Interesting post! If you wanted to read into the comparative political science literature a little more, you might be interested in diving into the subfield of democratic backsliding (as opposed to emergence):
How Democracies Die. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt 2018
On Democratic Backsliding Bermeo, Nancy 2016
Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability; Maeda, K. 201
Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation in American Political Science Review; Milan Svolik; 2008
Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World Timothy J. Power; Mark J. Gasiorowski; 04/1997
What Makes Democracies Endure? Jose Antonio Cheibub; Adam Przeworski; Fernando Papaterra Limongi Neto; Michael M. Alvarez 1996
The breakdown of democratic regimes: crisis, breakdown, and reequilibration Book by Juan J. Linz 1978
One of the common threads in this subfield is that once a democracy has ‘consolidated’, it seems to be fairly resilient to coups and perhaps incumbent takeover.
I certainly agree that how this interacts with new AI systems: automation, surveillance and targeting/profiling, and autonomous weapons systems is absolutely fascinating. For one early stab, you might be interested in my colleagues’:
I looked into the backsliding literature just a bit and had the initial impression it wasn’t as relevant for long-run and system-wide forecasting. A lot of the work seemed useful for forecasting whether a particular country might backslide (e.g. how large a risk-factor is Trump in the US or Modi in India?), or for making medium-term extrapolations (e.g. has backsliding become more common over the past decade?). But I didn’t see as clear of a way to use it to make long-run system-level predictions.
The point that democratic institutions tend to be naturally sticky does seem potentially important. I’m initially skeptical, though, that any inherent stickiness would be strong enough to keep democracy going for centuries if the conditions that allowed it to emerge disappear. It also seems like there should be heavy (although imperfect) overlap between factors that support the emergence of democracy and factors that support the persistence of democracy.
Out of curiosity, if you have a view, do you have the sense that the backsliding literature should make people substantially more or less optimistic about the future of democracy (relative to the views in this post)?
I would say more optimistic. I think there’s a pretty big difference between emergence (a shift from authoritarianism to democracy) - and democratic backsliding, that is autocratisation (a shift from democracy to authoritarianism). Once that shift has consolidated, there’s lots of changes that makes it self-reinforcing/path-dependent: norms and identities shift, economic and political power shifts, political institutions shift, the role of the military shifts. Some factors are the same for emergence and persistence, like wealth/growth, but some aren’t (which I would say are pretty key) like getting authoritarian elites to accept democratisation.
Two books on emergence that I’ve found particularly interesting are
The international dimensions of democratization: Europe and the Americas; edited by Laurence Whitehead 2001 (on underplayed international factors)
Conservative parties and the birth of democracy; Daniel Ziblatt 2017 (on buying off elites to accept this permanent change)
However as I said, the impact of AI systems does raise uncertainty, and is super fascinating.
Something I’m very concerned about, which I don’t believe you touched, is the fate of democracies after a civilizational collapse. I’ve got a book chapter coming out on this later this year, that I hope I may be able to share a preprint of.
Interesting post! If you wanted to read into the comparative political science literature a little more, you might be interested in diving into the subfield of democratic backsliding (as opposed to emergence):
A third wave of autocratization is here: what is new about it? Lührmann & Lindberg 2019
How Democracies Die. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt 2018
On Democratic Backsliding Bermeo, Nancy 2016
Two Modes of Democratic Breakdown: A Competing Risks Analysis of Democratic Durability; Maeda, K. 201
Authoritarian Reversals and Democratic Consolidation in American Political Science Review; Milan Svolik; 2008
Institutional Design and Democratic Consolidation in the Third World Timothy J. Power; Mark J. Gasiorowski; 04/1997
What Makes Democracies Endure? Jose Antonio Cheibub; Adam Przeworski; Fernando Papaterra Limongi Neto; Michael M. Alvarez 1996
The breakdown of democratic regimes: crisis, breakdown, and reequilibration Book by Juan J. Linz 1978
One of the common threads in this subfield is that once a democracy has ‘consolidated’, it seems to be fairly resilient to coups and perhaps incumbent takeover.
I certainly agree that how this interacts with new AI systems: automation, surveillance and targeting/profiling, and autonomous weapons systems is absolutely fascinating. For one early stab, you might be interested in my colleagues’:
Tackling threats to informed decision-making in democratic societies: Promoting epistemic security in a technologically-advanced world (see here for a news article).
Thanks for the reading list!
I looked into the backsliding literature just a bit and had the initial impression it wasn’t as relevant for long-run and system-wide forecasting. A lot of the work seemed useful for forecasting whether a particular country might backslide (e.g. how large a risk-factor is Trump in the US or Modi in India?), or for making medium-term extrapolations (e.g. has backsliding become more common over the past decade?). But I didn’t see as clear of a way to use it to make long-run system-level predictions.
The point that democratic institutions tend to be naturally sticky does seem potentially important. I’m initially skeptical, though, that any inherent stickiness would be strong enough to keep democracy going for centuries if the conditions that allowed it to emerge disappear. It also seems like there should be heavy (although imperfect) overlap between factors that support the emergence of democracy and factors that support the persistence of democracy.
Out of curiosity, if you have a view, do you have the sense that the backsliding literature should make people substantially more or less optimistic about the future of democracy (relative to the views in this post)?
I would say more optimistic. I think there’s a pretty big difference between emergence (a shift from authoritarianism to democracy) - and democratic backsliding, that is autocratisation (a shift from democracy to authoritarianism). Once that shift has consolidated, there’s lots of changes that makes it self-reinforcing/path-dependent: norms and identities shift, economic and political power shifts, political institutions shift, the role of the military shifts. Some factors are the same for emergence and persistence, like wealth/growth, but some aren’t (which I would say are pretty key) like getting authoritarian elites to accept democratisation.
Two books on emergence that I’ve found particularly interesting are
The international dimensions of democratization: Europe and the Americas; edited by Laurence Whitehead 2001 (on underplayed international factors)
Conservative parties and the birth of democracy; Daniel Ziblatt 2017 (on buying off elites to accept this permanent change)
However as I said, the impact of AI systems does raise uncertainty, and is super fascinating.
Something I’m very concerned about, which I don’t believe you touched, is the fate of democracies after a civilizational collapse. I’ve got a book chapter coming out on this later this year, that I hope I may be able to share a preprint of.