There’s a statistic that strikes me — and that almost never gets cited anywhere.
According to the latest V-Dem report (the Swedish institute that measures democracies in more detail than anyone else), around 40% of the world’s population — roughly 3 billion people — lives in countries undergoing autocratization (democratic decline and loss of freedoms) [1]. Only 5% live in countries that are becoming more democratic. And yet, when you ask people in surveys whether democracy is a good idea, they approve of it. In Latin America, support for democracy reached 52% in 2024 — a record high [2]. In Europe, trust in the European Union stands at 51%, its highest level in seventeen years [3]. How is it possible that democracies are deteriorating while people, on paper, want them more than ever? (Because they are deteriorating.)
That’s what we’re going to look at here — no slogans, no PR campaigns.
The measured crisis, not the imagined one
The 2024 Latinobarómetro, which surveys 18 Latin American countries, records trust in political parties at 17%. That’s a historic low. To put it in context: trust in the armed forces sits at 43%, in the police at 41%, in the president at 37%, in the judiciary at 28%, and in Congress at 24% [2]. Political parties — the very mechanism through which people govern themselves — are the institution trusted least of all. Only Uruguay breaks the average, with 36% [4].
And yet democracy as an idea is in good health. What’s rotten is something else. People want democracy. What they increasingly dislike is the real, distorted version of democracy they’re actually living under.
So the crisis of democracy doesn’t appear to be a problem of “support for democracy” — it’s a problem of perceived performance by concrete democratic governing institutions. It’s entirely possible to want more democracy while trusting less in the parties that claim to represent you. And that gap — between ideal and practice — is precisely the space where anti-system movements find oxygen.
When a “new”, brilliant, apparently outsider candidate promises to blow up the existing order, they’re not competing against the idea of democracy. They’re competing against trust in the current democratic system. That’s a much easier duel to win.
Europe’s picture is not as catastrophic as it seems
The Autumn 2024 Eurobarometer shows that 51% of Europeans trust the EU — the highest level since 2007 [3]. Among young people aged 15 to 24, the figure rises to 59%. This contradicts the all-too-easy narrative that “young people are abandoning democracy.” What they abandon, when they do, is the traditional party system — not the idea of self-government. And that changes considerably what kind of reform can actually command popular support.
What political science actually says
There’s an open debate here, and it’s worth not glossing over it. One school of thought — which we might call the backsliding school (Levitsky, Ziblatt, Bermeo) — focuses on specific actors: elected executives who, once in power, weaken democratic checks from within. They govern with the law, not against it. There is no coup; there is erosion. This is the Hungarian path, the Venezuelan path, the Turkish path — ending up with a system resembling Russia’s. It begins as a democracy, and once in power, gradually controls competition, restricts press freedom, and uses the law to strangle the opposition.
Another, more structural school insists that the problem comes from below, not from above. Economic inequality matters — a lot. A recent study from UChicago published in PNAS shows that income inequality is one of the strongest predictors of where and when democracy erodes [5].
The idea might seem counterintuitive (given that the poorer voting majority holds more electoral weight), but it’s solid: the more unequal a society, the easier it is for an authoritarian-leaning candidate to win elections by presenting themselves as the only one who can “restore order” against unjust economic elites. And note that this dynamic doesn’t only affect the right. AMLO, Orbán, Trump, Bukele, and Le Pen are very different figures, but they share the same electoral trick: they identify an internal enemy and promise to bypass the rules to defeat it.
There are dissenters. Larry Diamond and other political scientists argue that the emphasis on economic inequality overestimates the effect of money and underestimates the weight of political culture, elites, and institutional quality [6]. They point out that there are poor democracies that survive and wealthy democracies that degrade. Both sides are probably half right, and the real cause is an interaction: inequality + affective polarization + a degraded information ecosystem + leaders willing to exploit all of the above.
It’s reasonable to suspect that part of the institutional deterioration is fuelled by economic elites themselves, who — when they perceive that democracy might produce threatening redistributive policies — finance or tolerate authoritarian outsiders as a “lesser evil” compared to a left-wing alternative. This is a hypothesis, grounded in Levitsky and Way’s literature on competitive authoritarianism and in recent work on elite capture [7]. It hasn’t been conclusively proven. But if it’s true, the “crisis of democracy” is, in part, a crisis of democracy as a shield against economic power. And that changes what kinds of solutions are actually useful.
