International Day of Democracy: Upholding Democratic Values at Home and Abroad

On International Day of Democracy, we reflect on the vital importance of democratic principles and the need to safeguard them both domestically and globally. Each year, this day serves as a reminder of democracy's role in ensuring governance that is transparent, accountable, and representative of the people.

However, the celebration of democracy is tempered by a global landscape increasingly fraught with challenges.

Anne Applebaum’s new book, Autocracy Inc, describes how a network of authoritarian regimes around the world is setting aside the ideological differences between them to come together in active opposition to democracy and the ideas that underpin it.

Applebaum reveals the ways in which this network shares a toolkit of repression, whether in the form of common surveillance technologies or by adopting in one regime the successful tactics of stifling dissent of another.

Not content with snuffing out democracy at home, Autocracy Inc outlines the strategies deployed by authoritarian regimes to subvert and erode the norms and values undergirding the so-called liberal world order. Transparency, human rights, freedom of expression and the rule of law, concepts that are hardwired into almost all the international institutions established in the post-war period, are being systematically - and frequently violently - countered. 

Instead of human rights, Applebaum notes, China talks of ‘win-win cooperation’ - that is, a world in which we don’t criticise your practices, and you don’t criticise ours - and the book shows how language is being similarly manipulated to undercut the idea of sovereignty. According to Applebaum, what is being espoused, increasingly confidently, is a worldview where fundamental rights are not assumed, where might makes right, where democracy is just one model of political organisation among many.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the global trend of democratic backsliding is starkly evident. The most recent Global State of Democracy Report from International IDEA concluded “democracy is still in trouble, stagnant at best, and declining in many places”, pinpointing 2022 as the sixth successive year in which more countries had experienced net declines in their democratic processes than improvements. According to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project, 35 years of democratic progress have been reversed, with levels of democracy falling back to those last seen in 1986.

Here in the UK, as Unlock Democracy has been documenting, we have likewise seen a significant decline in democratic integrity over recent years.

From the holders of elected office breaching codes of conduct, democratic norms and, sometimes, the law itself, to draconian clampdowns on the right to protest, and conscious attempts to delegitimise and weaken the power of independent regulators and the judiciary, the building blocks of our democracy are being gradually eroded.

That’s not to mention serious concerns around electoral integrity: millions of eligible voters are unable to cast a ballot at elections because of our outdated and inaccurate voter registration system. Meanwhile, for those properly registered, voter ID is an unnecessary, costly and discriminatory barrier to democratic participation, depriving up to 750,000 people of their vote in this summer's general election. 

Even if neither of these problems affected you, and you were able to cast your vote at the last election, you’d be justified in wondering whether voting makes a difference anyway: only 4 in 10 voters actually got an MP they voted for, while the government secured two-thirds of the seats on just one-third of the vote. In short, the make-up of Parliament bears little resemblance to how the country voted.

With a new government elected on a manifesto commitment to “restoring trust between the public and politics”, “deepening our democracy” and “upholding the highest standards of integrity and honesty”, there is cause perhaps for cautious optimism. But we cannot let up the pressure.

This Democracy Day, we in the UK must be grateful for the relative privileges we have, vigilant in their defence, and steadfast in our commitment to help strengthen and promote these freedoms at home and abroad.