Kaushik Basu's column: Why do some democracies succeed and some don't?

There are many complexities inherent in democracy. At its core is the difficulty of how to turn personal choice into a coherent social decision? Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow called it improbability-theorem. Later, another Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, further developed this idea in his book 'Collective Choice and Social Welfare'. What Euclid did for geometry in the past, Arrow and Sen did for political economy and in the process exposed the limitations of collective decisions. Although the theoretical understanding of democracy has grown over time, its empirical analysis has lagged behind. In the absence of consistent data, the understanding of why some democracies succeed and others fail is often formed by biases rather than evidence. To address this shortcoming, Sweden's V-Dem Institute publishes its annual 'Democracy Report', which is one of the best efforts to take stock of the state of democracy in the countries of the world. The institute's latest report offers a sobering assessment of America's current direction. It warns that the pace at which American democracy is disintegrating is unprecedented in modern history. Given America's dominance as the world's leading democracy, such a decline has wide-ranging implications beyond its borders. The report also points to a sharp decline in Western Europe, where populist leaders are taking lessons from Trump. Arguably, any attempt to measure democracy is open to criticism, especially because there is no single universally accepted definition of democracy. Still, the V-Dem Institute report is probably one of the most diligent efforts. It assesses indicators that track the robustness of democratic institutions and limit the scope for personal bias in the evaluation of countries with different political cultures. Not surprisingly, Denmark, Sweden and Norway are at the top of V-DEM's 2026 index, while Eritrea, North Korea and Myanmar are at the bottom. The report paints a gloomy picture. She underlines that the gains made by the democratization wave of the second half of the 20th century are almost gone. But it also brings out some encouraging developments. Sri Lanka, for example, has seen a democratic resurgence under the leadership of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake. At the same time, after Lula da Silva's 2022 election victory in Brazil, it has become clear that the stream of democratic collapse in a country can also be reversed. Despite this, the broader trend is evident in front of us. The process that began with Portugal's Carnation Revolution in 1974—what political scientist Samuel Huntington called the third wave of democratization—expanded democracy to dozens of countries. Now that this wave is retreating, nearly five decades of democratic progress are being adversely affected. Can this trend be reversed? As Brian Stelter has said, two institutional tools offer the most hope—elections, which give citizens the power to change governments, and the independent judiciary, which serves to curb the encroachment of the executive. As I said in my book 'Beyond the Invisible Hand', in an interconnected global economy shaped by geopolitical inequalities, the leaders of major countries can be as important to ordinary people as their own governments. This is especially true for small countries, which are economically or strategically dependent on large countries. The problem would be less serious if governments followed international standards. But powerful countries have many ways of putting pressure on weak countries. This is why measuring the health of global democratic governance cannot depend solely on the sum total of national scores. It should also include how the dominant powers influence, limit and encroach on rights beyond their borders. It is difficult to formulate such parameters, but without it, our understanding of democracy will remain incomplete. (@प्रोजेक्ट Syndicate)