China, Democracy and Making Government Work Posted by Jacob Stokes

I’m late to this, but over at Democracy in America, there’s a well-informed and balanced discussion about whether China’s growing wealth will push the country’s political system towards democracy and what this means for the relative competitiveness of democracy vs. Chinese-style authoritarianism. The piece is worth the time, and it contains a strong message towards the end about what’s needed for the democratic model, not only to continue to best China’s authoritarian model, but also to continue to be distinct from it (i.e. complex debates being decided by accountable, democratic institutions rather an unaccountable bodies of technocrats). This message that has special resonance in the context of today’s deficit debate. Key paragraphs below:

Democracy is supposed to build public legitimacy for governance. I think there's a legitimacy deficit because of the way communications work nowadays. Democracy is also supposed to communicate problems to government so that government can respond. I think the constant crisis-atmosphere contrarianism of the current media and internet environment overwhelms the signal-to-noise ratio there, and preoccupies government with addressing blaring non-issues. And I think this has all weakened the advantage that democracies have generally enjoyed over autocracies in addressing real problems and in generating public support for fixing them. I think the result of that could well be that an increasing number of important policymaking issues are gradually shifted to non-democratic institutions, while political democracy increasingly devolves into a form of reality-TV contest.

Or maybe I'm just contributing to the blaring non-issue alarmism here. Thailand has recently taken a strong turn back towards democracy; maybe the Red Shirt/Yellow Shirt years were just growing pains, no worse than what France went through on its way to democracy in the 19th century, and a lot less bloody. The Arab world has just seen a bunch of autocratic regimes fall, and if some of those countries move towards democracy while others don't, that'll be par for the historical course. Here in America, well, if we throw away a perfectly good 200-year-old credit rating, that'll be pretty dumb, but nobody's killing each other yet. And American politics were often mean and stupid in the old days too, long before the internet arrived. But what I would say is that we should not be comfortably sure of anything. We're not in an era when fascism is on the march, but we are in an era when democracy is not generally showing its best governing face. What that means, I think, is that people who believe in democracy on moral grounds should make the case, again, on moral grounds, rather than relying on a comfortable assumption that countries will naturally go democratic as they get richer. And I think the fact that autocracies sometimes enjoy real advantages in policymaking should remind us of the need to behave responsibly in democratic activity and to make sure that our representative institutions are actually capable of governing, and are not paralysed by political brinksmanship.

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