thesis statement for democracy

How to Write a Thesis about Democracy

One of my subscribers, Nadir, is asking, “How do I write a thesis about democracy?”

That’s a great question.

We’re going to break this task into three steps. Let’s do it.

Step 1: We’re going to break up “democracy,” meaning the concept of democracy, into more manageable parts.

Step 2: We’re going to come up with an overall structure, which is almost an equivalent of creating an outline.

Step 3:  Finally, we’re going to write out the thesis statement. Let’s do it.

Step 1. How can we break democracy into manageable parts?

We’ll use the Power of Three because it’s the easiest way to break up a topic. The power of three just means using three supporting ideas as evidence in our body of the essay.

How can we divide democracy into three parts? How can we discuss democracy in three different ways or three different sections of a paper?

Supporting Idea 1. Early origins.

These would be the origins of democracy that take their root in Ancient Greece.

Supporting Idea 2 .  Modern roots of today’s democracy.

So what would be the modern roots? The modern roots are the main thinkers of the Enlightenment and their ideas.

These are such prominent philosophers as John Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu.

The Age of Enlightenment is also known as the Age of Reason, and that is where today’s democracy really takes root.

Supporting Idea 3. Democracy today .

This would answer the question, how is today’s democracy different from democracy of the early origins, such as in ancient Greece, and during the Age of Enlightenment?

Step 2. Coming up with the overall structure.

We know that we have three sections because we used the power of three to get three supporting ideas. So, here is how we can structure our overall argument.

In section 1 , we’re going to talk about the ancient Greek origins of democracy.

In section 2 , we’re going to talk about its modern roots.

In section 3 , we’ll discuss democracy today.

What will these sections contain?

In Section 1 , we’re really talking about Athenian democracy. And we can subdivide this topic into more than one subtopic.

In ancient Greece, principles with which we are familiar were born. These include voting for rulers and to pass legislation. This could be one subsection.

But we can also note some peculiarities of that ancient kind of democracy.

For example, only non-slave men could vote, which made up only about 10-15% of the population. 

As a result, we now have two subsections of main section 1. Essentially, we are talking about two things:

• The familiar principles of Athenian democracy
• The peculiarities of its early days

Section 2 is about the early modern roots of democracy.

We’re talking about some of the main thinkers. The two philosophers who come up right away if you do a search on Google are John Locke and Montesquieu.

These two names give us two subsections. See how it works?

Could we subdivide them further? How can we discuss Johns Locke and Montesquieu? Well, we can discuss them in terms of their ideas.

For example, John Locke was concerned with such concepts as equality, social contract, and private property. We can simply write about several concepts from each of these thinkers to have a neat little subsection about each one.

You can write a paragraph on equality, and then a paragraph on social contract, and so on.

In order to discuss these thinkers, all we would have to do is discuss their ideas. Since each of them had more than one idea, this gives us a wonderful way to keep writing.

How much you want to subdivide your sections will depend on how big your paper has to be.

If you need only three to four pages, maybe you don’t have to go that deep. But if you have to write a 10-page or a 15-page paper, this way of dividing into subsections would be very helpful to you.

Section 3 is about Democracy today.

Modern democracy has its similarities to the Ancient Greek origins and to the early modern roots. It also has its differences from them.

The similarities can include some of the main ideas that remain constant at all times.

The differences can include some of the peculiarities of each time period, such as voter rights or electronic or mail-in voting.

And we’re ready to write out our thesis statement, based on all the preparatory work we just did.

Step 3. Writing out the thesis statement.

We are totally ready to write this thesis statement.

And here we are.

Democracy is an ancient principle that has undergone changes and that is practiced in today’s society. It originates in Ancient Greece but was rediscovered during the period of Enlightenment in Britain and France. While today’s democracy shares elements with the ancient and early modern forms, it has its own distinct traits.

Let’s take a closer look at this thesis statement.

The first sentence should summarize your entire essay completely and perfectly. And that’s exactly what we’re doing here.

The remaining sentences must outline the supporting points. We combined the first two supporting points in the second sentence. And the third sentence is devoted to the third supporting point.

Let’s take a look.

And there you have it: three steps to going from one concept, which in this case is Democracy, to a full thesis statement.

I wrote a detailed tutorial on how to write a thesis statement on any topic . This would be your best next step.

Hope this was helpful!

Tutor Phil is an e-learning professional who helps adult learners finish their degrees by teaching them academic writing skills.

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Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Forms of Government — Democracy

Essays on Democracy

Democracy essay topics and outline examples, essay title 1: the evolution of democracy: historical origins, principles, and contemporary challenges.

Thesis Statement: This essay explores the historical roots of democracy, its foundational principles, and the contemporary challenges it faces in the context of modern societies.

• Introduction
• Origins of Democracy: Ancient Greece and Beyond
• Democratic Principles: Rule of Law, Freedom, and Participation
• Democracy in Practice: Case Studies of Democratic Nations
• Challenges to Democracy: Populism, Authoritarianism, and Erosion of Institutions
• Electoral Systems: Voting Methods and Representation
• Media and Democracy: The Role of Information and Misinformation
• Conclusion: Safeguarding Democracy in the 21st Century

Essay Title 2: The Democratic Experiment: Comparative Analysis of Democratic Systems Worldwide

Thesis Statement: This essay conducts a comparative analysis of democratic systems in different countries, highlighting variations in practices, governance structures, and outcomes.

• Democratic Models: Presidential vs. Parliamentary Systems
• Democratic Variations: Federalism and Unitarism
• Elections and Representation: Proportional vs. First-Past-the-Post Systems
• Citizen Participation: Direct Democracy and Referendums
• Case Studies: Analyzing Democracies in Europe, Asia, and the Americas
• Democratic Challenges: Corruption, Voter Suppression, and Civic Engagement
• Conclusion: Lessons Learned from Global Democratic Experiences

Essay Title 3: The Digital Age and Democracy: Technology, Social Media, and the Shaping of Political Discourse

Thesis Statement: This essay examines the influence of technology and social media on democratic processes, including their impact on political communication, public opinion, and election outcomes.

• The Digital Revolution: Internet Access and Political Engagement
• Social Media Platforms: Their Role in Disseminating Information and Disinformation
• Filter Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Polarization of Political Discourse
• Online Activism: Grassroots Movements and Their Impact
• Regulation and Ethics: Balancing Free Speech and Accountability Online
• Case Studies: Examining Elections and Political Campaigns in the Digital Age
• Conclusion: Navigating the Intersection of Technology and Democracy

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Essay on Democracy in 100, 300 and 500 Words

• Updated on  
• Jan 15, 2024

The oldest account of democracy can be traced back to 508–507 BCC Athens . Today there are over 50 different types of democracy across the world. But, what is the ideal form of democracy? Why is democracy considered the epitome of freedom and rights around the globe? Let’s explore what self-governance is and how you can write a creative and informative essay on democracy and its significance. 

Today, India is the largest democracy with a population of 1.41 billion and counting. Everyone in India above the age of 18 is given the right to vote and elect their representative. Isn’t it beautiful, when people are given the option to vote for their leader, one that understands their problems and promises to end their miseries? This is just one feature of democracy , for we have a lot of samples for you in the essay on democracy. Stay tuned!

Can you answer these questions in under 5 minutes? Take the Ultimate GK Quiz to find out!

What is Democracy? 

Democracy is a form of government in which the final authority to deliberate and decide the legislation for the country lies with the people, either directly or through representatives. Within a democracy, the method of decision-making, and the demarcation of citizens vary among countries. However, some fundamental principles of democracy include the rule of law, inclusivity, political deliberations, voting via elections , etc. 

Did you know: On 15th August 1947, India became the world’s largest democracy after adopting the Indian Constitution and granting fundamental rights to its citizens?

Must Explore: Human Rights Courses for Students 

Must Explore: NCERT Notes on Separation of Powers in a Democracy

Sample Essay on Democracy (100 words)

Democracy where people make decisions for the country is the only known form of governance in the world that promises to inculcate principles of equality, liberty and justice. The deliberations and negotiations to form policies and make decisions for the country are the basis on which the government works, with supreme power to people to choose their representatives, delegate the country’s matters and express their dissent. The democratic system is usually of two types, the presidential system, and the parliamentary system. In India, the three pillars of democracy, namely legislature, executive and judiciary, working independently and still interconnected, along with a free press and media provide a structure for a truly functional democracy. Despite the longest-written constitution incorporating values of sovereignty, socialism, secularism etc. India, like other countries, still faces challenges like corruption, bigotry, and oppression of certain communities and thus, struggles to stay true to its democratic ideals.

Did you know: Some of the richest countries in the world are democracies?

Must Read : Consumer Rights in India

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10

Sample Essay on Democracy (250 to 300 words)

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.” There is undeniably no doubt that the core of democracies lies in making people the ultimate decision-makers. With time, the simple definition of democracy has evolved to include other principles like equality, political accountability, rights of the citizens and to an extent, values of liberty and justice. Across the globe, representative democracies are widely prevalent, however, there is a major variation in how democracies are practised. The major two types of representative democracy are presidential and parliamentary forms of democracy. Moreover, not all those who present themselves as a democratic republic follow its values.

Many countries have legally deprived some communities of living with dignity and protecting their liberty, or are practising authoritarian rule through majoritarianism or populist leaders. Despite this, one of the things that are central and basic to all is the practice of elections and voting. However, even in such a case, the principles of universal adult franchise and the practice of free and fair elections are theoretically essential but very limited in practice, for a democracy. Unlike several other nations, India is still, at least constitutionally and principally, a practitioner of an ideal democracy.

With our three organs of the government, namely legislative, executive and judiciary, the constitutional rights to citizens, a multiparty system, laws to curb discrimination and spread the virtues of equality, protection to minorities, and a space for people to discuss, debate and dissent, India has shown a commitment towards democratic values. In recent times, with challenges to freedom of speech, rights of minority groups and a conundrum between the protection of diversity and unification of the country, the debate about the preservation of democracy has become vital to public discussion.

Did you know: In countries like Brazil, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Austria the minimum voting age is 16 years?

Also Read: Difference Between Democracy and Dictatorship

Sample Essay on Democracy for UPSC (500 words)

Democracy originated from the Greek word dēmokratiā , with dēmos ‘people’ and Kratos ‘rule.’ For the first time, the term appeared in the 5th century BC to denote the political systems then existing in Greek city-states, notably Classical Athens, to mean “rule of the people.” It now refers to a form of governance where the people have the right to participate in the decision-making of the country. Majorly, it is either a direct democracy where citizens deliberate and make legislation while in a representative democracy, they choose government officials on their behalf, like in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.

The presidential system (like in the USA) has the President as the head of the country and the government, while the parliamentary system (like in the UK and India) has both a Prime Minister who derives its legitimacy from a parliament and even a nominal head like a monarch or a President.

The notions and principle frameworks of democracy have evolved with time. At the core, lies the idea of political discussions and negotiations. In contrast to its alternatives like monarchy, anarchy, oligarchy etc., it is the one with the most liberty to incorporate diversity. The ideas of equality, political representation to all, active public participation, the inclusion of dissent, and most importantly, the authority to the law by all make it an attractive option for citizens to prefer, and countries to follow.

The largest democracy in the world, India with the lengthiest constitution has tried and to an extent, successfully achieved incorporating the framework to be a functional democracy. It is a parliamentary democratic republic where the President is head of the state and the Prime minister is head of the government. It works on the functioning of three bodies, namely legislative, executive, and judiciary. By including the principles of a sovereign, socialist, secular and democratic republic, and undertaking the guidelines to establish equality, liberty and justice, in the preamble itself, India shows true dedication to achieving the ideal.

It has formed a structure that allows people to enjoy their rights, fight against discrimination or any other form of suppression, and protect their rights as well. The ban on all and any form of discrimination, an independent judiciary, governmental accountability to its citizens, freedom of media and press, and secular values are some common values shared by all types of democracies.

Across the world, countries have tried rooting their constitution with the principles of democracy. However, the reality is different. Even though elections are conducted everywhere, mostly, they lack freedom of choice and fairness. Even in the world’s greatest democracies, there are challenges like political instability, suppression of dissent, corruption , and power dynamics polluting the political sphere and making it unjust for the citizens. Despite the consensus on democracy as the best form of government, the journey to achieve true democracy is both painstaking and tiresome. 

Did you know: Countries like Singapore, Peru, and Brazil have compulsory voting?

Must Read: Democracy and Diversity Class 10 Notes

Democracy is a process through which the government of a country is elected by and for the people.

Yes, India is a democratic country and also holds the title of the world’s largest democracy.

Direct and Representative Democracy are the two major types of Democracy.

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395 Democracy Essay Topics & Research Questions: Elections, American Democracy, and More

What is democracy? The word “democracy” has Greek roots. It combines two words: “demos,” which refers to people residing within a specific country, and “kratos,” which means power. Democracy ensures that all citizens have the same rights regardless of their background, race, religion, or sexual orientation. It also raises people’s sense of civic dignity.

In this article, we’ll explain how to write an essay on democracy and give some helpful tips. Keep reading to find out more.

• 🔝 Top Democracy Essay Topics

📝 Democracy Essay Prompts

• 💡 Democracy Research Questions
• ✍🏻 Democracy Essay Topics
• 🎤 Democracy Speech Topics
• ✅ Essay on Democracy: Outline

🔗 References

🔝 top 12 democracy essay topics.

• Democracy as public justification.
• Freedom and democratic authority.
• What are the main problems with democratic governance?
• The role of democracy in the modern world.
• The development of democracy.
• The influence of democracy on the young generation.
• The connection between human rights and democracy.
• What are the key features of democracy?
• The value of democracy.
• Democracy as collective self-rule.
• The demands of democratic participation.
• Limits to the authority of democracy.

Many students find writing a college essay on democracy to be a stressful task. For this reason, we’ve prepared some essay prompts and tips to help students improve their writing skills.

What Is Democracy: Essay Prompt

Democracy is a form of government that has played an essential role in reshaping societies from monarchical, imperial, and conquest-driven systems into ones founded on sovereignty and harmonious cohabitation principles. Here are some of the questions you can use for your essay:

• What is the definition of democracy?
• Why do we need democracy?
• Where did democracy initially come into existence?
• What distinguishes democracy from other forms of government?
• Why is education important for democracy?
• What is democracy’s primary flaw?
• What poses the most significant risk to democracy?

Disadvantages of Democracy: Essay Prompt

One disadvantage of democracy is that it can sometimes lead to slow decision-making due to the need for consensus and majority agreement. There’s also a risk of overlooking the interests of the minority. Finally, democratic systems can be susceptible to manipulation and misinformation, potentially leading to uninformed or misguided decisions by the electorate. In your essay, you may focus on the following aspects:

• The issue of corruption . A democratic leader is only in power for a limited time. As a result, there’s a tendency to make money through the use of authority.
• Unfair business . Political leaders advocate unfair commercial practices to get support for political campaigns.
• Misuse of media . Often, the media attempts to deceive the public to influence their voting behavior.

Democracy vs. Totalitarianism: Essay Prompt

Totalitarianism and democracy are opposing forms of government. Whereas democracy values equal rights and citizens’ participation in the government, in a totalitarian system, the leader’s word is the law, and the state has all the power. To compare totalitarianism and democracy in your essay, you may discuss these points:

• Origin of totalitarianism and democracy;
• Public opinion on these forms of governance;
• Law and discretion;
• Minority rights and their importance;
• Internal enemies of totalitarianism and democracy.

