Since 2006, the Economist Intelligence Unit has measured the quality of democracy in 167 countries and territories across the world. Its last index, for 2024, was published in February. Over the past eighteen years, the average score has declined — both globally and for each of the world’s regions — and in the latest index the overall score has reached an all-time low. That’s hardly surprising: the number of countries classified as democracies is shrinking, and even where democratic rule has been the norm for decades the political agenda is increasingly dominated by far-right populist parties and movements that reject key tenets of democratic governance.
Meanwhile, according to the EUI, democracy is particularly strong in Europe’s Nordic countries, Aotearoa New Zealand and Switzerland. Norway tops the rankings, as it did in the index published last year. But democracy is in trouble in two of its cradles, the United States and France.
The EUI’s scores are based on sixty indicators within the five categories of “electoral process and pluralism,” “functioning of government,” “political participation,” “political culture” and “civil liberties.” One could argue for an alternative methodology, but the EUI’s results largely match those of similar reports prepared by the US think tank Freedom House and the Varieties of Democracy Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden.
At the same time, satisfaction with democracy is declining, even in countries at the top of the EUI rankings. Further down the list of democracies, a significant majority of people have become disenchanted. In the United States (ranked twenty-eighth in the latest index), a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2025 found that 67 per cent of adults are dissatisfied with how democracy is working.
The results of such surveys ought to be treated with caution, however, because views about what exactly makes a country “democratic” differ widely. The Trump administration, for example, found in its November 2025 National Security Strategy that US government agencies’ “fearsome powers… must never be abused, whether under the guise of ‘deradicalization,’ ‘protecting our democracy,’ or any other pretext.” At the same time, it accused European governments of “[trampling] on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” and vowed to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by standing up “for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history.”
Donald Trump and the likes of Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, the Rassemblement National’s Marine Le Pen and German far-right politician Alice Weidel claim that wokeism has undermined democracy and that liberal elites — aided by sections of the established media — have monopolised the political process. Many of those dissatisfied with democracy and harbouring deep-seated resentments share those assessments and believe that only populist leaders could guarantee that their views are heard.
On the other side of the political divide, liberal politicians and journalists, as well as most scholars, claim that democracy is threatened above all by the very same populists because they have reinforced and capitalised on people’s disenchantment with democratic processes and are intent on dismantling democratic institutions once they get into power. The United States in the first year of Trump’s second presidency, Polen under the Kaczyński brothers and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary show how fragile democracies are when their institutions are attacked by democratically elected leaders intent on cementing their grip on power.
The populist assault and widespread dissatisfaction with democracy have occasioned numerous books diagnosing a “crisis of democracy.” Prominent among those lamenting democracy’s demise is British philosopher A.C. Grayling. In 2018, prompted by Trump’s win in the 2016 presidential election and the referendum on the UK’s continued EU membership six months earlier, he published Democracy and Its Crisis. Two years later he released a follow-up, The Good State, where he identified some of the structural weaknesses of democracy.
For the People, published last month, is Grayling’s third book about the crisis of democracy. He identifies four reasons for that crisis: democracies’ unresponsiveness to people’s aspirations and needs; the toxic influence of multinational corporations; the attraction of authoritarianism; and the undermining of democracy by anti-democratic forces.
The first of these reasons, Grayling writes, has to do with contemporary democracies’ structural defects. Rather than “the people,” it’s political parties that determine public policy, which has led to republicanism having been “captured by factionalism and thereby turned into oligarchy.” Using Britain as an example, he argues that “the voters’ participation in elections at most means… they express their consent to be ruled by Parliament.” This problem is supposedly exacerbated in countries that use plurality voting (such as the United States, Britain and Australia).
Capitalism has become an “unconstrainable monster,” he says, and the influence of big business is partly responsible for people’s disenchantment: “transnational business’s disempowerment of national government makes people angry about government policy, irrespective of whether they know the reason for the government’s inability to serve their interests or answer their needs; and that infects attitudes to… the democratic process itself.” But multinational corporations undermine democracy’s legitimacy at their peril, because democracies arguably provide a more favourable environment for business than authoritarian states.
Third, Grayling argues that democracy’s enemies have learned to exploit its vulnerability: “The very openness and tolerance of democratic civil liberties allows the intolerant and authoritarian to insert their views and use the institutions that embody these liberties to get into a position to negate them.”
Finally, democracies are systematically undermined by autocratic regimes spreading misinformation and interfering in democratic processes such as elections. There is ample evidence that Russia, in particular, has been targeting liberal democracies by unleashing armies of trolls upon them. China too has been known to have tried to manipulate public opinion in countries across the globe. Add to that now the United States under Trump; according to its recent National Security Strategy, it will prioritise “[cultivating] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” — presumably by supporting the Rassemblement National, Germany’s AfD and other anti-democratic forces.
Grayling’s four reasons for the crisis identify a mix of structural weaknesses and external threats. I would add at least one more to his list: the eagerness of liberal politicians to parrot demands put forward by the populist far right — purportedly in order to neutralise its appeal. British prime minister Keir Starmer and Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s recent call to “fix” the “problem” of irregularised migrants’ seeking Europe’s protection, not least by watering down the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights, is but the latest instance in which seemingly moderate leaders are endorsing sentiments fanned by anti-democrats.
Grayling’s argument is not particularly original; what distinguishes it from conclusions drawn by journalists at the New York Times or the Guardian is not so much the amount of evidence he provides, but his tone. His book sometimes reads like a lengthy op-ed, rather than a tight analysis.
