It might be criminal not to introduce this article with the quote that so many similar ones include. Winston Churchill famously remarked that “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” But what did he mean by this? Is democracy, the system of government touted by almost all Western nations, really so unsatisfactory? Is it just as prone to the corruption, injustices, and inefficiency that so often plague defective societies?
The success of democratic societies is largely dependent on the average citizen’s freedom to choose and their civil wisdom. There has always been a belief in and a reliance on a well-informed citizenry. Democracies are threatened around the world because well informed citizens are under assault around the world. The very nature of knowledge and of what we know is being steadily undermined.
It’s important to firstly define what democracy is. Encyclopedia Britannica defines democracy as “a system of government in which power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or through freely elected representatives.” The Ancient Athenians, who are credited with the creation of democracy, implemented a system where the citizenry had direct control over all aspects of the political process. This direct engagement allowed for public discourse, as citizens were encouraged to voice their opinions and influence the direction of their government. However, critics of Athenian democracy like Plato and Thucydides were concerned about potentially ignorant or misinformed citizenry having direct control over all aspects of the political process.
The United States is unique in its appreciation and representation of democracy. It contains both direct and indirect forms of representative governance to ensure citizens have political power. From the outset, the US sought to create a system that balanced the will of the people with the need for competent leadership. Slogans such as “no taxation with representation” epitomize the American people’s commitment to civic engagement and demands for a voice in government. Many other mainstream symbols of democracy popularly touted as “American” exist as well. One slightly satirical, yet popularized amalgamation of symbols–the American flag, the eagle and guns–creates a maximalist metaphor of what democracy and freedom for the people looks like.
No method of governance is perfect. Even democracy is–and should be–scrutinized and criticized to develop the average citizen’s understanding of how our system of government works and how it might be improved. It’s a battle between the ideal and the real.
Some of democracy’s drawbacks are the shadows of unalterable elements of its design, problems that are inherent and cannot be resolved without scrapping the entire foundation on which democracy is based. To be specific, there are a few main weaknesses democracy presents:
- The battle between political parties and ideologies sometimes lacks stability.
- There’s a slow response to crises; an ardent insistence on debate, discussion and compromise.
- There are those moments of individual or group corruption as well as the potential for abusing power for personal gain.
- Democracy has a strong dependence on a potentially uninformed, misinformed, and or gullible citizenry.
Historically, a substantial amount of this is heavily influenced by education through literacy, schooling, and personal research and awareness. But can rational decision-makers and thinkers outwit mass media? According to the American Psychological Association, misinformation heard for the first time will be persuasive about 99.6% of the time. As the media increasingly shifts away from credible sources and toward the sensational and entertaining realms of Internet and social media, opportunities for misinformation continue to proliferate. From targeted ads based on algorithms that are getting smarter, political Instagram posts that conveniently don’t list their sources, or profit-driven and sensationalized news reporting, the internet provides the space for echo chambers that can be harmful to the average person’s political awareness.
Social media also provides ample opportunity for foreign nations to influence how young voters think by subtly injecting political propaganda into posts and generally causing political unrest. Russia, Iran, and China are the three most common sources of foreign influence operations, according to Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.
As NPR states, “Facebook parent Meta says Chinese law enforcement is behind the largest covert online influence operation the company has ever disrupted. The operation spread pro-China messages and attacked critics of Beijing’s policies, using a sprawling network of fake accounts across more than 50 websites, from Facebook and Instagram to YouTube, Twitter (now known as X), TikTok, Reddit, and dozens of smaller platforms and forums.”
Increasing dependency on the internet and social media for information, particularly among young people, exposes them to a substantial amount of misinformation and propaganda–concerning both national and international affairs–that poses a clear threat to democracy. The former does so by diminishing the vital principle of informed decision-making when voting. The latter threatens democracy in a rather obvious way; Iran, Russia, and China are all autocratic nations, and their influence on any democratic voter body is dangerous.
One study done in 2020 titled “Is Journalistic Truth Dead? Measuring How Informed Voters Are about Political News” was authored by MIT Sloan’s Charles Angelucci and Columbia University’s Andrea Prat. They found that voters in the United States are 10 to 30 percent less likely to be aware of news stories that are unfavorable to their political party compared to voters of the opposing party. The same study found that the most informed voters were white, wealthy, and educated men above the age of 47, while the least informed voters were young, low-income minority women. The former had a 44% chance of knowing a given news story, whereas the latter had only a 30% chance of knowing the same news story. These findings point to education being one of the contributing factors when it comes to a voter’s political awareness, especially when considering wealthy white men have historically had more opportunities in the realms of education compared to poorer, younger, minority women (and women in general).
Politicians are not unaware of who is paying the most attention to politics. Angelucci says that this is a common concept in political science: Politicians end up catering to older, educated white men because they know they’re the ones who are the most invested in politics. They do this in hopes that they’ll gain more votes. In this way, it is not only the immediate reward of greater (political) knowledge that education brings, but the mere perception of a group of people being educated that can mean more policies benefiting them. This is one of the ways in which a democracy can end up supporting a minority of the people instead of the majority of the people.