Capitalism vs Democracy: Essay Prompt

Capitalism and democracy spread throughout the Western world during the 20th century. The fundamental distinction between the two concepts is that democracy is a form of government and a political system, while capitalism is an economic system.

In your essay, you can discuss the following questions:

• What is the connection between capitalism and democracy?
• What are the main goals and values of capitalism/democracy?
• What does capitalism/democracy mean today?
• What are the examples of capitalism/democracy?
• Why is capitalism /democracy harmful?

💡 Research Questions about Democracy

• How does a society’s education level impact the strength of its democratic institutions?
• What role does media freedom play in promoting democratic values?
• Relationship between economic development and political democratization .
• How does income inequality affect the functioning of democratic systems?
• What are the key factors that contribute to the stability of democratic governments?
• How does the level of political participation among citizens influence the quality of democracy?
• Researching the concept of democracy .
• What is the role of political parties in shaping democratic governance?
• How does the use of technology impact democratic processes and decision-making?
• Asian economic development and democratization .
• Does the presence of a strong judiciary contribute to the consolidation of democracy in a country?
• How does the level of trust among citizens affect democratic practices?
• What impact does gender equality have on the strength of democratic institutions?
• The equality of income or wealth depending on democracy .
• How does ethnic diversity influence the stability of democratic governments?
• What role do non-governmental organizations play in promoting democratic values?
• The democratic style of leadership .
• How does government transparency impact citizens’ trust in democratic institutions?
• How does the separation of powers principle contribute to democratic governance?
• What impact do direct democratic mechanisms, such as referendums , have on decision-making processes?
• How do political parties strengthen democracy ?
• How does the presence of independent media impact the accountability of political leaders in a democracy?
• What is the role of civil society in ensuring the effectiveness of democratic governance?
• Martin Luther Jr. “Jail Letter” and Aung San Kyi’s democracy excerp t.
• How does the integration of minority communities impact the inclusiveness of democratic systems?
• Does the involvement of citizens in local governance contribute to stronger democratic practices?
• What role does the rule of law play in establishing a democratic society?
• What are the impacts of social media on democracy ?
• What factors contribute to the erosion of democratic norms and values?
• What impact do international agreements have on the promotion and consolidation of democracy?
• Democracy: pluralist theory and elite theory .
• How does the role of money in politics influence the democratic decision-making process?
• What impact do international human rights standards have on protecting citizens’ rights within a democracy?
• What role does decentralization play in promoting democratic governance?
• What is the impact of technology on democracy ?
• How does the level of government accountability impact the overall functioning of a democracy?
• What is the relationship between economic development and the sustainability of democratic systems?
• Comparison of democracy levels in Uruguay and Venezuela .
• How does the level of political polarization impact the effectiveness of democratic governance?
• What role do regional and international organizations play in supporting the nascent democracies?
• How does the balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches influence democratic decision-making ?
• What are the key challenges faced by young democracies?
• What role does public opinion play in shaping democratic policies?
• Middle East democratization .
• How does the level of political corruption impact the functioning of democratic institutions?
• What impact does globalization have on the democratic governance of nation-states?
• What are the consequences of restrictions on freedom of expression in democratic societies?
• Social media regulation and future of democracy .
• What role do international democracy promotion programs play in supporting democratic transitions?
• How do different cultural and historical contexts shape the understanding and practice of democracy?
• Democracy and Western cultural values worldwide .
• What factors contribute to democratic backsliding in countries that have previously experienced democratic transitions?
• How does the presence of proportional representation contribute to inclusive and representative democratic governance?
• What role do civic education and political literacy play in a democracy?
• How does the level of social media usage impact the spread of disinformation and its effect on democratic processes?
• African political parties’ endeavour for the implementation of the democracy .
• How do citizen participation mechanisms, such as participatory budgeting, impact democratic decision-making?
• How does the level of political party system fragmentation impact the effectiveness of democratic governance?
• What role does the protection of minority rights play in establishing and sustaining democratic societies?
• How does the level of regional integration influence the democratic governance and decision-making of member states?
• The Australian Labor Party and the American Democrats: similarities and differences .
• What impact does income distribution have on citizens’ satisfaction with democratic systems?
• How does the presence of a strong civil service impact the capacity and efficiency of democratic governance?
• What factors contribute to successful democratic transitions in countries with a history of authoritarian rule ?
• How does the level of trust in key democratic institutions impact overall democratic stability?
• What factors contribute to economic failure in democracies ?
• What role does political leadership play in establishing and maintaining strong democratic systems?

Democracy and Elections Research Paper Topics

• The impact of voter ID laws on democratic participation.
• The influence of campaign finance spending on electoral outcomes.
• Political participation and voting as democracy features .
• The role of social media in shaping public opinion during elections.
• The effectiveness of electoral college systems in representing the will of the people.
• The effectiveness of international election observation missions in ensuring electoral integrity.
• The impact of electronic voting systems on election integrity.
• The role of political advertising in shaping voter preferences.
• Low voter participation in democratic countries .
• The relationship between political polarization and voter turnout.
• The effectiveness of voter education programs in promoting informed decision-making.
• The effect of voter suppression tactics on democratic participation.
• The influence of party endorsement on candidate success in elections.
• The impact of gender and ethnicity on political representation in elected offices.
• Voting: democracy, freedom, and political agency .
• The effectiveness of campaign debates in informing voter choices.
• The influence of social factors and peer networks on political affiliation and voting behavior.
• The effect of negative campaigning on voter perceptions and candidate success.
• The role of non-traditional media sources in shaping public opinion during elections.
• The role of technology in enhancing election monitoring and ensuring transparent and secure voting processes.
• Electoral systems in a democratic country .
• The influence of disinformation campaigns on voter behavior and their implications for electoral integrity.
• The challenges and opportunities of implementing online voting systems for improving accessibility and election integrity.
• The impact of non-voters and their reasons for not participating in the democratic process.
• The impact of campaign advertising on voter behavior in democratic elections.
• The role of social media platforms in electoral outcomes in democratic societies.
• “The Electoral College Is the Greatest Threat to Our Democracy” by Bouie .
• Electoral reforms and their effects on voter turnout and representation in democracies.
• The influence of demographic factors and socioeconomic status on voting patterns in democratic elections.
• The challenges and opportunities of implementing electronic voting systems to enhance the integrity and efficiency of democratic elections.

E-Democracy Research Topics

• Digital divide and its implications for e-democracy.
• Role of social media in promoting online political engagement.
• E-government and democracy .
• Challenges and opportunities for e-petitions as a form of democratic expression.
• Cybersecurity challenges in ensuring secure and reliable e-voting systems.
• Role of e-democracy in improving representation and inclusivity in decision-making processes.
• Ethical considerations in the collection and use of personal data for e-democracy purposes.
• Use of blockchain technology in enhancing transparency and trustworthiness in e-democracy.
• The use of technology in promoting transparency and accountability in government.
• American e-government and public administration .
• Influences of online political advertising on voter behavior.
• The potential of online deliberative platforms in fostering inclusive public discourse.
• The role of online communities in mobilizing citizens for political action.
• Effects of online platforms on political campaign strategies and communication tactics.
• Use of technology in expanding access to information and knowledge for informed citizenship.
• Strategies for building trust in e-government .
• Evaluation of online political education programs and their impact on citizen engagement.
• Open government initiatives and their role in fostering e-democracy .
• Digital activism and its effectiveness in driving social and political change .
• Online tools for monitoring and preventing disinformation and fake news in political discourse.
• Role of digital identity verification in ensuring the integrity of e-democracy processes.
• Challenges and opportunities for e-democracy in authoritarian regimes .
• Public trust and perceived legitimacy of e-democracy systems and processes.

✍🏻 Topics for Essays about Democracy

Democracy argumentative essay topics.

• The role of public protests in strengthening democracy.
• The role of youth engagement in shaping the future of democracy.
• Is the Democratic Party the Labour Party of the US ?
• Should there be limits on freedom of speech in a democracy to prevent hate speech?
• The tensions between national security and civil liberties in a democratic context.
• Is direct democracy a more effective form of governance than representative democracy?
• The United States is not really a democracy .
• The significance of an independent judiciary in upholding democratic principles.
• The importance of a robust and unbiased public education system for a thriving democracy.
• Compulsory voting: is it compatible with democracy ?
• The impact of income inequality on democratic participation and representation.
• The significance of constitutional reforms in addressing the challenges faced by democracies .
• Does the digital age pose a threat to the principles of democracy?
• Should prisoners have a right to vote in a democratic system?
• Are referendums effective tools for democratic decision-making?
• Democracy vs. other types of government .
• Does the media have a responsibility to promote democratic principles and accountability?
• Can a democratic government effectively balance national security and civil liberties ?
• Should there be limitations on the freedom of peaceful assembly and protest in a democracy?
• Democracy is the tyranny of the majority over the minority .
• Is the rise of populist movements a threat to democratic values?
• Does globalization undermine national sovereignty and democratic decision-making?
• Democracy: Durbin’s, Duckworth’s, and Krishinamoorthi’s positions .
• Should judges be elected or appointed in a democratic system?
• Is a strong independent judiciary essential for a healthy democracy?
• Is the EU an example of a successful democratic regional integration project?
• How can we provide political representation for non-citizens in a democratic society?
• Is democracy a universal value, or should different cultures be allowed to adopt different governance models?
• Democracy in the US: is it real today ?
• Should democratic governments prioritize economic growth or social welfare policies ?
• Should there be restrictions on the power of political parties in a democracy?
• Is there a tension between individual rights and collective decision-making in a democratic society?
• The role of national identity and multiculturalism in shaping democratic societies.
• The effectiveness of citizen initiatives and participatory democracy.
• Federal system’s pros and cons from a democratic perspective .
• The importance of accountability and transparency in ensuring the functioning of democracy.
• Should religion play a role in political decision-making in a democracy?
• Does a two-party system hinder the development of democracy?
• The influence of corporate power on democratic decision-making processes.
• The tension between individual rights and collective needs in democratic societies.
• Has the US government become more of or less of a republic, a confederation, or a democracy ?
• The role of education in fostering active and informed citizenry in a democracy.
• Is a multi-party system more conducive to a healthy and inclusive democracy?
• Should there be restrictions on political advertising to ensure fairness and transparency in democratic elections?
• Should corporations have the same rights as individuals in democratic legal systems?
• Is it necessary to separate church and state in a democratic society?
• How democratic was the new Constitution and the Bill of Rights ?
• Should there be mandatory civics education to promote democratic values and participation?
• Should there be age restrictions on political officeholders in a democracy?
• Should digital voting be implemented to increase participation and transparency in elections?

American Democracy Essay Topics

• The historical development of American democracy: from the Founding Fathers to the present.
• The significance of the American Constitution and its amendments in ensuring democratic governance in the United States.
• Government: United States Constitution and democracy .
• The impact of the American Revolution on the birth of American democracy.
• The separation of powers and checks and balances in the US government .
• The significance of the Bill of Rights in protecting individual freedoms within American democracy.
• Democracy: the Unites States of America .
• The challenges and opportunities of citizen participation in American democratic processes.
• The contributions of influential figures such as Thomas Jefferson , James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton to the development of American democracy.
• Dahl’s “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?”
• The evolution of political parties in American democracy: from the Federalists and Anti-Federalists to the Democrats and Republicans.
• The role of the Constitution in establishing and safeguarding American democracy.
• The two-party system and democracy in the US .
• The impact of the Civil Rights Movement on expanding democratic rights and equality in America.
• The ways media influences public opinion and its impact on American democracy.
• The influence of money in American politics and its effects on democratic processes.
• American democracy v. the social democracy: the healthcare system .
• The impact of the women’s suffrage movement on democratic participation and gender equality.
• The role of activism and social movements in shaping American democracy .
• The influence of third-party candidates on American democracy and election outcomes.
• Advancing democracy in the United States .
• The challenges and reforms associated with the electoral college system in American democracy.
• The impact of the progressive movement on democratic governance and social welfare.
• Democracy and tyranny in the United States .
• The role of the American presidency in shaping and upholding democratic principles.
• The historical relationship between religious freedom and American democracy.
• The influence of the labor movement on workers’ rights and democratic policies.
• Analysis of democracy in the USA .
• The significance of the New Deal and Great Society programs in fostering economic fairness and democratic values.
• The impact of the Cold War on American democracy and the preservation of democratic ideals abroad.
• Democracy in the United States of America .
• The challenges and reforms associated with campaign finance regulations in American democracy.
• The impact of modern technology on American democracy, including social media, data privacy , and online political engagement.
• Democracy in America: elites, interest groups, and average citizens .
• The significance of presidential debates in shaping public opinion and democratic decision-making.
• The role of state and local governments in American democracy and their relationship with the federal government .
• The impact of the Electoral College on presidential elections and its implications for democratic representation.
• Interest groups in the American democratic system .
• The relationship between media bias and democratic discourse in American democracy.
• The impact of the populist movement, both historically and in contemporary politics, on American democracy.
• The role of the First Amendment in protecting and promoting free speech in American democracy.
• “What Republicans and Democrats Are Doing in the States Where They Have Total Power”: analysis .
• The influence of foreign policy decisions on American democracy and the balance between national security and democratic values.
• American women’s historical struggles and triumphs in achieving suffrage and fighting for equal rights in American democracy.
• The shifting nature of American democracy .
• The impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on public discourse, democratic activism, and policy change.
• The labor movement’s influence on workers’ rights, economic policies, and democratic representation.
• The US democracy’s promotion in the Middle East .
• The significance of federalism in the American democratic system and the balance of power between states and the federal government.
• The importance of a free and independent press in American democracy.
• Democratic traditions in early American colonies .
• The influence of religious groups on American politics, democratic decision-making, and social policy.
• The role of non-governmental organizations in promoting democratic values, human rights, and social justice in America.
• Edmund Morgan: the views of American democracy .
• The protection of minority rights and the principle of majority rule in American democracy.
• The role of civil society organizations in promoting and strengthening American democracy.

Jacksonian Democracy Essay Topics

• The main principles and goals of Jacksonian Democracy.
• The impact of Jacksonian Democracy on expanding voting and political participation.
• Andrew Jackson’s first inaugural address .
• The role of populism in shaping Jacksonian Democracy.
• The controversy surrounding Jackson’s Indian Removal policies .
• The influence of Jacksonian Democracy on the development of the two-party system.
• The impact of the “Kitchen Cabinet” and informal advisors on Jackson’s presidency.
• The economic policies of Jacksonian Democracy and its effect on the national economy.
• The antebellum capitalism and Jeffersonians and Jacksonians capitalist ideals .
• The expansion of land ownership and westward expansion under Jacksonian Democracy.
• The role of women in Jacksonian Democracy and the early suffrage movement .
• The controversy surrounding Jackson’s veto of the Bank of the United States.
• The impact of Jacksonian Democracy on Native American rights and sovereignty.
• The legacy of Jacksonian Democracy and its influence on subsequent political movements.
• The significance of the Democratic Party’s rise during the Jacksonian era.
• Andrew Jackson presidency: society, politics, veto .
• The impact of Jacksonian Democracy on the growth of economic opportunities for common people.
• The relationship between Jacksonian Democracy and the rise of American nationalism.
• The role of newspapers and media in promoting or opposing Jacksonian Democracy.
• The controversies surrounding Jackson’s removal of government deposits from the Bank of the United States.
• The response of marginalized groups, such as Native Americans and African Americans, to Jacksonian Democracy.
• The impact of Jacksonian Democracy on the development of the American presidency and executive power.
• The long-term effects of Jacksonian Democracy on American political and social identity.

