Democratic Transformation in the Era of Crisis

Democracy across the world is confronting three simultaneously unfolding crises of epochal proportions: the devastation of climate change, the uncertain future of post-neoliberal capitalism, and the rising pressures of geopolitical conflict.  Whether and how democracy succeeds in navigating these challenges will determine whether we are entering an era of terminal democratic decay or fundamental renovation. The powerful political impact of these crises also calls for updated analytical frameworks to explain trends both towards and away from democracy. They are leading to stronger state- and society-led actions, with these qualitative shifts in political dynamics bringing both positive and negative implications for democracy. An era of major and multiple crises is reshaping the politics of democratization and autocratization, and the balance between these.

In Democratic Crossroads, Richard Youngs argues these crises are altering the balance between democratic and authoritarian dynamics around the world. Yet while they add to the strains on democracy, they are also awakening a momentum of democratic resilience and renewal. He argues that to deal with the era’s momentous challenges, democratic politics need a major boost and reboot. Without stronger commitments to uphold and improve democratic norms and practices, democracy may not weather these challenges. As Youngs shows, far-reaching democratic innovation that gives citizens effective influence over epoch-defining matters will help ensure that democratic values are more vigorously defended. In a moment of pivotal change, this book explains how democracies can retain their resiliency and highlights the key factors that will determine democracy’s fortunes in the future.

Crises and political change

The dynamics of political change are moving into a different phase. For over a decade, a narrative of democracy floundering in deep crisis has become the norm and all well-known democracy indices have registered year on year declines in the overall level of global democracy. In explaining this trend, analysts have focused heavily on democracy’s internal evolution and shortcomings, stressing the influence of populist leaders, shifts in identity and economic imbalances.

While these factors are still important, three overarching exogenous crises have increasingly come to act as powerful drivers of political change. These are the crises of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic and its socio-economic spill-over, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These three once-in-a-generation crises have unfolded more or less together and this clustering magnifies their political impacts.

The climate, pandemic and geopolitical crises need to be factored in more systematically to explanatory accounts of both democratic and authoritarian trends. They have begun to change the factors that both drive and hinder democratization and call for reworked analytical frameworks of political change. Conceptual accounts of democratization and autocratization need to incorporate the crucial role that these three critical issues are set to play.

Most crucially, the three crises have both positive and negative implications for democracy. Each has intensified the risks and difficulties that democracy faces in different parts of the world and in some ways given oxygen to authoritarianism. Yet, they have also spurred new democratic commitments and potential.

Climate and ecological stresses are in some places fuelling authoritarian dynamics. Autocratic regimes have assumed more powers under the guise of managing the energy transition and the dramatic effects of extreme weather. Democratic governments too have taken on emergency climate powers that abridge democratic pluralism. Yet, the climate crisis has also engendered a wave of new civic, democratic engagement ad has spurred the creation of locally managed ‘energy communities’ across the world.

The Covid-19 pandemic initially seemed to intensify authoritarian dynamics, as governments around the world appropriate stronger executive powers. Over time it led to new forms of democratic social organisation. The Covid-19 pandemic has left a legacy deeply troubling for open politics in some countries and has in some places provided a cloak for harsher authoritarian surveillance and control. In other countries it left democratic freedoms intact, while having its most notable impact in thickening the civic sphere and opening the way to more inclusive economic policymaking and rights-protecting state action.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has led to an upgrading of formal state commitments to protect and advance democratic norms, as least on the part of Western and some Asian democracies. The war has put some authoritarian systems on the defensive, left others largely untouched, and empowered still others. It has ignited noble democratic conviction in Ukraine, its region and some Western states, while having little resonance to democratic claims in other parts of the world.

The crises’ impact has been mixed, then. While in some senses they turbo charge authoritarian dynamics, the established discourse of democratic decline has become too narrow and unidimensional to capture this mixed impact. Both negative and positive dynamics are gaining force. Arguably, it is the latter strand of positive democratic renewal that is especially striking against the backdrop of a dominant concern with democratic erosion in the last one or two decades.

While the dynamics of crisis-driven political change have gained notable potency, they are subject to nuances and complex variations. The three crises act in very different ways from each other. The ecological crisis is one of long duration that is now crossing decisive tipping-points. The Covid-19 pandemic appeared suddenly, almost completely stopped the world in its tracks for much of 2020 and 2021, subsided in most places, and then led into a series of longer-term and underlying economic, social and political changes. The war on Ukraine has a more dramatic immediacy, while also compounding geopolitical tensions that had had been accumulating in the years before the 2022 invasion.

Moreover, while the crises’ have had far-reaching political impacts, they have not overridden local factors or differences between states. There has been significant variation in outcome across countries and this reflects the influence of these local drivers. Apart from the fact that the respective crises have simply had more severe or immediate effects on some countries than on others, variation results from many local political factors and these caution against overly bold claims about all-prevailing zeitgeists. The power of the three crises relative to local factors varies across different national contexts; their ultimate outcomes are mediated through local national and subnational conditions.

The democracy-related interactions between the three crises are also varied and nuanced. A standard line is that the crises reinforce each other’s negative effects. In their impact on democracy, however, a more varied picture emerges. The crises in some senses offset rather than reinforcing each other, while some of the spill-effects are positive more than negative for democracy. Russia’s difficulties in Ukraine and China’s with respect to Covid-19 offset some the democracies’ difficulties in dealing with the climate crisis. Community-level climate mobilisation and the post-pandemic thickening of civic infrastructure have in many places fused together in doubly positive democratic potential. In myriad ways, the coincidence of the three crises compounds the overall magnitude of political change underway in many places around the world but pull in different and shifting directions.