Another reason education is so important when it comes to supporting democracy is it helps voters become aware of what they’re actually voting for. If voters aren’t privy to how (at times, complex) policies shape their lives and the futures of their nations, they are more likely to be led astray by attention-grabbing, emotionally appealing propaganda. Without the opportunity to develop an appreciation for how politics, people, and logic work, which education often provides, it becomes easier to grow confused by complicated campaigns and instead feel a stronger attraction to simpler ones that induce fear. According to the American Psychological Association, in reference to political campaigns, “a meta-analysis conducted by Albarracin and her colleagues found that messages with fear are nearly twice as effective as messages without fear.” (Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 141, No. 6, 2015)
The only way a voter can protect themselves from falling victim to these misleading tactics is to diversify the sources of information they consume to escape echo chambers, cross reference information to avoid misleading claims, stay up to date on current events to learn more, and form their own opinions. In simple terms: To effectively vote for what you believe will benefit you and your country, it is essential to educate yourself.
Of course, dependence on voters is far from an objective weakness. In an ideal world, a government dependent on a group of rational and informed people doesn’t have much to worry about. The real threat to democracy, rather, lies in the potential for a nation’s government to have to rely on a politically unaware, propaganda-prone nation of voters that theoretically have the power to do a lot of bad for their own country–possibly to the benefit of one power-hungry politician. Propaganda and misinformation will always exist as any real democracy will promote freedom of information, so it truly is up to voters to be aware. The risk of depending on an uninformed or misled group of voters is inherent when it comes to democracy. The people, no matter if they’ve been manipulated, are the core of any democratic nation.
Adding to the confusion voters might experience alongside misinformation, it’s incredibly easy to grow disoriented concerning just what you’re supporting amidst polarization and the sensationalism of hot-button/controversial topics. Polarization is widely defined as the divergence of political attitudes away from the center, towards ideological extremes. A good example of this in The United States is how separated the political left and the right have become, with each possessing distinct opinions on a variety of controversial topics. Controversial social issues in particular have the capacity to overshadow many less provocative, but in some cases equally important, policies. Journalist Allen Faulton writes “Just because a candidate shares your view on abortion doesn’t mean they’re good at anything else. But that candidate is very likely to get elected (or not), depending on the prevailing views of their electorate on that trigger issue, and that issue alone. This has the effect of removing huge swathes of critically important issues from the public forum while also enabling absolute dumbasses to rise to positions of power.”
Polarization is not necessarily guaranteed to exist alongside any democracy. Its presence depends on how simplified or complicated a democracy’s political party system is and the size of the pool of representatives voters can choose from. Some simplification is necessary because people have lives outside of thinking about politics and are only willing to participate in government and vote if they don’t have too many choices. It can lead to extreme polarization, as we see in the United States, where many voters don’t like either of the only two main presidential candidates and rely on “voting for the lesser of two evils”.
Polarization also relates to how informed voters of a nation are. Voters who aren’t as politically aware are less likely to give thought to subtler, more complex elements of politics. Rather, emotional and extreme ideas or campaigns that arise as a result of polarization may appeal to them more. Even for the most informed of voters, it becomes so much harder to form cogent opinions on complicated issues when things become too polarized.
Another weakness of democracy that is less related to voter participation is a slow response to threats, as well as an even slower process when it comes to drawing conclusions on convoluted, less immediate subject matters. This characteristic is baked into many democratic governments as a means to discourage the most powerful from making decisions that could change the course of an entire nation by themselves. Time for deliberation can be an upside when it comes to ensuring that everyone’s voices are heard and a quality solution can be formulated. When it comes to national emergencies, however, determining a balance between speed (how quickly can an emergency be responded to?) and power (who is determining a fast response?) is necessary.
Prioritizing a timely response to emergencies can mean granting executive power to select individuals in a nation. This compromises some principles of democracy, such as equality–minority voices are likely to be overlooked. In times of crisis, many nations give executive powers the ability to override certain rights promised to citizens in constitutions and laws. The National Emergencies Act, or the NEA, which was passed in 1976 in the United States, is a prime example of this. As the Brennan Center describes it, “The law gives the President near-total discretion to declare a national emergency; there are no substantive criteria that must be met. The declaration then unlocks enhanced powers contained in more than 130 statutory provisions scattered across the U.S. Code.”
Of course, this unlocks the potential for the abuse of executive power. In 2019, for instance, Donald Trump declared a national emergency in order to attempt to procure eight billion taxpayer dollars towards building a wall along the southern US border after Congress refused to grant him these funds.
On the other hand, prioritizing the principles of democracy over the speed the government can respond to an emergency has clear potential consequences for the wellbeing of a nation and its citizens. Many sources, such as Scientific American, partially attribute the United States’ mishandling of preventing the spread of Covid-19 to our government’s distributive power structure. Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, states “Every district, every county, every state could make decisions and keep them to themselves. And we just have uneven applications of public health recommendations in a way that I can’t imagine any other country does.”
This lack of coordination is due to some responses to the pandemic being left in the hands of state and local governments, meaning policies all over the nation differed. While in this context, decentralized governing was an obstacle, it is a feature that is embedded within America’s government to protect democracy. It is purposefully deeply rooted in our legislative system. While the Trump Administration has been widely blamed for the mishandling of the pandemic, the distribution of different policies during this time and the asymmetry and confusion it creates is difficult for any administration–left or right leaning–to try to mitigate.
While some of these weaknesses arise as a rather unalterable consequence of some of the main tenets of democracy, there are some complications that have the potential to be greatly attenuated. Particularly, complications surrounding voters. Every person has the ability to become a more active citizen in helping to protect democracy by educating themselves and learning to discern reliable, objective sources of information from misleading stories and propaganda.