Questions about Democracy for Essays

• What are the key principles and values of democracy?
• How does democracy promote individual freedoms and rights?
• “Democracy and Collective Identity in the EU and the USA”: article analysis .
• What are the different forms of democracy, and how do they vary?
• How does democracy ensure accountability and transparency in governance?
• Concepts of democracy and wealth .
• What is the role of elections in a democratic system?
• How does democracy promote political participation and citizen engagement?
• Discussion of democracy assignment .
• What are the main challenges to democracy in the modern world?
• How does democracy protect minority rights and prevent majority tyranny?
• What are the political concepts of democracy and nationalism ?
• How does the media influence democratic processes and outcomes?
• What role do political parties play in a democratic system?
• What are representative democracy and its constituents ?
• How does democracy address social and economic inequalities?
• What is the relationship between democracy and human rights ?
• What are the benefits and drawbacks of direct democracy?
• How does democracy impact economic development and prosperity?
• Democracy description as a political system .
• What role does the judiciary play in a democratic system?
• How does democracy address issues of social justice and equality ?
• What are the implications of globalization for democracy?
• Can democracy exist without a well-informed citizenry and a free press?
• Democratic and authoritarian states .
• How does democracy respond to extremist ideologies and populism?
• What are the advantages and disadvantages of representative democracy?
• How does democracy promote peaceful transitions of power?
• How does democracy foster social cohesion and national unity?
• How does democracy ensure the protection of civil liberties?
• What is the nature and performance of Indonesia’s new democracy ?
• How does democracy reconcile the tension between majority rule and minority rights?
• What are the roles of civil society and non-governmental organizations in a democracy?
• How does democracy deal with issues of environmental sustainability ?
• Democracy: evolution of the political thought .
• What are the effects of money and lobbying on democratic processes?
• How does democracy guarantee freedom of speech and expression?
• What is the Canadian political culture and democracy ?
• What is the impact of education and civic education on democracy?
• How does democracy address the challenges of pluralism and diversity?
• What are the implications of digital technologies for democracy?
• The French Revolution: failed democracy and Napoleon .
• What role does international cooperation play in fostering democracy?
• How does democracy address the power imbalance between different societal groups?
• What are the reasons for the failure of democracy in South America ?
• What are the historical origins of democracy and its evolution over time?
• How does democracy protect the rights of marginalized and vulnerable populations?
• What are the political apathy and low voter turnout consequences in a democracy?
• How does democracy handle situations of crisis and emergency?
• Democracy as a socio-political phenomenon .
• What is the role of public opinion in democratic decision-making?
• How does democracy ensure fair representation and inclusivity ?
• What are the mechanisms in place to hold elected officials accountable in a democracy?

🎤 Topics about Democracy for Speeches

• The importance of democracy in safeguarding individual freedoms and human rights.
• The historical evolution of democracy: from ancient Athens to modern-day governance.
• The essential concepts and principles of democracy .
• Democratic revolutions and their impact on shaping the world.
• The role of citizen participation in a thriving democracy.
• Exploring the concept of direct democracy: can it work on a large scale?
• Backsliding of democracy: examples and preventive measures .
• The role of media in fostering accountability in a democracy.
• Striving for gender equality and women’s empowerment within democratic frameworks.
• Democracy and efforts to emphasize it .
• The influence of money and campaign finance on democratic processes.
• Democracy and social justice: addressing inequalities and discrimination.
• The impact of education in building a democratic society.
• The Republican and Democratic parties: issues, beliefs, and philosophy .
• Democracy and the environment: Promoting sustainable practices .
• The relation between democracy and economic development.
• Mexico’s globalization and democratization .
• The significance of a strong, independent judiciary in upholding the rule of law in a democracy.
• The potential benefits and drawbacks of digital technology on democracy.
• Youth engagement and the future of democracy.
• Democracy: equality of income and egalitarianism .
• Democracy in the face of political polarization and extremism.
• Democracy and cultural diversity : balancing majority rule and minority rights.
• Democratic society and the capitalist system .
• The importance of civic education in nurturing active and informed citizens.
• Democracy and peace: how democratic nations tend to avoid armed conflicts .
• The role of international organizations in promoting democracy worldwide.
• The struggle for democracy: bureaucracy .
• Social media and democracy: examining their impact on political discourse.
• Democracy and global governance: the need for collaborative decision-making.
• Democratization processes that have reshaped societies .
• The implications of demographic changes on democratic representation.
• The challenges of ensuring democracy in times of crisis and emergency.
• Democracy and immigration : the role of inclusive policies and integration.
• Corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo .
• The responsibility of democratic nations in addressing global challenges (e.g., climate change , pandemics).
• The effects of fake news and disinformation on democratic societies.
• Democrats and communists in 1950 .
• Democratic reforms: lessons learned from successful transitions.
• The role of intellectuals and artists in promoting democratic values and ideals.
• Democracy and the future of work : navigating technological advancements and automation.
• Safeguard of democracy is education .
• The importance of strong civil society organizations to democracy.
• Democracy and national security: striking the balance between safety and civil liberties.
• Representing the democracy of Florida .
• The significance of a robust social welfare system in ensuring democratic stability.
• Democracy and accountability in the age of surveillance and privacy concerns .
• The future prospects of democracy: challenges and opportunities in the 21st century.
• Democratic regime and liberation movements .
• The role of transitional justice in post-authoritarian democracies.
• Democratic decision-making: weighing majority opinion against expert knowledge.
• The topic of democracy in various speeches .
• Democracy and educational policy: the need for equitable access to quality education.
• The influence of cultural, religious, and ideological diversity on democratic governance.
• Democracy and intergenerational justice: balancing present needs with future aspirations.
• Biden warns of US peril from Trump’s ‘dagger’ at democracy .

Democracy Debate Topics

• Is direct democracy a practical and effective form of governance?
• Should there be term limits for political officeholders in a democracy?
• Social democratic welfare state .
• Is compulsory voting necessary for a thriving democratic system?
• Is money in politics a threat to democratic integrity?
• Should there be limits on campaign spending in democratic elections?
• Social democracy vs. social policy .
• Should felons have the right to vote in a democracy?
• Can social media platforms ensure fair and unbiased political discourse in a democracy?
• Why does democracy work and why doesn’t it ?
• Is proportional representation more democratic than a winner-takes-all electoral system?
• Should there be stricter regulations on political lobbying in a democracy?
• Is it necessary to establish a global democracy to tackle global challenges ?
• Is the concept of majority rule compatible with protecting minority rights in a democracy?
• Is populism a threat or an asset to democracy?
• The struggle for democracy: how politics captures people’s interest ?
• Should the voting age be lowered to increase youth participation in democracy?
• Should corporations have a say in democratic decision-making processes?
• Is a strong centralized government or decentralized governance better for democracy?
• Should the internet be regulated to protect its users from misinformation?
• Is democracy the best form of government ?
• Should religious institutions have a role in democratic governance?
• Is international intervention justified to promote democracy in authoritarian regimes ?
• Is a multi-party democracy more representative than a two-party system?
• Should immigration policies be determined through democratic processes?

✅ Outline for an Essay About Democracy

We’ve prepared a mini guide to help you structure your essay on democracy. You’ll also find some examples below.

Democracy Essay Introduction

Would you like to learn how to write a strong essay introduction? We are here for you! The introduction is the first paragraph of your essay, so it needs to provide context, capture the reader’s attention, and present the main topic or argument of an essay or paper. It also explains what readers can expect from the rest of the text. A good introduction should include:

• Hook . A hook is a compelling, attention-grabbing opening sentence designed to engage the reader’s interest and curiosity. It aims to draw the reader into the essay or paper by presenting an intriguing fact, anecdote, question, or statement related to the topic.
• Background information . Background information provides context and helps readers understand the subject matter before delving into the main discussion or argument.
• Thesis statement . It’s a sentence in the introduction part of the essay. A thesis statement introduces the paper’s main point, argument, or purpose, guiding and informing the reader about the essay’s focus and direction.

Hook : “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” ― Winston S. Churchill.

Thesis statement : Democracy has endured the test of time, and although other forms of governance have failed, democracy has stayed firm.

Essay on Democracy: Body Paragraphs

Body paragraphs are critical in writing a great college essay. There are 5 main steps you can follow to write a compelling body paragraph:

• Create a topic sentence.
• Provide the evidence.
• Explain how the evidence relates to the main points.
• Explain why your arguments are relevant.
• Add transition to the following paragraph.

Topic sentence : In a democratic system of governance, supreme authority rests with the people and is exercised through a framework of representation, often involving regular, unrestricted elections.

Supporting evidence : Democracy allows residents to participate in creating laws and public policies by electing their leaders; consequently, voters should be educated to select the best candidate for the ruling government.

Essay about Democracy: Conclusion

The conclusion is the final part of an academic essay. It should restate the thesis statement and briefly summarize the key points. Refrain from including new ideas or adding information to the conclusion.

There are 3 crucial components to the conclusion:

• Rephrased thesis statement.
• Summary of main points.
• Thought-provoking or memorable closing statement.

Rephrased thesis statement : To conclude, democracy is a form of government that has proven its effectiveness and resilience in contrast to other governance systems.

We hope you’ve found our article interesting and learned some new information! If so, feel free to share it with your friends and leave a comment below.

• Thesis Statements – The Writing Center • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay, With Examples | Grammarly
• Creating a Thesis Statement, Thesis Statement Tips – Purdue OWL® – Purdue University
• Paragraphs & Topic Sentences: Writing Guides: Writing Tutorial Services: Indiana University Bloomington
• How to Write a Topic Sentence (With Examples and Tips) | Indeed.com

414 Proposal Essay Topics for Projects, Research, & Proposal Arguments

371 fun argumentative essay topics for 2024.

By the People: Essays on Democracy

Harvard Kennedy School faculty explore aspects of democracy in their own words—from increasing civic participation and decreasing extreme partisanship to strengthening democratic institutions and making them more fair.

Winter 2020

By Archon Fung , Nancy Gibbs , Tarek Masoud , Julia Minson , Cornell William Brooks , Jane Mansbridge , Arthur Brooks , Pippa Norris , Benjamin Schneer

The basic terms of democratic governance are shifting before our eyes, and we don’t know what the future holds. Some fear the rise of hateful populism and the collapse of democratic norms and practices. Others see opportunities for marginalized people and groups to exercise greater voice and influence. At the Kennedy School, we are striving to produce ideas and insights to meet these great uncertainties and to help make democratic governance successful in the future. In the pages that follow, you can read about the varied ways our faculty members think about facets of democracy and democratic institutions and making democracy better in practice.

Explore essays on democracy

Archon fung: we voted, nancy gibbs: truth and trust, tarek masoud: a fragile state, julia minson: just listen, cornell william brooks: democracy behind bars, jane mansbridge: a teachable skill, arthur brooks: healthy competition, pippa norris: kicking the sandcastle, benjamin schneer: drawing a line.

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Democracy’s Arc: From Resurgent to Imperiled

• Larry Diamond

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The Journal of Democracy began publishing in 1990 in an era of hopeful, even exhilarating, expansion of democracy around the world. Democracy was on the march not only literally—on the ground and at the ballot box—but normatively and intellectually. Yet even at the peak of democracy’s third wave in the mid-1990s, scholars were worrying about the shallow nature of many democratic regimes. These illiberal, poorly governed democracies were identified as prime candidates for erosion, and many of the have since failed or oscillated. Beginning in 2006, the world entered a period of global democratic recession that has gathered considerable momentum in recent years. Now, with the deterioration of democratic norms and institutions in the United States, the growing doubts about democracy’s efficacy, and the resurgence of authoritarian power and belligerence (led by China and Russia), democracy faces its most daunting test in many decades.

A longer version of this essay, with additional reflections on the evolution of the  Journal ’ s work, is available here .

“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.”

—Hannah Arendt,  On Revolution,  1963

W hen Marc Plattner and I began preparing to launch this journal early in 1989, democracy was resurgent globally, but far from dominant. What Samuel P. Huntington would soon call “democracy’s third wave” had already spread from Southern Europe to Latin America to Asia, increasing the percentage of states that were democracies from a quarter in 1974 to about 40 percent at the end of 1988. 1  As we prepared to launch a new kind of publication that would inform scholars, students, activists, and policymakers around the world, we believed that we were riding a historical wave that would transform the world. But we did not assume its inevitability, and we did not imagine the scope and speed of the political transformation that was looming.

By the time our first issue went to press toward the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall had been torn down by the people whom it had held captive for decades ,  and the Soviet bloc was crumbling. After five years of opening under Mikhail Gorbachev, the decrepit Soviet Union itself had entered a twilight period. By the end of 1991, it was no more. Transitions to democracy were then well underway in most of Central and Eastern Europe, Nelson Mandela had been released in South Africa, civil society had toppled a dictatorship in Benin, and other longstanding African dictatorships were on the defensive. Seemingly impregnable dictators soon fell in Zambia, Kenya, and Malawi. By 1994, some forty countries had transited to democracy within the space of half a decade.

About the Author

Larry Diamond is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Mosbacher Senior Fellow in Global Democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University, and founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy .

View all work by Larry Diamond

This was the hopeful—and at times thrilling—context of the  Journal of Democracy ’ s early years, a period in which the liberal democracies were regarded as “the only truly and fully modern societies.” 2  Democracy was on the march not only literally—on the ground and at the ballot box—but normatively and intellectually. From both the left and the right, intellectuals like Nigeria’s Claude Ake and Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa were making the case for democracy as the best and historically necessary form of government. 3  In 1999, at the end of the  Journal ’ s first decade, Indian economist Amartya Sen decisively rebutted Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew’s thesis that autocracies are preferable as engines of economic development and stability. Beyond its selective, “sporadic,” and hence faulty empiricism—which ignores the frequent staggering developmental failures of autocracy—the Lee argument failed on both intrinsic and instrumental grounds. Intrinsically, Sen argued, democracy is important because it meets essential human needs for political participation and freedom. Instrumentally, it gives people—not least, the poor—the ability to voice their needs and be heard. 4

Across diverse regions, the rule of dictatorships had left a trail of tears: brutal human-rights abuses, pervasive fear, massive corruption, and often economic stagnation or ruin. In Latin America, this sobered both citizens and politicians, producing (especially on the left) what Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan termed “the increased valorization of democracy as an important end that needed to be protected in and for itself.” 5  Inspired by the rising tide of freedom, repulsed by the cruelties of authoritarian rule, and in some countries (especially in East Asia) transformed by growing incomes, education, and integration into the West, public opinion around the world swung strongly in favor of democracy as the best form of government. 6  By 1995, a clear majority of countries in the world had become democracies. In the decade that followed, democracy would continue to expand across the world, albeit at a slower pace.

