Though history has not ended, Fukuyama had a point: democracy has proved to be more attractive than its eulogizers acknowledge.16 After the first wave of democratization broke, there were theories “explaining” how democracy could never take root in Catholic, non-Western, Asian, Muslim, poor, or ethnically diverse countries, each refuted in turn. It is true that stable, top-shelf democracy is likelier to be found in countries that are richer and more highly educated.17 But governments that are more democratic than not are a motley collection: they are entrenched in most of Latin America, in floridly multiethnic India, in Muslim Malaysia, Indonesia, Niger, and Kosovo, in fourteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa (including Namibia, Senegal, and Benin), and in poor countries elsewhere such as Nepal, Timor-Leste, and most of the Caribbean.18
Even the autocracies of Russia and China, which show few signs of liberalizing, are incomparably less repressive than the regimes of Stalin, Brezhnev, and Mao.19 Johan Norberg summarizes life in China: “The Chinese people today can move almost however they like, buy a home, choose an education, pick a job, start a business, belong to a church (as long as they are Buddhists, Taoist, Muslims, Catholics or Protestants), dress as they like, marry whom they like, be openly gay without ending up in a labor camp, travel abroad freely, and even criticize aspects of the Party’s policy (though not its right to rule unopposed). Even ‘not free’ is not what it used to be.”20
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Why has the tide of democratization repeatedly exceeded expectations? The various backslidings, reversals, and black holes for democracy have led to theories which posit onerous prerequisites and an agonizing ordeal of democratization. (This serves as a convenient pretext for dictators to insist that their countries are not ready for it, like the revolutionary leader in Woody Allen’s Bananas who upon taking power announces, “These people are peasants. They are too ignorant to vote.”) The awe is reinforced by a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preference.
By that standard, the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future. Political scientists are repeatedly astonished by the shallowness and incoherence of people’s political beliefs, and by the tenuous connection of their preferences to their votes and to the behavior of their representatives.21 Most voters are ignorant not just of current policy options but of basic facts, such as what the major branches of government are, who the United States fought in World War II, and which countries have used nuclear weapons. Their opinions flip depending on how a question is worded: they say that the government spends too much on “welfare” but too little on “assistance to the poor,” and that it should “use military force” but not “go to war.” When they do formulate a preference, they commonly vote for a candidate with the opposite one. But it hardly matters, because once in office politicians vote the positions of their party regardless of the opinions of their constituents.
Nor does voting even provide much of a feedback signal about a government’s performance. Voters punish incumbents for recent events over which they have dubious control, such as macroeconomic swings and terrorist strikes, or no control at all, such as droughts, floods, even shark attacks. Many political scientists have concluded that most people correctly recognize that their votes are astronomically unlikely to affect the outcome of an election, and so they prioritize work, family, and leisure over educating themselves about politics and calibrating their votes. They use the franchise as a form of self-expression: they vote for candidates who they think are like them and stand for their kind of people.
So despite the widespread belief that elections are the quintessence of democracy, they are only one of the mechanisms by which a government is held responsible to those it governs, and not always a constructive one. When an election is a contest between aspiring despots, rival factions fear the worst if the other side wins and try to intimidate each other from the ballot box. Also, autocrats can learn to use elections to their advantage. The latest fashion in dictatorship has been called the competitive, electoral, kleptocratic, statist, or patronal authoritarian regime.22 (Putin’s Russia is the prototype.) The incumbents use the formidable resources of the state to harass the opposition, set up fake opposition parties, use state-controlled media to spread congenial narratives, manipulate electoral rules, tilt voter registration, and jigger the elections themselves. (Patronal authoritarians, for all that, are not invulnerable—the color revolutions sent several of them packing.)
If neither voters nor elected leaders can be counted on to uphold the ideals of democracy, why should this form of government work so not-badly—the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried, as Churchill famously put it? In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper argued that democracy should be understood not as the answer to the question “Who should rule?” (namely, “The People”), but as a solution to the problem of how to dismiss bad leadership without bloodshed.23 The political scientist John Mueller broadens the idea from a binary Judgment Day to continuous day-to-day feedback. Democracy, he suggests, is essentially based on giving people the freedom to complain: “It comes about when the people effectively agree not to use violence to replace the leadership, and the leadership leaves them free to try to dislodge it by any other means.”24 He explains how this can work:
If citizens have the right to complain, to petition, to organize, to protest, to demonstrate, to strike, to threaten to emigrate or secede, to shout, to publish, to export their funds, to express a lack of confidence, and to wheedle in back corridors, government will tend to respond to the sounds of the shouters and the importunings of the wheedlers: that is, it will necessarily become responsive—pay attention—whether there are elections or not.25
Women’s suffrage is an example: by definition, they could not vote to grant themselves the vote, but they got it by other means.