Grayling appears personally affronted by what anti-democrats, as well as politicians like Starmer, have been up to. His sense of outrage seems to have encouraged him to overreach and simplify to drum home his message: for example, when he assumes that “[populism] in politics leads directly to authoritarianism”, when he claims that the “differences between autocracy, totalitarianism and fascism are superficial,” or when he says that Orbán’s and Trump’s skilfully engineered “‘democratic backsliding’ into authoritarianism” parallels Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933.
While Grayling’s diagnosis is disappointing because most of it covers well-tilled ground, I found his conclusions downright infuriating. His answer to democracy’s structural weaknesses is a call for institutional reform, for a bill of rights and for a constitution that specifies how governments must serve the interests of all people.
If they were to happen, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with such reforms. But this top-down solution would require selfless democratic leadership (exercised by the kind of people he calls “true statesmen and -women”) who would then need to convince a significant majority of the electorate to reinvent their country’s form of government. Barring a miracle, that’s not going to happen. And looking around, I can’t see such leaders — not in the United States or Britain (which feature prominently in Grayling’s account), nor in Australia or Germany.
Grayling’s title is a reference to Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Gettysburgh address. Although it is remarkably short (fewer than 300 words), its phrases are often cited out of context.
Lincoln concluded his remarks by making three commitments: that the dead of the civil war “shall not have died in vain,” that the United States “shall have a new birth of freedom” and “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Grayling does well to omit a reference to Lincoln’s “government of [and] by the people” from his title, because in 1863 that was only a lofty aspiration — so whatever Lincoln had in mind could hardly guide us in the twenty-first century. Women and non-European men were still disenfranchised, and while property qualifications had been removed, some states granted voting rights only to taxpayers. In fact, it was only in the 1960s that voting rights were extended to all US citizens.
The gesture towards Lincoln’s famous words is symptomatic of a narrowness of focus that Grayling shares with many authors of books about the perilous state of democracy. Lincoln was right: democracy is a form of government. But it can be so much more than that: a process of public deliberation and decision-making that is geared towards taking the views and interests of all into account.
Using Lincoln’s much-cited words as a point of departure also suggests that democracy as a form of government necessarily means representative, republican democracy as envisaged by the framers of the US constitution. It’s true that most of today’s democracies are variations of the late eighteenth-century American model. But the term “democracy” itself, a compound noun made up of the Greek demos (people) and kratos (might), points to a much older model, that of direct democracy in fifth-century BC Athens, where decision makers were chosen by sortition rather than elected.
Reports by the EUI and Freedom House privilege indicators about the conduct of elections and the functioning of government. The authors of the most recent EUI index hope for a “more efficient Congress” given “that one party controls the presidency and both chambers,” and applaud the smooth running of the 2024 US elections. Is a campaign bankrolled by the likes of Elon Musk really an example of a well-functioning democracy?
If democracy were all about casting a vote once in a while and about the performance of politicians elected periodically, it would indeed be on the ropes. But democracy in the broader sense of the term is still comparatively healthy. People are taking to the streets, engaging in what German constitutional lawyer Konrad Hesse more than sixty years ago famously called “an instance of primeval, untamed, direct democracy,” and thereby make their voices heard. The likes of Vladimir Putin use social media to undermine liberal democracies, but digital deliberation also offers avenues for more people than ever before to engage in democratic practices.
Allotted citizens’ councils and assemblies, whose members are representative of the population (rather than of the electorate), are increasingly involved in designing policies. This happens often at the local level, but in some instances, for example in Iceland and Ireland, such bodies have also facilitated constitutional reform.
Civil society groups invested in resuscitating democracy fight for extensions of the franchise to allow children and non-citizens to participate in democratic deliberation and decision-making.
Direct democracy can be a powerful tool to correct the decisions of elected representatives. In Hamburg, the city state’s zero emissions target has just been moved forward in a referendum, although the initiative was opposed by the state government (comprised of Social Democrats and Greens) and the opposition Christian Democrats.
Democratic initiatives in the broader sense of the term might counteract the demise of liberal, representative democracy. They have the potential to deal with the concerns of some of those disaffected with democracy as a form of government and enamoured by the populist far right. Ideally, they would rekindle people’s appetite for vigorous and informed debate and make them suspicious of what Grayling calls the “false desire for political peace.” Such initiatives are not devised top-down, by enlightened “statesmen and -women,” but bottom-up, by civil society.
Grayling is right to say that the policies of national governments are overridden by multinational corporations. But that too is a structural problem. The modern nation-state is a product of the late nineteenth century. In the early twenty-first century, it has become an anachronism. National governments try to obscure the fact they are no longer fully in control by focusing attention on issues such as migration control. Bottom-up democracy has the capacity to challenge the ideological primacy of the territorially based nation-state — both through transnational networks and by taking charge locally.
The EUI index and similar reports highlight a serious problem. No doubt the constitutional changes called for by Grayling would enhance the quality of democracy (as a form of government) in the United States, Britain, Australia and beyond. But there’s no point waiting for them and, while doing so, becoming fixated on democracy’s external threats and structural deficits. Now is the time to explore, invent and invest in alternative democratic processes and structures. And also, as Grayling demands, to resist authoritarianism “by every morally legitimate and principled means.” •
For the People: Fighting Authoritarianism, Saving Democracy
By A.C. Grayling | Oneworld | £12.99 | xi+266 pages