Even then, years before democracy’s present headwinds, I began worrying about the problem of democratic shallowness and inauthenticity. Part of this came from my growing concern about the limits and deep contradictions of democracy in Latin America, which had initially seemed advantaged by its prior democratic experience, its proximity to the United States, a regional architecture for democratic defense, and at-least-middling levels of economic development. One memory had stayed with me from years earlier: At a conference on democracy in the Americas hosted by the Carter Center late in 1986, I got a rude awakening when Guatemalan president Vinicio Cerezo declared: “I have ten percent of the power in my country.” The rest, he said, was controlled by the military and various hidden, wealthy elites. How real and effective can the formal institutions of democracy be when they are overwhelmed by hidden forces, “reserve domains” of military power, or “authoritarian enclaves” of local bosses and mafias? 7  In 1993, Guillermo O’Donnell warned about the limited reach of the legal state in Latin America, beyond which lie vast “brown areas” informally but quite effectively controlled by “patrimonial, sultanistic, or simply gangsterlike” powers. These are worlds of “extreme violence” and predation that “coexist with a regime that, at least at the national political center, is democratic.” 8  My assessment of democracy in Latin America in the 1990s similarly led me to concern about the “illiberal nature of ‘democracy’” in the region. I argued that shallow democracy renders a country more susceptible to a total breakdown of the constitutional order, and that democratic regimes cannot become secure unless they broadly respect human rights and institutionalize constraints on the power of key political actors. 9  Since then, some Latin American countries have moved forward, others back, but democracy remains a partial, troubled, and contested reality that has recently shown growing signs of unraveling.

A Farewell Message This issue is my 129th and last as coeditor of the  Journal of Democracy.  For the past 32 years, the work of shaping and editing our coverage of democracy’s challenges has been a calling and a privilege. For a young scholar of comparative democracy, the opportunity to partner in conceiving, launching, and editing the  Journal   was the chance of a lifetime, and I cannot imagine having had the same career of scholarship and advocacy without it. I would like to thank the   Journal ’ s publisher, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), and staff for their friendship, dedication, and exemplary work—especially former NED president Carl Gershman and the  Journal ’ s founding coeditor, Marc Plattner, for their support and solidarity over three decades. From his perch heading the NED’s International Forum for Democratic Studies, Marc was the ideal working partner in every respect—intellectually rigorous, normatively steadfast, prudent, well organized, creative, and empathetic. I felt we made an effective “inside-outside” team. Carl Gershman gave us not only tangible support as president of the NED, but also constant intellectual and moral inspiration. Christopher Walker, who now leads the NED’s International Forum, has been a vital partner, key ally, and promoter of our work. Will Dobson has proven to be a gifted and worthy successor to Marc as coeditor of the  Journal,  bringing to the role far-reaching knowledge, superb editorial judgement, and fierce intellectual integrity. I am also confident that my successor, Professor Tarek Masoud of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, will help take the  Journal   to new horizons. A longtime member of our editorial board, Tarek is committed to the high standards and deep analysis that are our signature, and he brings a brilliant mind, strong moral commitment, and fresh analytic perspective to the work. I am deeply grateful to the dedicated and talented people who have served on the  Journal ’ s staff over the years, particularly our executive editor, Phil Costopoulos, who has done so much to shape the style of these pages, especially their crisp, accessible, and engaging prose. With the incredibly sharp and thoughtful Tracy Brown recently returning to the  Journal   as senior editor, Brent Kallmer as our creative and efficient managing editor, and Justin Daniels as our prodigiously energetic assistant editor, the  Journal   team has never been stronger. Finally, I thank the many extraordinary scholars of democracy who have served on our editorial board, contributed essays, and advised us in many ways. While Seymour Martin Lipset, Juan Linz, Alfred Stepan, Samuel Huntington, and Guillermo O’Donnell are no longer with us, the debt that we (and I personally) owe them is enormous and can never fully be repaid. —Larry Diamond

It is impossible for democracy to become consolidated when lawlessness reigns, corruption is rampant, and the state is weak. As Francis Fukuyama has stressed,  good governance —or at least initially decent, as opposed to predatory, governance—is key to democracy’s long-term prospects. 10  Badly governed, poorly performing democracies are accidents waiting to happen. At some point, a crisis or an antidemocratic force will emerge—the military, an insurgent movement, or an authoritarian demagogue like Vladimir Putin or Hugo Chávez—and knock them over. If there is a holy grail for democratic development, in my view good governance is it.

But how does good governance emerge out of historical and social circumstances of weak laws, courts, bureaucracies, and other formal institutions? This can only be done by the conscious work of leaders, organizations, and reform coalitions, sometimes with the assistance of other states and outside institutions. 11  Political and civic agency, strategy, and choice—or to use a word strangely rare in political science these days, “leadership”—matter. Most success stories have benefited from capable and dedicated (though hardly angelic) leaders who were committed to democracy, respectful of its institutions, and savvy about building and broadening coalitions and gradually strengthening institutions. Many scholars emphasize that the scope for political “agency” is often strictly limited by structural conditions and institutional arrangements. But many of the institutions (representative parties, suitable electoral systems, inclusive rules, competent states, independent courts) that have helped democracies to endure are the historical product of prior periods of political crafting by democratic leaders in government and civil society.

Nevertheless, democracies do not rise or fall in a global vacuum. A key contribution of Huntington’s landmark 1991 book,  The Third Wave,   was to demonstrate the crucial impact of the international context of prevailing norms, ideas, models, and trends, and how the policies and actions of powerful democracies—and their power  relative   to autocracies—shaped the global fate of freedom. During the third wave, U.S. and European pressure, diplomatic engagement, and support often tipped the balance toward a successful transition (or away from democratic demise) in precarious circumstances. A later comparative study found that Western technical assistance, training, intellectual engagement, diplomatic pressure, and financial support for independent media and NGOs all figured prominently in successful democratic transitions but were notably weaker or absent in failed transitions. 12

A healthy appreciation for the role of agency counsels us against a false sense of security about democracy’s fate—that once “consolidated,” democracies are inevitably here to stay. By the mid-1990s, several Western democracies, including the United States, were showing signs of political decay, distrust, and declining civic and political engagement. In 1995, Robert Putnam called attention to a particular dimension of this problem—America’s declining social capital—in his famous article “Bowling Alone,” which remains one of the most read articles in the history of the   Journal . 13  That same year Juan Linz, Seymour Martin Lipset, and I offered our own warning:

It is a dangerous fallacy to view consolidation as a one-time, irreversible process. Democracies come and go. Over time, they may become legitimated, institutionalized, and consolidated. But as their institutions decay and democratic beliefs and practices erode, they may also become deconsolidated. . . . Even established democracies have demagogues who blame the failings of society on democracy itself. One should not assume that in the face of severe societal crisis and prolonged governmental inefficacy and corruption, these demagogues could not gain a wider following. 14

The Accelerating Democratic Recession

In 1996, I raised the possibility that the third wave might be giving way to stagnation or reversal, due to the growing gap between the electoral minimum of democracy and the rest of its liberal essence. Many third-wave democracies (or regimes loosely labeled as such, like Pakistan’s) were staggering on at a very superficial level, while suffering elite assaults on constitutional norms that threatened “death by a thousand subtractions.” Unless democracy was deepened and institutionally strengthened, many democracies would fail. And this deepening required, I argued then (and still do), that the established liberal democracies “show their own continued capacity for democratic vitality, reform, and good governance,” while working consciously “to promote democratic development around the world.” 15

It gives me no satisfaction that many of my worst fears have been realized. Pakistan’s shallow “democracy” fell in a military coup in October 1999. Several of the other major democracies that I worried about at the time have clearly failed (Bangladesh and Turkey) or oscillated (Sri Lanka) or descended deeply into what Thomas Carothers called the “gray zone” of regime ambiguity (the Philippines). Of thirty strategic swing states that I identified in 1999, 16  only Taiwan and the Czech Republic have maintained a high level of liberal democracy or progressed substantially in that direction. Democracy has been retreating at least somewhat in South Korea and, under the leadership of populist, illiberal leaders and parties, substantially in Brazil, India, Mexico, and Poland. 17  In addition to Bangladesh and Turkey, democracy broke down in Russia and Thailand, and it is now once again threatened by severe political polarization in Chile, weak governance in South Africa, and Russian meddling and aggression in Ukraine.

The above is only a very partial list of democracy’s setbacks. In global aggregate, the democratic recession did not actually begin until around 2006. Since then, levels of freedom and democracy have steadily declined, fewer countries have made transitions to democracy, and many more democracies (almost all of them illiberal) have broken down. Several liberal democracies have declined in quality, and at least one (Hungary) has ceased to be a democracy at all. Several electoral democracies (such as Peru) are hanging by a thread; the only Arab democracy (Tunisia) has suffered an executive coup; and the most promising African democracy (Ghana) has been quietly deteriorating under the weight of rising corruption and disaffection. Several competitive authoritarian regimes (Cambodia, Nicaragua, and Uganda) are no longer the least bit competitive, and the weightiest authoritarian regimes (China and Russia, but also Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia) are now significantly more so. Finally, rather than sustaining vitality and self-confidence, some of the leading liberal democracies (most alarmingly, the United States) have been on a glide path toward polarization and decay.

For a decade, the democratic recession was sufficiently subtle, incremental, and mixed that it was reasonable to debate whether it was happening at all. 18  But as the years have passed, the authoritarian trend has become harder to miss. For each of the last fifteen years, many more countries have declined in freedom than have gained (reversing the pattern of the first fifteen post–Cold War years). By my count, the percentage of states (with populations over one million) that are democracies peaked in 2006 at 57 percent and has steadily declined since, dropping below a majority (to 48 percent) in 2019 for the first time since 1993. 19  Every annual global assessment now warns of a serious downward spiral, as in the titles of the most recent Freedom House survey, “Democracy Under Siege,” 20  and the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) report, “Autocratization Turns Viral.” 21  The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2020 Democracy Index found that under pressure from the coronavirus pandemic, democracy scores declined in nearly 70 percent of the countries tracked, while “the global average score fell to its lowest level since the index began in 2006.” 22

We have recently entered a more ominous phase of the democratic recession, evocative of Huntington’s reverse waves. More troubling than the aggregate numbers are the qualitative trends and where they are taking place. The world’s most populous democracy, India, is experiencing a diffuse assault on the normative and constitutional underpinnings of liberal democracy: political and intellectual pluralism; tolerance of ethnic and religious minorities; judicial independence and bureaucratic professionalism; and freedom of the media and civil society. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is following a trajectory hauntingly familiar to those who have watched the gradual destruction of democracy in countries such as Turkey, and because of India’s emerging-market size and vital strategic importance as a counterweight to China, no major democracy wishes to call it out. The other big and influential democracies of the global South are also in trouble, due as well to authoritarian populist leaders (in Brazil and Mexico) or weak institutions and rising social stresses (in South Africa and Indonesia). The Philippines may next year elect as president the son of the last dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, and perhaps then complete its slide back into autocracy.

Stoking this worldwide backsliding has been the steady, shocking decline of democracy in the United States, which the Economist Intelligence Unit rates as a “flawed democracy.” Western Europe’s democratic troubles have been fed by the declining programmatic distinctiveness, creativity, and responsiveness of mainstream parties. Gripped by many of the same underlying stresses—economic dislocation, rising inequality, immigration pressures, identity divisions, and the explosive inflammation of these by social media—U.S. democracy has decayed differently. Partisan polarization, skillfully exploited by demagogic forces, has followed the same toxic downward spiral that has undermined democracy in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, and Venezuela. As Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer explain, polarizing social forces and political strategies generate a deep societal rift, an “us versus them” intergroup logic, and the collapse of cross-cutting social ties, which Seymour Martin Lipset and many other scholars have viewed as crucial to the health of democracy. 23  As the boundaries of in-group loyalty and interaction harden, mutual respect and tolerance give way to distrust, stereotyping, prejudice, and enmity between members of deeply hostile political camps. Each side comes to view the other as an existential threat, straining and then rupturing respect for democratic norms and rules. 24  The problem is made worse, William Galston argues, by deep tensions in the nature of liberal democracy that render it vulnerable to reassertions of nationalism and traditionalism. “Individualism gives rise to the desire for denser communities. Egalitarianism strains against the desire for status and distinction. . . . Diversity produces a craving for unity; tedious negotiation for swift and decisive leadership.” 25

It is not just political behavior that has taken the United States to the brink of constitutional crisis. Rising proportions of Americans in both camps express attitudes and perceptions that are blinking red for democratic peril. Common political ground has largely vanished. An October 2020 Pew poll found that “roughly eight-in-ten registered voters in both camps said their differences with the other side were about core American values, and roughly nine-in-ten—again in both camps—worried that a victory by the other would lead to ‘lasting harm’ to the United States.” 26  A February 2021 survey documented deep partisan divisions over the legitimacy of the last presidential election, with most Republicans but very few Democrats believing that there was widespread voter fraud. Nearly three in ten Americans (29 percent), and 39 percent of Republicans, were ready to endorse “violent actions” by “the people . . . themselves” to “protect America” if elected leaders fail to do so. 27

A growing number of politicians and elected officials in the United States have been willing to bend or abandon democratic norms in the quest to achieve or retain power—and in retaining power, to barricade the party in it as a kind of permanent right, through restrictions on voting, politicization of electoral administration, and increasingly audacious and scientific gerrymandering that seeks to foreclose electoral alternation. Even in the wake of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, most Americans have still not come to grips with how far the country has strayed from the minimum elements of normative and behavioral consensus that sustain democracy, what Robert A. Dahl called the “system of mutual security,” in which competing political forces commit to tolerating the other and playing peacefully by the rules of the democratic game. 28  Every major scholar of democracy has recognized the fundamental need in a democracy for competitors to: 1) accept the legitimacy of their political rivals, and their right to compete; 2) trust that their rivals will not seek to eliminate them if they come to power; and 3) accept the consequences of fairly administered elections. This all requires, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt note, not just “mutual toleration” but also political “forbearance”—self-restraint in the exercise of power, rejection of violence, and respect for democracy’s unwritten rules and limits. 29  As these two master norms have begun disintegrating, democracy in the United States has begun to deconsolidate and is at serious risk of breaking down in the next presidential election.

Resurgent Authoritarianism

As my longtime coeditor, Marc Plattner, observed in our thirtieth-anniversary issue, “We are relearning the lesson that geopolitics matters deeply for the fate of democracy.” 30  It is no coincidence that the heyday of democratic expansion—the decade of the 1990s—was also what Charles Krauthammer dubbed “the unipolar moment,” when the United States stood at “the center of world power” as “the unchallenged superpower . . . attended by its Western allies.” 31  Already during the late 1970s and especially the 1980s, the power and will of the United States to defend human rights and promote democracy were giving hope and help to movements for democratic change, while ushering embattled autocrats out of power. Then, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of other powerful autocracies enabled the United States, key European democratic allies, and the European Union to support and encourage democratic change on an unprecedented scale. Democratic forces around the world were emboldened, morally embraced, and materially assisted. Autocrats who depended on aid and diplomatic support faced often irresistible pressure to open up, plan their exits, or step aside when they lost elections.

