What democracy are we defending?

Last year Philea published a Democracy Briefer for Funders, bringing together state-of-the-art insights into the threats facing democracy across Europe. It is an important contribution and I recommend it. In this piece I build on it by raising a question the Briefer, like most work in our field, leaves open: what exactly are we defending when we defend democracy?

Far-right extremism makes it easy to ignore the question. When people are arrested on the street and thrown in detention at an unknown location for writing an opinion, when governments don’t publish court rulings they dislike, or when tax-funded public media never mentioned the main opposition party, it is not democracy.

These cases are obvious. But many issues are not. What can majorities decide? Do immigration policies have something to do with democracy (prominent democracy researchers say they do not)? How are judges held accountable? How non-partisan does civil society need to be? If we imply that these are simple questions and that all democracies must answer them in identical manners, we would not only have to declare many political positions to be undemocratic, we would also have to deny that democracies vary.

To give one example: Nordic states have generally weak judiciaries. Parliamentary majorities have rather wide leeway to make decisions (unexplainably the V-DEM Index classifies them as very liberal, which in their definition means strong checks and balances). Most European democracies give significant powers to Constitutional Courts or High Courts to check government decisions and often also parliamentary votes.

Neither of these systems is per se illegitimate or inconsistent with obligations that states agreed to under international or European law. They simply represent different constitutional traditions with some leaning more in favour of democratic decision, and others being more cautious about it. Nordic countries reflect Obama’s statement that “elections have consequences” with more vigour and less caution than most continental states do.

Many of our current debates avoid such questions. They use terms like “illiberal” or “populist” which obscure where the border lies between democratic and authoritarian rule. These questions cannot be avoided. They are much more than an academic debate about definitions. They are the foundational questions of our democracies.

In democracies we need to be able to distinguish between a political position, say progressive-left, liberal, centrist or conservative-right, all of which are legitimate, from positions that are inconsistent with democratic rule. Anyone who has discussed with the many voters of extremist or borderline parties knows that it mostly comes down to democracy and to “what is allowed in a democracy”.

It permeates all aspects of the democracy debate. If we want to address severe political polarisation, we must avoid overstretching the notion of democracy. Why? Because then we would treat legitimate political positions as illegitimate – the hallmark of affective polarisation. If people accuse LLM chatbots of being politically biased (a big debate in the US), they should have a concept of what non-bias (= political pluralism) in chatbots would look like. If we are concerned about GONGOS (government organised NGOs), government initiatives that masquerade as civil society, we must have a notion of what attributes a democratic civil society should have and what democracies can legitimately decide on this. If we want to confront authoritarians, we have to heed Steven Levitsky’s and Daniel Ziblatt’s point: “If authoritarians are to be kept out of power, they first have to be identified” (How democracies die, page 22).

A lot of our analysis maps the terrain of external threats to democracy, but we also need a map of fundamental agreements and good-faith disagreements on the notion of democracy. If not, we overlay these two maps and create confusions where legitimate positions start looking like external threats; or where external threats are perceived as mere disagreements on what democracy is.

Whether we are civil society, academics or funders, we need to be sensitive to the question of what democracy is. If we subtly import partisan assumptions into our notion of democracy, we become exclusionary, creating a straitjacket and confirming the accusations that there is no genuine space anymore for majorities to make real political choices. If, on the other hand, we define democracy too loosely, we make it an “anything goes” system, where governments can do whatever they please in the name of majority rule.

In conclusion: Organisations that are involved in defending and furthering democracy should make their understanding of democracy explicit to their partners and the public. They should make conscious decisions on their role as non-partisan supporters of democracy or other public goods, that may be more partisan. At a moment when democracy’s opponents are highly organised, mimicking democracy’s arguments, democracy’s defenders cannot afford ambiguity. We need to know what we are defending.