The contrast between the messy reality of democracy and the civics-class ideal leads to perennial disillusionment. John Kenneth Galbraith once advised that if you ever want a lucrative book contract, just propose to write The Crisis of American Democracy. Reviewing the history, Mueller concludes that “inequality, disagreement, apathy, and ignorance seem to be normal, not abnormal, in a democracy, and to a considerable degree the beauty of the form is that it works despite these qualities—or, in some important respects, because of them.”26
In this minimalist conception, democracy is not a particularly abstruse or demanding form of government. Its main prerequisite is that a government be competent enough to protect people from anarchic violence so they don’t fall prey to, or even welcome, the first strongman who promises he can do the job. (Chaos is deadlier than tyranny.) That’s one reason why democracy has trouble getting a toehold in extremely poor countries with weak governments, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, and in countries whose government has been decapitated, such as Afghanistan and Iraq following the American-led invasions. As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “State failure brings violence and instability; it almost never brings democratization.”27
Ideas matter, too. For democracy to take root, influential people (particularly people with guns) have to think that it is better than alternatives such as theocracy, the divine right of kings, colonial paternalism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (in practice, its “revolutionary vanguard”), or authoritarian rule by a charismatic leader who directly embodies the will of the people. This helps explain other patterns in the annals of democratization, such as why democracy is less likely to take root in countries with less education, in countries that are remote from Western influence (such as in Central Asia), and in countries whose regimes were born of violent, ideologically driven revolutions (such as China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Vietnam).28 Conversely, as people recognize that democracies are relatively nice
places to live, the idea of democracy can become contagious and the number can increase over time.
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The freedom to complain rests on an assurance that the government won’t punish or silence the complainer. The front line in democratization, then, is constraining the government from abusing its monopoly on force to brutalize its uppity citizens.
A series of international agreements beginning with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 drew red lines around thuggish governmental tactics, particularly torture, extrajudicial killings, the imprisonment of dissidents, and the ugly transitive verb coined during the Argentinian military regime of 1974–84, to disappear someone. These red lines are not the same as electoral democracy, since a majority of voters may be indifferent to government brutality as long as it isn’t directed at them. In practice, democratic countries do show greater respect for human rights.29 But the world also has some benevolent autocracies, like Singapore, and some repressive democracies, like Pakistan. This leads to a key question about whether the waves of democratization are really a form of progress. Has the rise in democracy brought a rise in human rights, or are dictators just using elections and other democratic trappings to cover their abuses with a smiley-face?
The US State Department, Amnesty International, and other organizations have monitored violations of human rights over the decades. If one were to look at their numbers since the 1970s, it would appear that governments are as repressive as ever—despite the spread of democracy, human rights norms, international criminal courts, and the watchdog organizations themselves. This has led to pronouncements (delivered with alarm by rights activists and with glee by cultural pessimists) that we have reached “the endtimes of human rights,” “the twilight of human rights law,” and, of course, “the post–human rights world.”30
But progress has a way of covering its tracks. As our moral standards rise over the years, we become alert to harms that would have gone unnoticed in the past. Moreover, activist organizations feel they must always cry “crisis” to keep the heat up (though the strategy can backfire, implying that decades of activism have been a waste of time). The political scientist Kathryn Sikkink calls this the information paradox: as human rights watchdogs admirably look harder for abuse, look in more places for abuse, and classify more acts as abuse, they find more of it—but if we don’t compensate for their keener powers of detection, we can be misled into thinking that there is more abuse to detect.31
The political scientist Christopher Fariss has cut this knot with a mathematical model that compensates for more dogged reporting over time and estimates the actual amount of human rights abuse in the world. Figure 14-2 shows his scores for four countries from 1949 to 2014 and for the world as a whole. The graph displays numbers spat out by a mathematical model, so we should not take the exact values too seriously, but they do indicate differences and trends. The top line is for a country that represents a gold standard for human rights. As with most measures of human flourishing, it is Scandinavian, in this case Norway, and it started high and has grown higher. We see diverging lines for the two Koreas: North, which started low and sank even lower, and South, which rose from a right-wing autocracy during the Cold War into positive territory today. In China, human rights hit bottom during the Cultural Revolution, shot up after the death of Mao, and crested during the 1980s democracy movement before the government cracked down after the Tiananmen Square protests, though they are still well above the Maoist-era lowlands. But the most significant curve is the one for the world as a whole: for all its setbacks, the arc of human rights bends upward.