Krauthammer anticipated that the unipolar moment would extend for decades. It lasted for little more than one. The first body blow to the United States’ global democratic supremacy was the reckless overextension of U.S. power in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which tarnished the very idea of democracy promotion. The second was the 2008 financial crisis, generated by greed and mismanagement in the U.S. subprime-mortgage–lending industry and flawed regulatory policies. As the U.S. financial crisis became a global one, the reputation of the world’s most powerful democracy was further damaged. Preoccupied with the crisis and torn between his deep philosophical commitment to human rights and his instinctive pragmatism, the new U.S. president, Barack Obama, charted a middle course that brought only “partial revitalization” of the U.S. role in promoting democracy. Although it sustained democracy assistance, launched the Open Government Partnership against corruption, worked to discourage democratic backsliding, and occasionally pushed for democratic change, the United States was no longer spearheading an effort to make dictatorships democratize. The era of U.S. leadership to  shape   a more democratic world drew to a close. 32

Two structural factors constrained Obama’s—and the United States’—scope to promote democracy. One was the deepening polarization of U.S. politics, which further reduced the United States’ appeal as a model of democracy (and would do so even more dramatically in the years to come). And the second was the global resurgence of authoritarianism: the swelling power of China, the revival of aggressive and resentful Russian power, the cunning learning and adaptation of many autocracies, and their increasing collaboration in overlapping networks and norm-challenging initiatives. 33

No global development of the twenty-first century has been more damaging to the cause of freedom than the emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the world’s next superpower, with the world’s fastest-growing military, a worldwide propaganda apparatus, and a program of global infrastructure development—the Belt and Road Initiative—that has already invested more than US$200 billion in ports, railways, highways, energy pipelines, and the like in some sixty countries containing a majority of the world’s population. China has now surpassed the United States as the largest trading partner of Europe, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. China leads four of the fifteen specialized UN agencies and, in cooperation with Russia and other authoritarian regimes, is working energetically to degrade human-rights norms and democratic civil society participation within existing global institutions, such as the UN and its Human Rights Council, while seeking to craft new global rules to make the world safe for autocracy, kleptocracy, and digital repression. Now China is developing the world’s first major central-bank digital currency in a bid to challenge the supremacy of the dollar and weaken the ability of the United States to impose financial sanctions on violators of international norms.

As its geopolitical weight and resources swell, China is deploying classic Communist Party “united front” tactics to penetrate and coopt the soft tissues of democracy—universities, think tanks, research centers, news media, the arts, corporations, community organizations, political parties, and local governments. The three principal goals of this vast apparatus are: 1) to steal and appropriate Western technology in a drive toward global economic and military dominance; 2) to control the narrative about China by censoring and intimidating criticism of its human-rights violations and external belligerence, while promoting a benign view of the regime; and 3) to mobilize exchange partners and united-front allies (witting or not) to embrace rather than resist China’s hegemonic pretensions, and to lobby their governments for policies that will expedite this seismic shift in global power.

Abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s historic dictum to “hide your strength and bide your time,” China under its dictatorial leader, Xi Jinping, has engaged in increasingly brash and bellicose conduct in its region and beyond. It has laid sovereign claim to virtually the entire resource-rich and strategically vital South China Sea, and it has enforced this claim by dredging and militarizing new islands, swarming disputed waters with its vessels, invading the fishing and other maritime rights of its neighbors, and launching increasingly frequent and threatening rhetoric and military probes against Taiwan. Such actions, and China’s sweeping projection of sharp power in the region and globally, have come at a price. The Quadrilateral Strategic Dialogue among the United States, Australia, India, and Japan has begun to fashion a coordinated balancing response, and Japan and Australia especially are ramping up their defense posture and vigilance. Globally, public views of China have dimmed in reaction to its blandishments and bullying. But precisely because sharp power is covert and corrupting, many ruling elites around the world are only too happy to take up the bargain, and weak-state autocrats in particular welcome the support of an authoritarian superpower to neutralize and deter pressure from the Western democracies. Autocracy and kleptocracy have become inseparable companions in a global campaign to compromise sovereignty, plunder national wealth, eviscerate the rule of law, suppress opposition, and weaken the advanced democracies by laundering illicit wealth and whitewashing the reputations of the looters. Numerous Western corporations, consultancies, law firms, and private intelligence and surveillance contractors have become deeply implicated in this malign global trade, which has greatly extended the repressive capacity, retaliatory reach, and self-confidence of the world’s autocracies. 34

No country has witnessed the marriage of autocracy and kleptocracy on a more staggering scale than Russia, where an increasingly fearful and despotic ruler, now more than two decades in power, has amassed one of the world’s largest personal fortunes. The Kremlin’s mafia state seriously threatens the rule of law and the integrity of governance in Europe and the United States. But even greater is the damage that Russia’s deep digital, financial, and political projections of sharp power have repeatedly done to democracy in neighboring states such as Georgia, Ukraine, and Moldova, as well as to Western democracies through social-media manipulation and disinformation and financial support for far-right actors. These increasingly well-resourced and technically sophisticated efforts would be alarming enough, but Russia has also been reviving and modernizing its military as well. It has already used military force to shear off Crimea, a strategic portion of Ukraine, while waging a years-long war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region to destabilize the country’s democracy and warn it away from a closer alliance with the West.

Although they differ significantly in political system, economic capacity, and global power, the Chinese and Russian regimes share important features and interests. Each has become dramatically more repressive in the last decade, with China moving toward a neototalitarian surveillance state and Russia toward more vengeful and pervasive punishment of political opposition and dissent. Each system has become increasingly dominated by a single ruler who, feeling insecure in power, tightens repression and stokes nationalism to enhance domestic control. Each regime feels threatened by the example of a neighboring democracy—Taiwan in the case of China, Ukraine in the case of Russia—that substantially shares its language and culture and could inspire its citizens to want their own country’s political system to follow the neighboring model of freedom and pluralism. Each autocracy is therefore determined to subvert that neighboring democracy before being subverted by it. Each leader—and system—has broad contempt for the West and is determined to upend the liberal international order, which each detests. And each regime believes that the United States and, more broadly, the Western democracies are weak and irresolute, and therefore can be compromised, tested, and one day successfully confronted. Separately and together, China and Russia are nurturing networks of authoritarian collusion and endeavoring to remake the global balance of power.

We are approaching a very dangerous juncture. There is a real chance that China will use military force (if not an invasion, then a blockade, a massive cyberattack, or an escalating campaign of hybrid warfare) to attempt to compel Taiwan to “reunify with the motherland” and surrender its remarkable democracy. There is also a worrisome possibility that Russia will unleash more overt and massive military force to bring Ukraine to heel. Either of these events could happen not in some novelistic, next-generation scenario, but in the next few years, and the launching of one could, opportunistically, well invite the other. For this reason, Taiwan and Ukraine represent the front lines of the struggle to defend freedom in the world. The demise of either democracy through aggression by a more powerful neighbor would represent a hinge in history, much more akin to the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia than to the shadow contests of the Cold War. For several decades, we have become used to thinking of the struggle for freedom as purely political and civic. But unfortunately, as in the 1930s, the present danger has a significant element of military threat, for which neither the two battleground democracies nor the world’s most powerful liberal democracies are adequately prepared, psychologically, militarily, or in the security of their supply chains.

Power and Legitimacy

The most efficient solution to the gathering crisis of democracy globally would be the democratization of its two greatest adversaries, Russia and especially China. The failure of Russia’s nascent 1990s democracy was not predestined. As Michael McFaul recently explained in these pages, the choice of a successor to the ailing Boris Yeltsin was a close call. “A global financial meltdown felled Russia’s fragile economy in August 1998,” and along with it the liberalizing reformists led by first deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov. Absent that development, Yeltsin’s deteriorating health, and a few other elements of chance, it is plausible to imagine a different scenario, in which Nemtsov might have succeeded Yeltsin and an imperfect but real democracy could have gradually taken hold. 35  Putin’s dictatorship may seem ruthless and unassailable now, but public confidence in his leadership is falling, and the regime’s self-confidence appears to be at a low ebb.

By contrast, China’s communist regime has seemed a juggernaut of economic success and efficient control since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. But the regime faces multiple dilemmas. Its economic-growth rate has slowed to probably 4 percent or less. The real-estate sector is disastrously overleveraged and in crisis. As Hal Brands and Michael Beckley have recently observed, “State zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of capital.”   To remain economically innovative and dynamic, the regime needs to incentivize private enterprise and investment, but it is cracking down on its biggest tech companies (as well as other entrepreneurs) because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is genetically unable to tolerate any rival to its power. Having “ravaged its own natural resources,” Brands and Beckley write, China is running out of water and “is importing more energy and food than any other nation.” Consequently, it is three times as costly for China to produce a unit of growth today as it was in the early 2000s. The price of labor and fiscal pressures are likely to soar with the rapid aging of the Chinese population, which will reduce the working-age population by 200 million over the next three decades while increasing the number of senior citizens by a similar amount. 36  These contradictions could turn China’s economic miracle into a prolonged period of Soviet-style stagnation. But before that would bring the collapse of communism and the possibility of democratic change, Brands and Beckley worry that it could generate strategic panic—a conclusion that time is not on the regime’s side, and that (like Germany before World War I and Japan before Pearl Harbor) the PRC must strike militarily soon, before its power wanes.

Two decades ago, it was possible to imagine that China’s rapid development would bring pressure for democratic change. In 2007, the economist Henry S. Rowen predicted that China’s swift economic modernization would make it a “partly free” state by 2015 and a “free” one by 2025. 37  The Asian Barometer was likewise finding tantalizing evidence that values were changing in China in a more liberal direction, particularly among the young. However, this faith in the power of modernization to liberalize China (which I also found seductive) has proven misplaced thus far. Prior to Rowen’s essay (and since), the  Journal   published many others predicting at least incremental progress toward a stronger civil society and a more technocratic, law-based state, or that corruption and unaccountable rule would produce a crisis that could open the way to democracy. 38  Instead, Andrew Nathan’s 2003 analysis of “authoritarian resilience” has held truer to the mark. But Nathan’s assessment presumed continued institutionalization of CCP rule through regular, norm-bound succession, increased meritocracy and bureaucratic specialization, and growing channels of mass participation and appeal. 39  Few anticipated the emergence in Xi Jinping of a neototalitarian ruler who would erase institutional constraints on his power, intensify state control of the masses, and extinguish any trace of political liberalization. Early on, Xiao Qiang, the founder of  China Digital Times,  revealed the ways in which Chinese netizens were evading and even ridiculing government authority. But digital censorship, manipulation, and control have rendered online civic pluralism largely an illusion. With the aid of an ever more omniscient and integrated system of digital surveillance and control, powered by rapid gains in artificial intelligence, the CCP under Xi has been defying the odds.

We have reentered a period of epochal confrontation between two divergent forms of rule—one based on power, the other on legitimacy. Regimes based on power have the comfort and aid of one another as well as their shared corrupt networks and technologies of control, but most face dwindling economic prospects. Surveillance and repression are expensive, and kleptocratic tyranny drains the economy and atrophies the state beyond its repressive core. As Venezuela and Zimbabwe discovered, this is a formula for state decay and ultimately failure, unless the ruling clique has natural resources to loot or (as in North Korea and Syria) can operate as a global organized-crime syndicate. Where autocrats such as Recep Tayyip Erdo ğ an in Turkey and Viktor Orbán in Hungary depend on elections to legitimize and renew their rule, the economic consequences of their bad governance will be their undoing. This is a dilemma that India’s populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, will confront if he continues down his current illiberal path.

But the dictatorships in Russia and China could destroy world peace before they destroy themselves. As they face the deep contradictions of their stultifying models, the authoritarian rulers of Russia and China will find their legitimacy waning. If they do not embrace political reform—a prospect that fills them with dread, given the fate of Gorbachev—they will have to rely increasingly on the exercise of raw power at home and abroad to preserve their rule. This is likely to propel them on a fascistic path, in which relentless repression of internal pluralism becomes inseparably bound up with ultranationalism, expansionism, and intense ideological hostility to all liberal and democratic values and rivals. In both Russia and China, the campaign of bigotry and harassment against the LGBT community and any deviance from traditional gender roles reflects the rising tide of chauvinistic rejection of “Western influence” and is the flip side of the growing threat that these regimes pose to regional and ultimately global peace and security.

This is the darkest moment for freedom in half a century. I have faith in democracy’s long-run prospects, because it is a morally superior system and because it has proven over time to be more effective at meeting human needs, growing economies, protecting the environment, respecting human rights, and controlling corruption. 40  In addition, it is human nature to seek personal autonomy, dignity, and self-determination, and with economic development those values have become ascendant. 41  But there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of democracy. In this new era, the strategies and choices of democratic states and leaders will have consequences that resonate for decades. Can the world’s democracies manage their divisions and rally their resolve to meet the challenge posed by resurgent authoritarianism? Antonio Gramsci urged: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Only a clear-eyed recognition of the depth of the current peril can generate the necessary will.

I remain optimistic.

1. Samuel P. Huntington, “Democracy’s Third Wave,”  Journal of Democracy  2 (Spring 1991): 12–34; and Huntington,  The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century   (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2. Marc F. Plattner, “The Democratic Moment,”  Journal of Democracy   2 (Fall 1991): 38.

3. Claude Ake, “Rethinking African Democracy,”  Journal of Democracy   (Winter 1991): 32–44; and Mario Vargas Llosa, “The Culture of Liberty,”  Journal of Democracy   2 (Fall 1991): 25–33.

4. Amartya Sen, “Democracy as a Universal Value,”  Journal of Democracy  10 (July 1999), quoted from pages 6 and 10.

5. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Political Crafting of Democratic Consolidation or Destruction: European and South American Comparisons,” in Robert A. Pastor, ed.,  Democracy in the Americas: Stopping the Pendulum  (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1989), 47

6. The  Journal   has published numerous articles from the Afrobarometer, Arab Barometer, Asian Barometer, Latinobarómetro, and others showing broader global support for democracy than cultural skeptics imagined. Many of these essays were collected in Larry Diamond and Marc F. Plattner, eds.,  How People View Democracy  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

7. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, “Toward Consolidated Democracies,”  Journal of Democracy  7 (April 1996): 15, and Linz and Stepan,  Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 67–69.

8. These quotes are from Guillermo O’Donnell, “The Quality of Democracy: Why the Rule of Law Matters,”  Journal of Democracy   15 (October 2004): 41, but the idea originates in his essay “On the State, Democratization and Some Conceptual Problems: A Latin American View with Glances at Some Postcommunist Countries,”  World Development  21 (August 1993): 1355–69.

9. Larry Diamond, “Democracy in Latin America: Degrees, Illusions, and Directions for Consolidation,” in Tom Farer, ed.,  Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas   (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 73–74. See also Larry Diamond,  Developing Democracy: Toward Consolidation  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 64–117, especially 74–75.

10. Francis Fukuyama, “Why is Democracy Performing So Poorly?”  Journal of Democracy   26 (January 2015): 11–20.

11. Andreas Schedler, “Restraining the State: Conflicts and Agents of Accountability,” in Schedler, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner, eds.,   The Self–Restraining State: Power and Accountability in New Democracies  (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999); and Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, “The Quest for Good Government: Learning from Virtuous Circles,”  Journal of Democracy   27 (January 2016): 95–109.