Statism and localism in tandem

These overlapping shifts are not only driving changes in the overall balance between democracy and autocracy, but also exert a more qualitative impact on politics. The location of power and sites of political activity are moving upwards and downwards at the same time. The three crises of climate change, Covid-19 and geopolitical turbulence are an important part of the explanation for this dual up-down movement.

One trend is towards the empowered state. Public authorities have assumed new powers, responsibilities and resources to address climate change, the pandemic and geopolitical conflict. In this era of neo-statism, climate change, post-pandemic socio-economic challenges and geopolitical conflict are all driving a reassessment of the state and its role in attenuating crisis and existential threats. Each of the three crises has caused policymakers and analysts to call for ambitious levels of rescue and financing through state and international bodies. Governments around the world have begun to empower states as an integral part of embryonic moves towards ecological society, post-pandemic rebuilding and securitized geopolitics.

The other trend is towards what can be designated as micro-politics: a thickening of political and social action organised at a local level, often outside traditional or formal organisational structures. The development of more localized forms of citizen organization and engagement has been apparent and gathering pace in many countries around the world for quite some number of years. Yet this emergent trend has been given a decisive prompt forward by the more recent issues associated with ecological crisis, health emergencies and the need for societal resilience against geopolitical threats. Civic micropolitics are increasingly evident across all types of political regime, from consolidated democracies to hybrid regimes and fully authoritarian states.

In some ways these dynamics of empowered states and micro-politics encapsulate a spirit of democratic renewal and are set to enable this to extend further. The three crises have resulted in state powers being deployed more purposively to attenuate some of the key risks to democratic politics. State-led climate action is vital to saving democracy in a very direct, physical sense, as well as to dealing with the social impacts of energy transition that otherwise could fuel anti-democratic frustration. States empowered in the Covid-19 pandemic acted to preserve the kind of social fabric upon which democracy depends, while also acknowledging the need to redress the socio-economic marginalization that undermines a de facto equality of democratic rights. And strong state action has self-evidently sought to preserve core principles of democratic order in and after the Ukraine war.

For its part, the rise of micropolitics enriches and remoulds mainstream liberal-democratic templates. With both the pandemic and ecological crisis, as well in the ethos of Ukrainian civic resilience, what is often called a democracy of the commons has gained ground, based around a mutualization and shared management of local economies. This micropolitics stands as an understated corrective to higher-level, macro democratic trends. It is still generally not well captured in big-picture analyses or indices of the state of democracy.

Yet the two dynamics entail more problematic implications for democracy too: state power that evades democratic accountability and forms of local-level political engagement that sit uncomfortably with liberal-democratic norms. Neo-statism has empowered some highly authoritarian state machinery. There is a lack of strong accountability over many empowered states in hybrid regimes that combine elements of autocracy with weak democracy. And another concern is the trend towards technocratic statism in democratic states that is not overtly anti-democratic but curtails the breadth and vibrancy of citizens’ influence.

Overall, the impact of these potent trends in political forms is mixed. One much cited analysis from the late 2010s lamented that trends at both state and society level were heading in democracy-weakening rather than democracy-strengthening directions and that the combination of the two was especially problematic: in some countries stronger state powers have not been matched by societal control, while in others the state has effectively become too weak to underpin open politics.* However, the evolving evidence increasingly offers a more varied and balanced picture in this regard. Such negative trends persist but more democratic state-and-society combinations are also gaining momentum.

Truncated transformations

The fact that negative perspectives on democracy have been so dominant in the last decade makes the more positive dynamics of renewal especially interesting from an analytical point of view. However, these generally remain limited and hesitant. A more far-reaching democratic transformation is required if democracy is to adapt to these three major exogenous challenges. In the absence of this transformation, the risk is that trends militate further against democratic politics. The crises dramatically raise the stakes for democracy: they mean that democracy needs to perform better both to protect itself from authoritarian and illiberal alternatives and to show itself germane to the defining crises of the era. 

Democracies have shown tenacity in the buffeting of the three crises of ecological emergency, the pandemic and geopolitical conflict, yet there is clearly a need for deeper reform and rethinking of democracy. The different crises show there is rising demand for democratic renewal and a need for reforms to ensure that democracy can better deal with these shocks. So far, across these different crises, Western democracies have seemed unable to move into a different gear in their responses or shift out of the comfort zone of ‘normal times’ politics in a way that preserves liberalism’s wider appeal.**

This democratic transformation requires multiple advances. Civic micropolitics still needs to be embedded into mainstream politics. The best of participation and technocracy would need to combine in mutually enhancing fusion – a more organically rooted democracy, buttressed by an empowering Leviathan. Democratic renewal must still probe the right combination of active popular engagement with restraints both on power and also on the illiberal risks of popular will.*** Government and civic reformers will need to show greater willingness to look outside standard templates of democracy.

Crises often cut with a double-edged bite. They generate an instinct for political control but also open windows of transformative opportunity. This uneasy combination will mark political trends for many years. In an era of sharpened political agency and action, propelled by dramatic shifts and crises, democracy’s fate is more openly up for grabs than it has been for many years.

*    Acemoglu and Robinson, The Narrow Corridor, 474 and 483.

**  Macaes, Geopolitics for the End Times.

*** J. Keane, 2023, The Shortest History of Democracy, pp. 61-5