Q&A: In a Year of Elections, a Podcast Takes Stock of Democracy

What was the impetus for making the podcast?

This podcast began in a crucial year for democracy in which 4 billion people went to the polls—more than in any previous year. But interestingly only half of them were voting in elections that we would think of as free and fair. To get a broad view, we have spoken to people from Senegal to Malaysia, Latin America to Ukraine, and South Africa to Lebanon—seeking to outline the challenges to the world’s democracies as well as emphasizing the strengths, and exploring the state of the free press, the judiciary, and other important elements of democracy’s immune system. 

Is democracy always the best model of government?

Broadly speaking, I’m a democracy optimist. I think that everyone ideally would be able to choose their own leaders, have the right to say what we think, and to organize with whom we want. I think many of the people who criticize democracy would not want to lose those things. However, there are clearly places around the world where the context is different. In one episode with Sharun Makund, an expert on Rwandan politics, we discussed the phenomenon of using authoritarianism to keep tensions at bay when there is a recent history of ethnic conflict. There are going to be situations where there may be concerns around immediately introducing democracy. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be a goal that we try to head toward.

Can everyone participate in democracy?

In terms of legal restrictions to voting we are almost at the final staging point of universal suffrage. The story of the 19th century was about enfranchising poor men, and the story of the 20th century was largely about enfranchising women, though racial minority groups continued to be excluded right up until the 1960s in the case of the United States. Now that has been replaced by creating difficulties and burdens to vote. In most countries, prisoners can’t vote until they complete their sentence, though that is not the case in many American states. Even things like extremely long polling lines can be seen as implicit restrictions and raise issues around the perceived legality of elections, something we may see after November 5 in the U.S. if the election is close.

What is the role of the youth vote in democracies around the world?

Young people do vote less than older people, but it can vary across different countries. The last U.S. presidential election had the highest turnout of eligible voters since 1900—partially fueled by the youth vote. In many countries over the last 20 years, young men have become more conservative, while young women have become more liberal. In the U.S., that could be related to abortion rights and women’s liberty being taken away. And in South Korea, for example, it could be related to the view that young men are seeing the traditional privileges of the patriarchy being taken away. Sub-Saharan Africa has the youngest population of any region in the world, so we absolutely should be expecting young voters to be crucial there, as evidenced by how competitive politics and elections in South African and Nigerian have been in the last decade. You have a very large group demographic emerging into voting age which can often completely outweigh the previous generations, as happened with boomers in Europe and North America.

How important are protests in democracies?

Protests for democracy might not always achieve their immediate goals but they are an important component in the way in which countries democratize. The 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine is a great example of protest movements pushing toward democracy. In an episode on street politics, we interviewed the Dakar-based graffiti artist Madzoo on how the recent protest movements and opposition victory could influence Senegalese democracy in the future. In Kenya, young people felt that they couldn’t afford to live, and their protest was the mechanism by which the government understood how problematic their economic policies were going to be. Meanwhile, over in Iran, protests are clamped down on immediately by the Revolutionary Guards. But the outcome of protests can also depend on who is doing the protesting or how close you are to elections. We spoke to Ilya Marittz, a journalist who had interviewed people who were part of the January 6th insurrection. They considered themselves to be protesters, that Trump had won the election, and that democracy was being unfairly curtailed. So I do think it is important to understand why we have so many tensions about what legitimate and illegitimate protest is.

What influence does the climate crisis play in democracies?

I don’t think we have got to the hard part yet, which is figuring out how to get democratic consent for actual policies that are costly and might be necessary to meet climate goals. We can see that there is lots of general support for the idea of net zero in Europe but lots of opposition to any specific policy that might achieve it. So that suggests to me that this is a big risk for democracies because authoritarian countries that have signed up to climate commitments may be able to achieve their objectives by ignoring their public’s discontent. There is very warranted skepticism from the Global South about this when countries in the Global North demand fast action but then refuse to sign or make binding commitments themselves. Democracies are going to need a kind of John F. Kennedy moment—asking not what the world can do for you, but what you can do for the world.

How is misinformation threatening democracy?

Lies have been spread through the media for as long as we have had a mass media but now people are probably at least more educated about the need to immunize themselves against misinformation than they would have been 100 years ago. The bad news is that misinformation can travel now at the speed of light. Elliott Higgins from the investigative journalism group Bellingcat told us that they can expose lies and misinformation using the same set of networks that spread falsity. The very technologies and media that enable the misinformation are often our best ways of catching it. But levels of trust in government have fallen through the floor in democracies both in the Global North and South, something that is likely to continue if people are content to find their own sources of information that match their own prejudices. Although when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, citizens across England to Italy to China to India to the U.S. to Brazil mostly obeyed what the government asked them to do.

What is the future for democracy?

Most elections around the world this year have been more competitive than we thought, especially where people were worried about an authoritarian turn. We can see a pushback against governments from Poland to India to Turkey to Bangladesh. In Europe, we have seen the rise of parties that, though populist, are mostly pro-democracy (though perhaps not always in favor of the liberal parts of democracy) and voters have often balked at giving these parties huge amounts of power—as seen most recently in France where an alliance of parties triumphed against the far-right Rassemblement National. But many of the electoral systems we have don’t reflect the diversity of people’s opinions. The best example of that is the latest British election, where the Labour Party has two thirds of the seats in parliament with just one third of the vote. I’m not sure how tenable it is to carry on having multiparty voting in a two-party system. But overall, many have spoken about 2024 being the year that democracy dies, whereas the evidence suggests otherwise.