12. Kathryn Stoner et al., “Transitional Successes and Failures: The Domestic-International Nexus,” in Kathryn Stoner and Michael McFaul, eds.,  Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

13. Robert D. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,”  Journal of Democracy   6 (January 1995): 65–78.

14. Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, “What Makes for Democracy?”   in Diamond, Linz, and Lipset, eds.,  Politics in Developing Countries: Comparing Experiences with Democracy,   2nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

15. Larry Diamond, “Is the Third Wave Over?”  Journal of Democracy   7 (July 1996): 20–37, quoted on 33 and 35.

16. Larry Diamond, “Is Pakistan the (Reverse) Wave of the Future?”  Journal of Democracy   11 (July 2000): 91–106.

17. For two broader views, see Larry Diamond,  Ill Winds: Saving Democracy from Russia Rage, Chinese Ambition, and American Complacency  (New York: Penguin, 2019), and Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, “The Anatomy of Democratic Backsliding,”  Journal of Democracy   32 (October 2021): 26–41.

18. See the essays under the title, “Is Democracy in Decline?” in the  Journal of Democracy  26 (January 2015), and compare especially Larry Diamond, “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession” (141–155) and Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Myth of Democratic Recession” (45–58).

19. Larry Diamond, “Breaking Out of the Democratic Slump,”  Journal of Democracy   31 (January 2020): 36–50, and Diamond, “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective: Scope, Methods, and Causes,”  Democratization  28 (January 2021): 22–42.

20. Freedom House,  Freedom in the World 2021 ; and Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz, “The Freedom House Survey for 2020: Democracy in a Year of Crisis,”  Journal of Democracy   32 (April 2021): 45–60.

21. V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2021,  www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/74/8c/748c68ad-f224-4cd7-87f9-8794add5c60f/dr_2021_updated.pdf .

22. Economist Intelligence Unit, “Democracy Index 2020: In Sickness and In Health?” www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2020 .

23. Seymour Martin Lipset,  Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics,  expanded ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 77–78.

24. Jennifer McCoy and Murat Somer, “Mainstream Parties in Crisis: Overcoming Polarization,”  Journal of Democracy   32 (January 2021): 9–11; and McCoy and Somer, “Toward a Theory of Pernicious Polarization and How It Harms Democracies,”  Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science  681 (January 2019): 234–71.

25. William A. Galston, “The Enduring Vulnerability of Liberal Democracy,”  Journal of Democracy   31 (July 2020): 23.

26. Michael Dimock and Richard Wike, “America Is Exceptional in the Nature of Its Political Divide,” Pew Research Center, 13 November 2020,  www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/13/america-is-exceptional-in-the-nature-of-its-political-divide .

27. Daniel A. Cox, “After the Ballots Are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism,” Survey Center on American Life, 11 February 2021,  www.americansurveycenter.org/research/after-the-ballots-are-counted-conspiracies-political-violence-and-american-exceptionalism .

28. Robert A. Dahl,  Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition  (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971).

29. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt,  How Democracies Die  (New York: Crown, 2018), 97–117.

30. Marc F. Plattner, “Democracy Embattled,”  Journal of Democracy  31 (January 2020): 8.

31. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,”  Foreign Affairs  70, no. 1 (1991): 23.

32. Thomas Carothers,  Democracy Policy Under Obama: Revitalization or Retreat?  (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012).

33. William J. Dobson,  The Dictator’s Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy   (New York: Doubleday, 2012); Alexander Cooley, “Authoritarianism Goes Global: Countering Democratic Norms,”  Journal of Democracy 26  (July 2015): 49–63; and Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, and Christopher Walker, eds.,  Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy   (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016).

34. Ronald Deibert,  Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society   (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2020); Deibert, “Digital Subversion: The Threat to Democracy,” Lipset Lecture, National Endowment for Democracy, 1 December 2021; and Anne Applebaum, “The Autocrats Are Winning,” Atlantic   (December 2021): 44–54.

35. Michael McFaul, “Russia’s Road to Autocracy,”  Journal of Democracy   32 (October 2021): 17 (and see the full discussion of democratic failure, 15–19).

36. Hal Brands and Michael Beckley, “China Is a Declining Power—and That’s the Problem,”  Foreign Policy , 24 September 2021.

37. Henry S. Rowen, “When Will the Chinese People Be Free?”  Journal of Democracy   18 (July 2007): 38–52.

38. These numerous  Journal of Democracy   essays, including the ones cited in this paragraph, were gathered together in Andrew J. Nathan, Larry Diamond, and Marc F. Plattner, eds.,  Will China Democratize?  (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

39. Andrew J. Nathan, “China’s Changing of the Guard: Authoritarian Resilience,”   Journal of Democracy   14 (January 2003): 6–17.

40. See the V-Dem project on “The Case for Democracy,” www.v-dem.net/en/our-work/research-projects/case-democracy .

41. Christian Welzel and Ronald Inglehart, “The Role of Ordinary People in Democratization,”  Journal of Democracy   19 (January 2008): 126–40; Welzel, “Why the Future Is Democratic,”  Journal of Democracy   32 (April 2021): 132–44.

Copyright © 2022 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

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Further Reading

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Coup in Tunisia: Is Democracy Lost?

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Volume 31, Issue 1

30 Years of World Politics: What Has Changed?

• Francis Fukuyama

Democracies are grappling with an era of transformation: Identity is increasingly replacing economics as the major axis of world politics. Technological change has deepened social fragmentation, and trust in institutions…

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• Michael Albertus
• Guy Grossman

Recent survey research suggests that most voters disapprove of antidemocratic acts by elected leaders. Yet there are critical exceptions when a significant minority of voters are sympathetic to or even…

Sample Essay On Democracy, with Outline

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Democracy Essay Sample Outline

Introduction.

Thesis: Democracy is a system of government where the will of the people is the ultimate power. Though it has a decisive influence in most countries where it is practiced, several drawbacks amount from the practice.

Paragraph 1:

Democracy is, ‘the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’

• Free and fair elections characterize it.
• A country that thrives in a democracy should prioritize the protection of human freedoms and rights.

Paragraph 2:

Democracy discards privileges of a class or group of men.

• Ordinary people have the right to choose their leaders.
• All voters are eligible for leadership positions.

Paragraph 3:

Democracy ensures that all people are treated as equals before the law.

• Citizens make laws in a democratic country through their representatives.
• All people regardless of their influence in the society are treated equally under the law.

Paragraph 4:

Democracy instills a sense of responsibility in all citizens within a country.

• People take part in governing their country.
• People rise against oppression and air their views on governance.

Paragraph 5: 

Democracy greatly reduces the likelihood of political dissent.

• A democratically elected government receives its mandate from a majority of the citizenry.
• A majority should be content with it.

Paragraph 6:

Democracy operates by an exceptional majority.

• Illiterate persons and the ignorant, who make up the majority are given the power to choose leaders instead of the elites.
• Leadership positions are given to irresponsible people.

Paragraph 7:

Democracy proliferates inefficiency in governance.

• Most leaders in democratic countries focus more on creating political alliances rather than on development and administration. Administration in many democratic countries is run by bureaucrats, who have no obligation to the people.
• Elected leaders do not foster development in their countries.

Paragraph 8:

Democracy encourages corruption.

• Most leaders use their political influence to benefit those close to them.
• Only supporters of a political regime benefit from an elected government.

Democracy gives people the power to govern themselves. It allows them to make laws, which promote equality and fair treatment for all. However, it also encourages corruption and promotes inefficiency in governance. Appropriate use of democracy benefits both a country and its people.

Make use of the best writing tools that will come in handy when writing your essays or handling your assignments.

Free Essay On Democracy for Students

Democracy is a system of government where the will of the people is the ultimate power. It was introduced to give ordinary people the ability to take part in determining who governs them. Over the years more and more countries have followed the democratization path in an effort to improve their links with other democratic countries. It is a practice that is highly recommended by most international organizations. Even though this form of governance has real influence in most countries where it is practiced, it also has its downside. Below is a discussion regarding what democracy entails, and its positive and negative impacts in countries where it is practiced.

Many sources define democracy as, ‘the government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ Freedom in a country is realized through the use of an open mechanism of selecting leaders. In this light, a democratic nation should be characterized by free and fair elections. Ordinary people hold the ultimate power in a democratic country, and therefore should be allowed to actively participate in civic life and politics. A state that thrives on democracy should prioritize the protection of human freedoms and rights. The rule of law is one of the crucial components of justice. In a democratic country, all individuals are treated equally under the law.

Merits of Democracy

Democracy discards privileges of a class or group of people. In a democratic environment, only people with the right to vote are given the responsibility of leadership. Every voter in a country has the potential to lead others. In a democratic state, the administration is not limited to few groups or individuals. It gives ordinary people the freedom to choose their leaders and to serve as leaders. Democracy ensures that no individual is above others as is often evident in other forms of government such as monarchies and anarchies. It upholds the values of equality and liberty in a country.

Democracy also ensures that all people are treated equally before the law. In a democratic country, rules are made by ordinary people through their representatives in the legislature. Laws made take into consideration the welfare of all people and not for those who belong to a particular class. The freedoms, interests, and rights of every citizen are highly and equally safeguarded. Resources in such a nation are similarly distributed because democracy stresses on equality of all persons. People in the three social classes are governed by the same set of rules and regulations. The law applies to all individuals irrespective of their influence in society. Perhaps you maybe interested in what it means to be American sample esays .

This method of governance further instills a sense of responsibility in all citizens within a country. It gives the common man the right of belonging to a particular nation. It also gives them a chance to participate in the nation’s governance. The people are therefore compelled to take matters of governance upon themselves so that if anything goes wrong, they will stand and question those they put in positions of leadership. They feel entitled to oppose any form of oppression that may arise in their country. They are given the right to speak up their minds and express their views about the governance or leadership without fear of being victimized.

Further, democracy has a significant strength in its ability to greatly reduce the likelihood of political dissent. Collier (2012) explains that since a democratically elected government receives its mandate from a majority of the citizenry, it implies that a majority should be content with it. This is not possible in other forms of government. It is only by constituting and running a government as informed by the needs of those who elect it that a system of governance can be said to be based on approval by the majority. Not even when a dictatorship works in the interest of all citizens can it be considered to enjoy majority approval. This is because the only sure way of determining what the public needs and/or wants is through elections. On the other hand however, the minority needs may not be fully met by a democratic government. Those who voted against such a government would feel left out and would thus develop a feeling of dissatisfaction (Collier, 2012). This notwithstanding, no system of politics or governance can see everybody get satisfied and it is only through democracy that a majority can be satisfied.

Demerits of Democracy

Democracy operates on majority rule. As earlier mentioned, democracy gives ordinary people the power to choose their leaders. Those who are preferred by the majority are regarded to be the elected leaders. However, in most countries, a high proportion of the population consists of illiterate or ignorant individuals who do not care about how the government is run. These people vote blindly and end up giving leadership positions to unqualified and undeserving persons. The elite makes up the minority in many countries, and their few numbers restrict them from determining those that assume positions of power.

Democracy also proliferates inefficiency in governance. Most leaders in democratic countries focus more on creating political alliances rather than on development and administration. Administration in many democratic countries is run by bureaucrats, who have no obligation to the people. Since most of those that elect such leaders are ignorant individuals, they are sucked into the debates of political alliances thus paying less attention to the delivery of services by such leaders. It therefore becomes difficult to foster infrastructural, social, and economic development in many democratic countries. People neglect their responsibilities of keeping the government in check, making it hard for leaders to make any meaningful developments. Democracy therefore negatively influences the ability of a country to experience significant economic growth.

Further, democracy encourages corruption. After elected leaders assume office, they embark on activities of forming new political parties and alliances. Leadership values and promises made to the people are forgotten. Developments are only initiated in regions that support ruling regimes, while other regions are neglected. The value of equality, which democracy purports to uphold, is often overlooked. Most state jobs are given based on favoritism. People in leadership positions use their influence to benefit those close to them and those who belong to their communities or support their political movements.

Democracy gives people the power to govern themselves. Through it, equality is upheld, and the rule of law takes its course. However, it also gives illiterate and ignorant individuals the power to lead others, and this contributes to inefficiency in governance and promotes corruption. Thus, democracy may only be of benefit to a country if used appropriately and in line with the true meaning of the word. Scheme through some quality criminal justice research paper topics you can choose for your assignment.

Ankita, T. (2016). “13 valid demerits of democracy form of government”. Preserve Articles . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://www.preservearticles.com/201106248563/13-valid-demerits-of-democracy-form-of-government.html

Ankita, T. (2017). “13 most essential merits of democracy form of government”. Preserve Articles . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://www.preservearticles.com/201106248562/13-most-essential-merits-of-democracy-form-of-government.html

Campbell, D. F. (2008). The basic concept for the democracy ranking of the quality of democracy .

Collier, R. (2012). Fundamental principles of democracy . Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.

Ghiorgis, A. (2012). “Principles of democracy”. Asmarino . Retrieved June 19, 2020 from http://asmarino.com/articles/1442-principles-of-democracy

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Democracy and Dictatorship Essay

Democracy and dictatorship play a role in paths that lead to political development. While democracy in itself provides a variety of friendliness amongst the people, dictatorship, on the other hand, bestows all power of a community or a country upon a single individual.

This creates a lot of tension and unfairness between the rulers and the ruled. As opposed to democracy, dictatorship results in an unstable economy of a country. The way Daron and James (2006) outline, there are different political paths that different political institutions take over a certain period. Amongst the paths, just a few of them result in democracy.

Albert makes a clear observation that is of a lot of importance. He notices that a more established democracy results in an enormous distribution of coalitions.

After these same coalitions have formed, economic landscape is flooded with incompetent laws, regulation and other practices. Because of these practices, a country or a community ultimately excels little in terms of development or growth.

In an attempt to understand democracy and dictatorship in length, Acemoglu and Robinson (2006) come out vividly to take us through these. According to them, determinants of democratization are substantially reduced to various levels that explain it better.

The levels include economy structure and inequality that exists in a community or society. Additional levels that they discuss incorporate the degree of globalization and the kind of skills that elites bear as will be subsequently explained.

Dictatorship and democracy trace their origins in the ancient of time. For instance, there are the already mentioned paths that led to their creation in different manners. Apparently, the paths make us familiarize ourselves with the difficulties in the universe owing to the fast changing real- world comparisons, Daron and James (2006).

As a matter of fact, the paths above show some means that connect political and economic composition of a community to a political institution. Talking about the paths of political development, there exist four of them in number.

They all result in different democracy through diverse means as is discussed below noticed that democracy is now never endangered. It simply tolerates all other forces that may hit it from side to side and consolidates to a stable state. This means that this first path that leads to democracy may take a little time to stabilize, but after that, it stands out effectively on its own.

The second path is the one that leads to a democracy that is quickly created. It does not end at the creation but has its immediate other side that does away with the created democracy.

In other words, the established democracy quickly crumples as Daron and James (2006) observes. Again, the collapsed democracy uses the forces that made it stand initially to stabilize. After this, once more the re-established democracy falls again and the cycle recurs.

A third path of democracy is one in which a community or a country stays put in no democracy. In case democracy exists, then it is that which is totally delayed to appoint of not realizing their existence. This third path of may be divided into two nondemocratic paths.

In the first place, democracy is never created because of community’s wealthy and prosperous status. This is an assurance of a stable status of the society’s political quo. It appears that this system is never challenged simply because individuals found in the society are well satisfied under the on hand political institutions, Daron and James (2006).