According to the work of Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page (2014), which analysed thousands of policy decisions, they demonstrated that the preferences of economic elites and corporate interest groups determine nearly 100% of policy outcomes, while the preferences of average-income citizens have an impact close to 0% on the laws that are ultimately passed.
Corporate financing of political parties and campaigns is another clear indicator of elite influence over politics. Since 2010, following the Citizens United ruling, U.S. corporations have been permitted to donate anonymously to political parties — meaning not only are these influence-buying donations allowed without oversight, but the public doesn’t even know which corporation is donating to which party. In Europe, the aim is to prevent parties from depending on private money in order to avoid political favours, but in some countries the problems come in the form of revolving doors, debt forgiveness for parties, or senior private-sector positions offered to politicians once they leave office.
Possible solutions: what’s being tried
Now for the positive side. Institutional innovation is alive — even if the headlines don’t cover it.
The oldest and most tested is participatory budgeting, born in Porto Alegre in 1989, through which local voters suggest and decide how a portion of the public budget is spent. It is now present in more than 11,000 cities worldwide [8]. The evidence shows modest but consistent effects: it increases electoral participation, reduces clientelism, and improves residents’ sense of political efficacy among those who take part. It’s not a panacea, but it works.
More recent and more striking: citizens’ assemblies selected by sortition. Ireland used them to legalise abortion and same-sex marriage in referendums that subsequently passed by large majorities. The model has been replicated in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Scotland, and Poland. The evidence shows that participants become more tolerant, better informed, and less partisan after deliberating. It doesn’t eliminate polarisation — it displaces it. The process consists of selecting a diverse sample of the population which, once informed by experts, academics, and those directly affected, debates proposed legislation and makes a recommendation that is then put to a referendum vote. In my view, any law that significantly affects a population should go through this process.
And then there’s the more boring but possibly most effective path: strengthening horizontal accountability without touching the Constitution. Independent reports on judicial integrity, algorithmic transparency in public procurement, protecting investigative journalists. Things that can be done through ordinary legislation. Political science recommends them with considerable consensus.
Conclusion
Liberal democracy is not dead. It is being attacked from within by leaders who have learned that you can win an election and then hollow out democracy from the inside — and from without by an economic and technological context that makes it feel slow, expensive, and powerless. But the idea is still alive, and the social demand for institutions that actually work has not declined. It’s rising.
What has declined — and this is the data point that worries me most — is tolerance for the rules of the game. And that tolerance is not recovered through more civic education or more declarations of love for democracy. It’s recovered when institutions demonstrate, in concrete terms, that they deserve the trust still extended to them in the abstract.
References (assessed with our reliability rating)
[1] V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot (University of Gothenburg, March 2024). Available at v-dem.net. Reliable
[2] Latinobarómetro, Informe 2024: La democracia resiliente (Corporación Latinobarómetro, November 2024). Reliable
[3] European Commission, Standard Eurobarometer 102 — Autumn 2024, press release IP/24/6126 (Brussels, 29 November 2024). Reliable
[4] Latinobarómetro, Country Results 2024. Reliable
[5] Rau, E. et al., “Income inequality and the erosion of democracy in the twenty-first century”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), January 2025. With reservations
[6] Levitsky, S. and Way, L., Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Diamond, L., “Democratic Regression in Comparative Perspective”, Journal of Democracy, 2021. Reliable
[7] Bermeo, N., On Democratic Backsliding (Journal of Democracy Working Paper, 2016); and the subsequent literature on elites and political capture synthesised in the Carnegie Endowment, Understanding and Responding to Global Democratic Backsliding (2022). Reliable
[8] Wampler, B. et al., A Global Theory of Change for Participatory Budgeting, Public Deliberation Network, 2023. With reservations
[9] Escotto, L. et al., Asamblea ciudadana y democracia deliberativa en América Latina (UN Democracy Fund, 2021). Under review