections as its primary means of changing things, presupposes a certain kind of information space (so, things like newspapers and national television and radio stations have been very important to it). It is a twentieth century phenomenon, and we think this is what democracy is. And it’s what democracy has been for most of our lifetimes, and it’s been fantastic and has worked incredibly well in the places where it’s worked. But the idea that that’s all it can be is ridiculous.

It’s true that democracy is thousands of years old, and even if it’s got another century of life left in it, it’s not going to be this. And yet, at the moment, because we are the generations who have had the best of that system, we are so – relatively speaking – prosperous and peaceful in our lives, and so well-off, basically, we are very reluctant to tinker with it and change it. We feel like we have to hold on to this thing or it’s all going to fall apart. I think what we need to do is be much more open to the idea that that form of democracy is coming to the end of its life, and that doesn’t mean the alternative is ‘no democracy’, anti-democracy, or authoritarianism. The alternative should be other forms of democracy, and we should think that the idea is more varied than we currently think it is.

So, not that democracy has to change to some new definition, but that it’s going to be lots of things; democracy is going to have lots of different aspects to it, some much more radical local democracy, some more direct democracy, some parts of our lives might have less democracy in them, questions of international democracy, different kinds of political movements replacing political parties. That version of democracy that worked really well in about 1995 is not done yet, but it’s close to being done, and we should be open to the thought that what comes next is not anti-democracy, what comes next is more varied democracy.

Is democracy coming to an end? Do most people misunderstand how democracy works? Do we need to update how democracy works? Let us know your thoughts and comments in the form below and we’ll take them to policymakers and experts for their reactions!

IMAGE CREDITS: Randy Colas on Unsplash; PORTRAIT CREDITS: Runciman (cc) Central European University