Another situation arises still in the nondemocratic paths. As opposed to the above, this type entails a community that is unequal but very exploitative. The panorama of the existing democracy in this path is weak and posses a threat to elites.

In response, the elites use any means possible to totally avoid it. For example, the elites resolve in using war and repression to put the impending threats at bay. A typical example of a country that used a similar path to this is South Africa before the fall of apartheid rule.

As Jorge Heine argues, it is impractical in the absence of political participation to have political scientist. As a clear fact, political science develops with expansion of political participation. Huntington further explains this in his central proposition which identifies that political science is strong where democracy is strong, and the reverse is also true.

According to him, surfacing of democracy promotes establishment of political science. Furthermore, development of political science results in the creation and maintenance of democracy.

Democracy and dictatorship have had a bit-by bit progress amongst different people of diverse classes. Dictatorship, which is also known as autocracy, is a government system in which there is an authority to control all the activities of a state or a community. This authority, however, is concentrated in the hands of one individual.

Talking about progress of democracy in Britain, for example, there was a wide gap that separated the rich from the poor as Robinson and Acemoglu (2003) observed. Initially, only the rich elites were allowed to vote; whereas, the poor had many complications that hindered them from voting.

For instance, illiteracy was a major bane to them that had them left out of the entire voting process as the rich in their own class took it upon themselves to vote.

As was earlier mentioned, there was a path of democracy existed gradually. This became a reality in Europe where democratic system emerged more progressively. Precisely, Britain issued I the first place uncertain reforms in 1832 that included the relatively wealthy middle class, Robinson and Acemoglu (2003).

As time progressed, rights to vote were broadened in 1867 and 1884, then again in 1919 when worldwide male suffrage was initiated. In addition to this, all women in Britain were finally allowed to vote in the year 1928. This is for sure a series of gradual extensions of franchise that a thee-class model analyses and the details are as below.

When an alliance between the middle class and the poor pressurizes revolution disenfranchised, the rich devises a way to curb it all. The rich elites break the coalition through one sure way of lengthening permission to middle class.

Presumably, this middle class is considerably richer than the poor individuals and so it is easier to persuade them against revolution, Robinson and Acemoglu (2003).

Taking the Great Britain as an example, democracy traces its origins upon formation of ordinary parliaments. These were a forum for upper classes to agree about taxes while discussing policies with the king of the Great Britain as Daron and James (2006) explain. Voting became unopposed in the 18 th century all though to the mid of 19th century in Britain.

This means that governance by then ceased being dictatorial because efficient voting system was adapted. Future democracy of Britain was shaped through reforms that were made in the constitution after Civil War, which took place in 1642-1651.

Alongside that, Glorious Revolution of 1668 resulted to a remarkable transformation in both economic and political institutions, Daron and James (2006). The changes have had significant insinuations for the future democracy of the Great Britain.

Autocracy, on the other hand, also reveals it intensions. That a dictator comes to power, and lead a group of people in a society is a reality. However, when the autocrat has a short period horizon, it is always in their interest to seize the property of their subjects.

It is also in their minds to abrogate any contracts that they might have signed with an intension of borrowing money from them. After getting money, they suit themselves while and neglecting the long-term economic consequences of their choices. According to Mancur (1993), dictatorship carried out within a short time horizon decreases assurance in enforcement of long-run contacts and investments.

Owing to these facts, there is a remedy that should be advocated for and supported in totality. Individuals just need to secure a government that regards with respect the rights of individuals. These rights are objects of a unique set of the governmental body (Mancur, 1993).

In conclusion, autocracies are appalling but successful because autocrats rely on major groups to stay in power. On the other hand, in political economy, there exists a long- standing theme which is making political leaders accountable as we make their office survival dependant on their policy performance, Masa (2007). In addition, success always follows autocrats who administer and exercise discipline for those who perform poorly.

Daron, A R & James, A R 2006, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Cambridge University Press, USA.

Daron, A R & James, A R 2006, Political Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: The Role of the Middle Class, Cambridge University Press, USA.

Jorge, H 2002, Democracy, Dictatorship, and the Making of Modern Political Science: Huntington’s Thesis and Pinochet’s Chile. Web.

Mancur, O 1993, Dictatorship, Democracy and Development , the American Political Science review, vol. 87, no. 3.

Masa, K 2007, What Can We Learn From Successful Autocracies? Web.

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Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Democracy and Dictatorship." April 26, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/democracy-and-dictatorship/.

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Twelve Theses on Nationalism

Subscribe to governance weekly, william a. galston william a. galston ezra k. zilkha chair and senior fellow - governance studies.

August 12, 2019

• 16 min read

This piece was originally published by “ The American Interest. “

B y the end of World War Two, nationalism had been thoroughly discredited. Critics charged that national self-interest had prevented democratic governments from cooperating to end the Great Depression, and that nationalist passions had led not just to war, but also to some of the worst crimes groups of human beings had ever perpetrated on others. The construction of international institutions and norms—in economics, politics, and human rights—as antidotes to nationalist excesses dominated Western diplomacy for decades after 1945, and the global struggle between liberal democracy and communism muted the expression of nationalist sentiments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The peace and economic growth that characterized this period built public support for this strategy.

As decades passed and new generations emerged, memories of the Great Depression and World War Two lost their hold on the Western imagination. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the postwar era began giving way to new forces. The European Union, its boosters convinced that their enlightened post-national project represented the future of politics for mankind, sought to move from economic integration to political integration. But public opposition swelled in many member-states. The “captive nations” of eastern and central Europe reemerged as independent actors, and long-submerged nationalist feelings resurfaced. But the feelings were not limited to the east: Growing regional inequalities within countries drove a wedge between left-behind populations and the international elites many citizens held responsible for their plight. The Great Recession of 2008 undermined public confidence in expert managers of the economy, and in the internationalist outlook that had long dominated their thinking. In Europe, concerns over immigration grew as people from lower-wage countries in the EU moved freely to wealthy member-states. These concerns exploded in 2015 after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to admit more than 1 million refugees from Syria and other countries wracked by conflict and economic stagnation.

All these trends, and others, were at work in the United States. The consequences of China’s entry into the WTO, especially for U.S. manufacturing, stoked concerns about international trade. Five decades of robust immigration transformed America’s demography, a shift celebrated by some but deplored by others. In the wake of the Great Recession and the Iraq war, the costs of America’s global leadership became increasingly controversial, and the belief that other nations were taking advantage of the United States intensified. Postwar internationalism became a new front in the decades-old culture war. In retrospect, it was only a matter of time until someone mounted a frontal challenge to the consensus of elites in both major political parties. When it did, “America First” hit the established order with the force and subtlety of a wrecking-ball.

“Nationalism rightly understood means that no nation is an island, and that in the long run the wellbeing of one’s nation cannot be decoupled from the fate of others.”

The growth of nationalism as a political phenomenon encouraged the emergence of nationalist theoreticians and ideologues. In the United States, a July 2019 conference on “National Conservatism” brought together thinkers who argued—in direct opposition to the leaders of the postwar era—that nationalism offers a more secure and morally preferable basis for both domestic and international policy. Similar convenings have occurred in Europe. Critics of the new nationalism have been quick to weigh in.

As the battle has been joined, the ratio of heat to light has been high. And yet so are the stakes. Our democratic future depends on whether publics come to see nationalism as the solution, the problem, or something in-between. As a contribution to clarifying the debate, I offer twelve theses on nationalism.

Thesis One:   Nationalism and patriotism are not the same.  Patriotism is love of country—as George Orwell puts it, “devotion to a particular place and way of life.” Nationalism means giving pride of place, culturally and politically, to a distinctive ensemble of individuals—the nation.

Thesis Two:   A nation is a community, united by sentiments of loyalty and mutual concern, that shares a cultural heritage and belief in a common destiny.  Some nations additionally invoke common descent, which in nearly all cases is mythical, as it was when John Jay posited it for the nascent United States in Federalist 2. As political theorist Bernard Yack observes in  Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community , not all nationalist claims are based on ethnicity. Ethno-nations are distinct, he observes, in that they make descent from previous members “a necessary, rather than merely sufficient, condition of membership.”

Thesis Three:   An individual need not be born into a cultural heritage to (come to) share it.  Entrants into the national community commit themselves not only to learn their nation’s history and customs but also to take on their benefits and burdens as their own, as Ruth did when she pledged to Naomi that “Your people shall be my people, and your God my God.”

Thesis Four:   Nationalism and patriotism can yield conflicting imperatives.  Many Zionists felt patriotic connections to the states in which they lived, even as they labored to create a nation-state of their own. Although many of today’s Kurds in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey harbor patriotic sentiments, their primary loyalty is to the Kurdish nation, and their ultimate aim is national self-determination in their own state.

Thesis Five:   Nationalism poses a challenge to the modern state system.  The familiar term “nation-state” implicitly assumes that the geographical locations of distinct nations coincide with state boundaries. Occasionally this is true (Japan comes close), but mostly it isn’t. Nations can be spread across multiple states (as the Kurds are), and states can contain multiple nations (as Spain does). What some regard as the ideal arrangement—a sovereign state for each nation and only this nation—is still exceedingly rare despite the convulsions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and still could not be realized without further massive, bloody disruptions of existing arrangements. Hitler’s determination to unify all ethno-cultural Germans into a single nation would have been a disaster, even if he had harbored no further ambitions. Today’s Hungarians have grounds for objecting to the Treaty of Trianon, which left millions of their co-nationals outside the borders of their shrunken state. Nevertheless, any effort to reunite them under a single flag would mean war in the heart of Europe.

Today’s state system includes international organizations, which many nationalists oppose as abrogating their states’ sovereignty. This stance rests on a failure to distinguish between revocable agreements, which are compatible with maintaining sovereignty, and irrevocable agreements, which are not. In leaving the European Union, Britain is exercising its sovereign rights, which it did not surrender when it entered the EU. By contrast, the states that banded together into the United States of America agreed to replace their several sovereignties into a single sovereign power, with no legal right under the Constitution to reverse this decision. When the southern states tried to secede, a civil war ensued, and its outcome ratified the permanent nature of the Union.

Thesis Six:   It is possible to be a nationalist without believing that every nation has a right to political independence, but it isn’t easy.  The U.S. Declaration of Independence speaks of “the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them.” Similarly, Israel’s Declaration of Independence invokes the “self-evident right of the Jewish people to be a nation, as all other nations, in its own sovereign state.”

There are often practical reasons to deny some nations political self-determination (see Thesis Five). But doing so in principle rests on the belief that some nations are superior to others and deserve to rule over them. The claimed superiority can be cultural, hence mutable and temporary, or ethno-racial, essentialist, and immutable. The former often includes the responsibility of dominant nations to prepare subordinated nations for independence, as John Stuart Mill’s defense of tutelary colonialism did. The latter implies that subordinate nations are at best means to the well-being of dominant nations; at worst, lesser forms of humanity who exist at the sufferance of superior nations.

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There is no logical connection between the undeniable premise that each nation is distinctive and the conclusion that mine is better than yours. But the psychology of pride in one’s nation can lead even decent, well-meaning people from the former to the latter.

Some contemporary defenders of nationalism claim that it is inherently opposed to imperialism. Nation-states want only to be left alone, they say, to govern themselves in accordance with their own traditions. As Rebecca West once put it, there is not “the smallest reason for confounding nationalism, which is the desire of a people to be itself, with imperialism, which is the desire of a people to prevent other peoples from being themselves.”

She would be right if all nationalism were inwardly focused and guided by the maxim of live and let live. But the history of the 20th century shows that some forms of nationalism are compatible with imperialism and worse. It depends on what a nation thinks that “being itself” entails. The proposition that nationalism and imperialism always stand opposed rests not on historical evidence, but rather on a definition of nationalism at odds with its real-world manifestations.

Thesis Seven:   It is possible to be a nationalist without believing that the interests of one’s nation always trump competing considerations.  Writing in the shadow of World War Two, George Orwell declared that nationalism was “the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” Although this is an unmatched description of Nazism, it conflates an extreme instance of nationalism with the totality.

In fact, nationalism is compatible with a wide range of ideologies and political programs. It motivated not only Nazi Germany but also Britain’s heroic resistance to fascism. (Churchill’s wartime speeches rallied his countrymen with stirring invocations of British nationalism against its foe.) And because the nation need not be understood as the supreme good, “liberal nationalism” is not an oxymoron.

Giving priority to the interests of one’s nation does not mean ignoring the interests of others, any more than caring most about one’s own children implies indifference to the fate of others’ children. Nations are sometimes called upon to risk their blood and treasure to respond to or prevent harm in other nations. At some point, the imbalance between modest costs to one’s nation and grievous damage to others should compel action. Even though some Americans would have risked their lives to prevent the Rwandan genocide, America’s failure to intervene was a mistake, a proposition that nationalists can accept without contradicting their beliefs.

Thesis Eight:   It is a mistake to finger nationalism as the principal source of oppression and aggression in modern politics.  As we have seen repeatedly, creedal and religion-based states and movements can be just as brutal, and they can pose, in their own way, equally fundamental challenges to the state system. The Reformation triggered a full century of astonishingly bloody strife. More recently, for those who took class identity to be more fundamental than civic identity, “socialist internationalism” became the organizing principle of politics, and similarly if membership in the Muslim  umma  is thought to erase the significance of state boundaries. Those outside the favored class or creed became enemies with whom no permanent peace is possible, and the consequences are as negative for decent politics as any of the evils perpetrated in the name of nationalism.

Thesis Nine:   As a key source of social solidarity, nationalism can support higher-order political goods such as democracy and the welfare state.  Democracy rests on mutual trust, without which the peaceful transfer of power comes to be regarded as risky. The welfare state rests on sympathy and concern for others who are vulnerable, whether or not the more fortunate members of the community see themselves as equally vulnerable. Shared nationality promotes these sentiments, while in the short-to-medium term (at least), increasing national diversity within states weakens them.

This helps explain why many nationalists who are not driven by racial or ethnic bias nonetheless are ambivalent about high numbers of immigrants and refugees. It also points to the most important domestic challenge contemporary nationalists face—reconciling their attachment to their co-nationals with fair treatment for other groups with whom they share a common civic space.

Thesis Ten:   Although we typically think of nations as driving the creation of nation-states, the reverse is also possible.  A generation ago, Eugen Weber showed how, over the decades before World War One, the French state deployed a program of linguistic, cultural, and educational unification to turn “peasants into Frenchmen.” During the past half-century, post-colonial governments have sought, with varying degrees of success, to weaken tribal and sectarian ties in favor of overarching national attachments.

Many historians have discerned similar processes at work in the United States. Prior to the Civil War, lexicographers such as Noah Webster crystallized a non-regional American English, distinct from British English, while historians such as George Bancroft told the story of America’s creation and growth as a narrative that all could share. After the Civil War, as flows of immigrants from Central and Southern Europe accelerated, programs of civic education proliferated—with the aim, one might say, of turning peasants into Americans. Because it was no longer possible to say, as John Jay did in 1787, that Americans were “descended from the same ancestors,” let alone “professing the same religion,” it became all the more important to create a common cultural heritage into which millions of new immigrants could be initiated. The process may have been rough and ready, even coercive, but in the main it succeeded. And today, after a half century of cultural strife and large flows of immigrants from an unprecedented diversity of countries, it may be necessary to recommit ourselves to this task, albeit in less favorable circumstances.