Figure 14-2: Human rights, 1949–2014
Source: Our World in Data, Roser 2016i, graphing an index devised by Fariss 2014, which estimates protection from torture, extrajudicial killing, political imprisonment, and disappearances. “0” is the mean over all countries and years; the units are standard deviations.
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How does the curtailment of government power unfold in real time? An unusually clear window into the machinery of human progress is the fate of the ultimate exercise of violence by the state: deliberately killing its citizens.
Capital punishment was once ubiquitous among countries, and it was applied to hundreds of misdemeanors in gruesome public spectacles of torture and humiliation.32 (The crucifixion of Jesus together with two common thieves is as good a reminder as any.) After the Enlightenment, European countries stopped executing people for any but the most heinous crimes: by the middle of the 19th century, Britain had reduced the number of capital offenses from 222 to 4. And the countries looked for methods of execution such as drop hanging that were as humane as such a gruesome practice could pretend to be. After World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights inaugurated a second humanitarian revolution, capital punishment was abolished altogether in country after country, and in Europe today it lingers only in Belarus.
The abolition of capital punishment has gone global (figure 14-3), and today the death penalty is on death row.33 In the last three decades, two or three countries have abolished it every year, and less than a fifth of the world’s nations continue to execute people. (While ninety countries retain capital punishment in their law books, most have not put anyone to death in at least a decade.) The UN Special Rapporteur on executions, Christopher Heyns, points out that if the current rate of abolition continues (not that he’s prophesying it will), capital punishment will vanish from the face of the earth by 2026.34
Figure 14-3: Death penalty abolitions, 1863–2016
Source: “Capital Punishment by Country: Abolition Chronology,” Wikipedia, retrieved Aug. 15, 2016. Several European countries abolished the death penalty in their mainland earlier than indicated here, but the time line records the last abolition in any territory under their jurisdiction. The arrow points to 2008, the last year plotted in fig. 4–3 of Pinker 2011.
The top five countries that still execute people in significant numbers form an unlikely club: China and Iran (more than a thousand apiece annually), Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. As in other areas of human flourishing (such as crime, war, health, longevity, accidents, and education), the United States is a laggard among wealthy democracies. This American exceptionalism illuminates the tortuous path by which moral progress proceeds from philosophical arguments to facts on the ground. It also showcases the tension between the two conceptions of democracy we have been examining: a form of government whose power to inflict violence on its citizens is sharply circumscribed, and a form of government that carries out the will of the majority of its people. The reason the United States is a death-penalty outlier is that it is, in one sense, too democratic.
In his history of the abolition of capital punishment in Europe, the legal scholar Andrew Hammel points out that in most times and places the death penalty strikes people as perfectly just: if you take a life, you deserve to lose your own.35 It was only with the Enlightenment that forceful arguments against the death penalty began to appear.36 One argument was that the state’s mandate to exercise violence may not breach the sacred zone of human life. Another was that the deterrent effect of capital punishment can be achieved with surer and less brutal penalties.
The ideas trickled down from a thin stratum of philosophers and intellectuals to the educated upper classes, particularly liberal professionals like doctors, lawyers, writers, and journalists. Abolition was soon folded into a portfolio of other progressive causes, including mandatory education, universal suffrage, and workers’ rights. It was also sacralized under the halo of “human rights” and held out as a symbol of “the kind of society we choose to live in and the kind of people we choose to be.” The abolitionist elites in Europe got their way over the misgivings of the common man because European democracies did not convert the opinions of the common man into policy. The penal codes of their countries were drafted by committees of renowned scholars, passed into law by legislators who th
ought of themselves as a natural aristocracy, and implemented by appointed judges who were lifelong civil servants. It was only after a couple of decades had elapsed and people saw that their country had not fallen into chaos—at which point it would have taken a concerted effort to reintroduce capital punishment—that the populace came around to seeing it as unnecessary.
But the United States, for better or worse, is closer to having government by the people for the people. Other than for a few federal crimes like terrorism and treason, the death penalty is decided upon by individual states, voted on by legislators who are close to their constituents, and in many states sought and approved by prosecutors and judges who have to stand for reelection. Southern states have a longstanding culture of honor, with its ethos of justified retaliation, and not surprisingly, American executions are concentrated in a handful of Southern states, mainly Texas, Georgia, and Missouri—indeed, in a handful of counties in those states.37