Democracy’s new dividing lines: Populist anger and polarisation

The latest edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index reveals how new divisions are becoming entrenched in many of the world’s democracies.

Democracy is facing a crisis today, at the root of which is an increasingly stark divide variously characterised as being between elites and electorates, experts and the people, insiders and outsiders, “citizens of nowhere” and “citizens of somewhere”.

These deepening political, social and cultural divisions were reflected in worsening scores on the question of social cohesion for a number of countries in the 2017 Democracy Index.

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Among the advanced democracies of Europe and North America, for example, political and social polarisation worsened in the US, the UK, Austria, Belgium, France and Spain.

These are no longer simply the old divisions of class, though these have not gone away.

Today’s divisions express antagonistic views and values on a range of issues, including immigration, globalisation, the nation state, history, tradition, and culture. They presage the breakdown of the traditional party alignments of the post-1945 era, demarcated along conservative/Christian democratic vs socialist/social democratic lines, and the emergence of new political formations.

The emergence of these divisions has coincided with a broad-based deterioration in the practice of democracy over the past decade, as reflected in our annual Democracy Index since its launch in 2006.

Strikingly, this democratic regression has been most apparent in some of the oldest democracies in the world, in western Europe and in the US.

The main manifestations of this crisis of democracy include: declining popular participation in elections and politics; weaknesses in the functioning of government; declining public trust in institutions; dwindling appeal of mainstream political parties; growing influence of unelected institutions and expert bodies; a widening gap between political elites and electorates; a decline in media freedoms; and an erosion of civil liberties.

A survey by Pew Research Centre on global attitudes towards democracy, published in October 2017, revealed a disjuncture between generally high levels of public support for democracy across the globe, and deep popular disappointment with the functioning of democracy and systems of political representation.

This disappointment with “actually existing democracy” helps to explain the popular revolt that resulted in the UK’s vote in June 2016 to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump as US president in November 2016.

Both were expressions of a deep popular dissatisfaction with the status quo and of a demand for change.

If 2016 was notable for the populist insurgency against mainstream parties and politicians, 2017 was defined by a liberal backlash against populism, which has led to further polarisation.

The reaction to the populist insurgency has revealed the prevalence of prejudices about the average voter. Some have blamed popular ignorance and xenophobia for the Brexit and Trump results and presented voters (and supporters of populist parties in general) as a threat to democracy today.

The resulting deepening polarisation between the political class and alienated voters was one of the most striking trends in the western democracies in 2017.

A major focus of this year’s Democracy Index report, entitled Free speech under attack, is the state of media freedom and freedom of expression around the world.

According to our Media Freedom Index, only 30 countries out of the 167 covered by the Democracy Index – representing 11 per cent of the world’s population – are classified as “fully free”. Another 40 countries, representing 34.2 per cent, are classified as “partly free”, while 97 are rated as “unfree” or “largely unfree”.

Freedom of expression faces a threefold threat.

The state in democratic and authoritarian countries is deploying defamation, prevention of terrorism, blasphemy and other laws to curb freedom of expression.

Non-state actors, including militant Islamists, criminal gangs, and vested interests use intimidation, threats, violence and murder to stifle free speech.

Those claiming the right not to be offended are demanding “safe spaces”, “trigger warnings”, “hate speech” laws, and regulation of social media.

Instead of a “golden age for free speech”, ushered in by the internet and social media, in practice freedom of expression is increasingly restricted.

The Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories. This covers almost the entire population of the world and the vast majority of the world’s states. The Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on its scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: “full democracy”; “flawed democracy”; “hybrid regime”; and “authoritarian regime”. The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index 2017 is available free of charge here.

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