Thesis Eleven:   Although scholars distinguish between creedal nationalism and ethnic or cultural nationalism as ideal types, there are no examples of purely creedal nations.  In the United States, abstract principles and concrete identities have been braided together since the Founding. Our greatest President, who famously described the United States as a nation dedicated to a proposition, also invoked (unsuccessfully) the “mystic chords of memory” and our “bonds of affection” as antidotes for civil strife and advocated transmuting our Constitution and laws into objects of reverence—a “political religion.”

Thesis Twelve:   Although nationalism is a distinctively modern ideology, national identity has pervaded much of human history and is unlikely to disappear as a prominent feature of politics.  As Bernard Yack has persuasively argued, nationalism is unthinkable without the emergence of the principle of popular sovereignty as the source of legitimate political power. Because this theory characterizes the “people” who constitute the sovereign in abstract terms, it does not answer the key practical question: Who or what is the people?

The U.S. Declaration of Independence exemplifies this hiatus. Before we reach its much-quoted second paragraph on the rights of individuals, we encounter the assertion that Americans constitute “one people” asserting its right to “dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another.” Americans are one people, the British another. The governing class of Great Britain had a different view: Americans were subjects of the king, just as residents of the British Isles were, distinguished from them only by location. Even to assert their Lockean right of revolution, of which George III was no great fan, Americans had to make the case that they were a separate and distinct people. It turns out that in the case of the United States and many that followed, national identity offered the most plausible way to meet this challenge, which is why John Jay resorted to it. 19th century nationalists had richer intellectual resources on which to draw, including Herder’s account of distinct cultures, but their strategy was much the same.

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In short, national identity is transmuted into nationalism through its encounter with the doctrine of popular sovereignty. When the people are understood as the nation, popular sovereignty becomes national sovereignty.

Because pre-modern politics lacked the theory of popular sovereignty, it could not develop a doctrine of nationalism. Nonetheless, national identity has pervaded human history, for the simple reason that we are finite beings shaped by unchosen contingencies. Although we are social, cultural, and political beings, we are born helpless and unformed. We are formed first by the ministration of parents and kin or their equivalents, then by the experiences of neighborhood and local community, and eventually by the wider circle of those with whom we share a cultural heritage. To be sure, the encounter with those whose formative influences were different will not leave us untouched. No matter how much our horizons are broadened, we never set aside our origin. We may leave home, but home never quite leaves us, a reality reflected in our language. “Mother tongue,” “fatherland”—the age-old metaphor of our place of origin as nurturing, shaping parent will never lose its power.

N ational identity is an aspect of human experience that no measure of education should seek to expunge—nor could it if it tried. But as we have seen, the modern political expression of national identity is multi-valent. Nationalism can be a force for great evil or great good. It can motivate collective nobility and collective brutality. It can bring us together and drive us apart.

In the face of these realities, the way forward is clear, at least in principle. Acknowledging the permanence of nationalism and its capacity for good, we must do our best to mitigate its negative effects. Nationalism need not mean that a country’s cultural majority oppresses others with whom it shares a state; putting one’s country first need not mean ignoring the interests and concerns of others. On the contrary: To adapt a Tocquevillian locution, nationalism rightly understood means that no nation is an island, that in the long run the wellbeing of one’s nation cannot be decoupled from the fate of others. The American leaders who rebuilt Europe understood that theirs was not an act of charity but rather a means to the long-time best interest of their country. The leaders of the civil rights movement knew that they promoted not only the cause of justice, but also the strength of their country, at home and abroad.

The details may have changed since the days of George Marshall and Martin Luther King, Jr., but the essentials remain the same.

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Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America

New York: Viking, 2017. 368 pp. $28.00. ISBN: 978-1101980965

• Book Review
• Published: 01 July 2019
• Volume 56 , pages 300–306, ( 2019 )

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• Fred Thompson 1  

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For examples, J.M. Buchanan. The limits of liberty: Between anarchy and Leviathan . University of Chicago Press, 1975; J.M. Buchanan and Richard E. Wagner. Democracy in deficit . Academic Press, 1977; and Geoffrey Brennan and J.M. Buchanan. The power to tax: Analytic foundations of a fiscal constitution . Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Although he was not, according to Phillip W. Magness, Art Carden, and Vincent Geloso. “James M. Buchanan, Public Choice, and the Political Economy of Desegregation” (November 15, 2017). Accessed Jan. 5, 2018 at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3071403 , in fact, ever a segregationist. Of course, it’s pretty hard to prove a negative, but Magness and his colleagues try to make a case based on evidence rather than mere presumption based on place of birth and milieu, which puts them one up on MacLean.

Referenced by MacLean @ page 117. And, indeed, with that, she rests her case.

J.M. Buchanan. “America’s Third Century in perspective.” Atlantic Economic Journal 1.1 (1973): 6. This was his presidential address to the Atlantic Economic Society. One of the only four his academic works that MacLean cites to any degree. Another is his presidential address to the Southern Economic Association.

This is the symmetric behavior assumption, which presumes that the same kinds of motivations underlie individual behavior in market and non-market arenas. It is one of the more contested issues in positive political theory, but it is not unreasonable, especially where one presumes that all behavior is to a degree influenced by an expectation of reciprocity, if not necessarily altruism.

This is relevant because after about 1970, when he started to grapple seriously with Hobbesian ideas, his view of human nature took a darker, albeit arguably more realistic, turn. For an informed analysis that parallels MacLean’s, see Fleury, Jean-Baptiste and Marciano, Alain, “The Making of a Constitutionalist: James Buchanan on Education” (December 1, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2994683

Buchanan, like Lindahl, was especially influenced by Wicksell’s 1896 work on fiscal theory, Finanztheoretische Untersuchungen (Partially reprinted as “A New Principle of Just Taxation.” In Classics in the Theory of Public Finance , edited by Richard A. Musgrave and Alan T. Peacock, London, 72–118. Macmillan), which argues that reform efforts ought to be directed primarily toward changes in the rules for making decisions.

Most of Buchanan’s defenders are more or less anti-government libertarians, consequently, aside from noting that Buchanan argued for heavy gift and inheritance taxes, they generally let claims like the ones she made in her Chronicle Review interview pass: “Buchanan and other libertarian thinkers lay out a vision for a certain kind of society. It’s a society where capitalism has free rein and the rights of the wealthy few are protected, while the many are prevented from exercising countervailing power. It’s a society where government is so shrunken as to be unrecognizable. In the country they envision, most protections that benefit average Americans have vanished: Social Security has been abolished, worker and public-health protections are gone, and public schools are shuttered in favor of private education. It’s a country where national parks and water supplies are sold to the highest bidder.” Certainly, there are libertarian thinkers who have made a case for each and every item in MacLean’s list. Indeed, I’m not much of a libertarian, but I think we’d generally be better off selling water supplies to the highest bidders. However, that isn’t the society Buchanan envisions or defends in his texts. Aside from his anxiety about Keynesian fiscal policy, his positions hewed closely to actual practice, which was also fairly close to the discipline’s mainstream. In a private capacity he may well have supported all of those things. But, in his public, scholarly role, no. David Reisman, James Buchanan . London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Brennan, Geoffrey, and James M. Buchanan. “Towards a tax constitution for Leviathan.” Journal of Public Economics 8.3 (1977): 255–273.

Hochman, Harold M., and J.D. Rodgers. Redistribution through Public Choice . Columbia University Press, 1974.

Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine (Nov. 1964): 77–86. It is interesting that MacLean attributes the negative reaction to “the Koch operatives and the riders of their academic “gravy train,” but few if any of her critics defend the Kochs (DiLorenzo does so in part). Most of them focus entirely on her interpretation of James Buchanan’s writings and deeds. Several defend libertarianism as well, although, insofar as it is not at all clear what that is, they typically uphold their own version of it. For example, my own interpretation of libertarianism comes primarily from J.S. Mill. Clearly, that’s not what MacLean is objecting to, nor is it clear that what she is criticizing is what her self-proclaimed libertarian opponents are defending.

Several of the positive reviews praise MacLean’s careful documentation of her claims, but I was surprised by its thinness. Most of her citations are to secondary sources and many of those are partisan polemics.

I don’t wish to belabor this point, but arguably the Library of Economics and Liberty, which is run out of George Mason University, has a stronger claim to the title of representing both public choice and Buchanan’s version of libertarianism. Performing the same analysis on its data one finds 47 hits of any kind for Calhoun (0 articles), 160 for Madison (6 articles) and 429 for Mill (65 articles).

This is one obvious difference between John C. Calhoun’s thinking on these issues and Buchanan’s (or Madison’s): his view of the nature of the Federal union and of state sovereignty, which provides the underlying logic for the doctrine of nullification, “which holds that the states, singly or in concert, can defy federal actions by declaring them invalid or simply ignoring them.” And, as Sam Tanenhaus explains, there are a lot of nullifiers on the right: “We hear the echoes of nullification in the venting of anti-government passions and also in campaigns to ‘starve government,’ curtail voter registration, repeal legislation, delegitimize presidents.” But I find nothing in Buchanan advocating this doctrine or, for that matter, giving voice to the 10th Amendment. Besides, there are a lot of nullifiers on the left, who are eager and willing to deny the legitimacy of the federal government when it pursues policies contrary to their wants. On this question, see Buchanan, James M., and Roger L. Faith. “Secession and the limits of taxation: Toward a theory of internal exit.” The American Economic Review 77.5 (1987): 1023–1031.

I could very easily have this wrong. I am not a Madison scholar and haven’t read or discussed Calhoun since I was an undergraduate more than 50 years ago. Professor Nancy Isenberg, who is a Madison scholar, blurbs Democracy in Chains very positively. Further, see Lacy K. Ford, Jr., “Inventing the Concurrent Majority: Madison, Calhoun, and the Problem of Majoritarianism in American Political Thought,” Journal of Southern History _ 60 (1994): 19–58.

Tanenhaus himself offers at least one alternative origin story, and a complementary one, making some conservatives quite unhappy.

I might note here that Maclean asserts that apart from Calculus of Consent , Gordon Tullock’s publication record was undistinguished and that he struck many outside the Center as an egomaniac and/or a twit (@ page 99). I can certainly understand how someone who met Tullock in person might think him an egomaniacal twit. Although I enjoyed his particular style of cross-examination and his razor-sharp wit, I suspect that were he still alive he would be miffed that MacLean didn’t name him as an ‘evil genius’ along with Buchanan. But most people outside the Center knew him as a correspondent. And, in that role, he was gracious, smart, and exceedingly collegial. As for the assessment of his publication record, certainly Calculus of Consent was his most influential publication, as it was Buchanan’s, also by a wide margin, but Tullock has a Google Scholar page (see also Dennis C. Mueller. “Gordon Tullock and Public Choice.” Public Choice 152.1 (2012): 47–60). Readers can judge for themselves. This is trivial point, but it shows, I think, that MacLean rarely pushes very hard against her preconceptions. Indeed, I wonder what MacLean would have made of Buchanan’s second most frequently cited publication, “An economic theory of clubs.” Economica 32.125 (1965): 1–14.

Here is an excerpt from the Café Hayek blog by economist Don Boudreaux that offers yet another devastating refutation of one of the egregious false claims in the book:

“Of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It turns out, however, that there exist documents that relate to James Buchanan’s views on education and school segregation. And this evidence directly contradicts Professor MacLean’s characterization, and suggests that Buchanan strongly opposed segregation, and supported diversity in education. It comes from two of Buchanan’s letters. (I was alerted to these letters by Professor Jeremy Shearmur of Australian National University, who came across them while conducting research at the Hoover Institution. The location of the letters at Hoover is in the IEA archive, Box 162.2. Professor MacLean lists this archive among the archival collections she consulted for her book.)

In 1984, Buchanan was asked to contribute to an essay collection on school vouchers, edited by Arthur Seldon. In two letters, Buchanan politely declined to participate. And then, Buchanan offers a brief comment on his views on education and school vouchers. Critically, he voices reservations about the introduction of vouchers. Why? Because, as he writes, he is concerned “somehow, to avoid the evils of race-class-cultural segregation that an unregulated voucher scheme might introduce.” Buchanan then goes on to express support for introducing competition in the provision of education, but notes that this should be done in a way that serves “at the same time, to secure the potential benefits of commonly shared experiences, including exposure to other races, classes, and cultures.” In short, though brief, Buchanan’s letter eloquently expresses a vision of education that champions the value of diversity, explicitly condemns “the evils of race-class-cultural segregation,” and notes his reservations about school vouchers if they threaten these values. This is powerful evidence: Buchanan is writing a private letter to a person who is sympathetic to his academic approach and supports voucher systems. There is little reason to doubt that the statement expresses anything other than Buchanan’s sincere views.

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Thompson, F. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America . Soc 56 , 300–306 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-019-00369-2

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"It's called democracy": Inside the Trump trial's opening statements

P rosecutors in Donald Trump's criminal trial in New York used their opening statement to lay out a bold — and potentially risky — thesis: "Trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election."

Why it matters: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants his case — widely considered the weakest of the four indictments Trump faces — to be viewed beyond the context of a sordid, years-old sex scandal.

• "This was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures," prosecutor Matthew Colangelo argued.
• "I have a spoiler alert," Trump attorney Todd Blanche countered. "There's nothing wrong with trying to influence the election. It's called democracy."

The big picture: These dueling narratives will color each side's presentations as a jury of 12 New Yorkers considers whether to convict a former president for the first time in U.S. history.

• To the prosecution, Trump's alleged scheme to pay hush money to cover up negative stories during his 2016 campaign was "election fraud, pure and simple."
• To the defense, the 34 charges Trump faces for falsifying business records "are really just 34 pieces of paper" — a simple dispute over "bookkeeping."

Zoom in: The prosecution alleges that Trump, his former lawyer Michael Cohen and tabloid publisher David Pecker hatched a conspiracy in 2016 to "catch and kill" stories that could have damaged Trump's campaign.

• Those included alleged affairs with adult film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, as well as an uncorroborated claim that Trump fathered a child out of wedlock with an ex-employee.
• "Another story about sexual infidelity, especially with a porn star, on the heels of the 'Access Hollywood' tape, could have been devastating to his campaign," Colangelo said, referencing the 2005 recording of Trump boasting about grabbing women without their consent.

The other side: Blanche — declaring that Trump is "cloaked in innocence" — took repeated digs at the credibility of Cohen and Daniels, who are expected to be witnesses for the prosecution.

• "Michael Cohen wanted a job in the [Trump] administration. He didn't get one," Blanche said, calling Trump's former fixer a "criminal" who's "obsessed" with the idea of sending Trump to jail.
• "Daniels saw her chance to make a lot of money, $130,000, against Trump," Blanche said of the former adult film star, forecasting her testimony "salacious" but irrelevant to the charges.

The bottom line: Unlike his cases in Georgia and D.C., Trump has not been charged with crimes related to election interference in New York.

• Bragg insists that's not necessary to prosecute the "cover-up," but opening statements made one thing clear: A conviction will require the jury to believe that Trump was willing to lie his way to victory in 2016.
• For Trump, who continues to claim that his legal troubles amount to "election interference" by Democrats, the argument that he engaged in election fraud to win the White House is the ultimate gut punch.

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