Why democratic decline matters to everyday people

In mid-2015, when the political philosopher Adam Lovett started his PhD dissertation looking at how democracies fail, the world was a vastly different place. Then based at the New York University, the British scholar was combining political philosophy with empirical political science to explore the ways that modern democracies fall short of democratic values.

The following year signalled a monumental shift in the political landscape, described variously by commentators as “a blow to the political establishment” and “the end of the world as we know it”.

“Two major things happen in 2016,” says Dr Lovett, now a lecturer at ACU’s National School of Philosophy. “First, there’s a referendum and Britain leaves the European Union; second, Donald Trump gets elected as president of the United States.”

While Dr Lovett tries to avoid getting mired in the politics of the day in his academic work, Trump’s rise and the Brexit vote suddenly made the failures of democracy personally salient.

“These were striking examples of what I take to be bad decision-making on behalf of democracy,” he says.

The notable events of 2016 formed part of the motivation for Dr Lovett’s first book, Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy. Published in early 2024, it expands on his PhD research, investigating how real-world democracies fail to hold up democratic ideals, and why these failures matter to ordinary people.

Central to his argument is the idea that democracy is intrinsically valuable for the roles it plays in advancing equality and self-rule among citizens.

“Democracies are distinctively egalitarian, and what that means is that power is more equally distributed in democracies like the United States than in autocracies like contemporary China, where most people have no substantial influence over what their government does,” says Dr Lovett, who before joining ACU in 2024 taught at the London School of Economics.

“Why does that matter? I think it matters because asymmetries of power are intrinsically objectionable. Think about relationships like that of master and slave, or lord and peasant, or husband and wife in a patriarchal Victorian-era marriage. These are all relationships of subordination or domination, and we’ve got a right against being in these kinds of relationships, which are constituted in part by power asymmetries.”

Democracies that uphold democratic ideals do well at ameliorating such power imbalances, he says, while also contributing to autonomy, which gives ordinary citizens a chance to co-author the important features of society.

“Things like the nature of our economic or political systems, or how we treat criminals – I think there’s value when citizens are autonomous authors of these social and political affairs, so they have a causal influence on what their government does,” he says. “The mere fact that democracy facilitates these twin values of autonomy and equality helps to make it superior to autocracy.”

Understanding democracy’s value

Adam Lovett begins Democratic Failures with a statement that is ominous and yet uncontroversial: “American democracy is in a bad state.”

This is “obvious from current affairs”, he writes, while also pointing out that the ailments of American democracy have “been known for a long time”.

He cites, for example, the writer Walter Lippman and economist Joseph Schumpeter, who identified failures in American democracy almost a century ago. Lippman believed that when it comes to politics, the regular citizen “does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen”, while Schumpeter claimed that the average voter “drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field”.

While Lippman and Schumpeter were “basically right” about the political ignorance of ordinary people, Dr Lovett says their evidence for this claim “left a lot to be desired”. 

“They talked to people, they read newspapers and read history, but their evidence was mainly journalistic,” he says. 

In the years that followed their claims about the nature of American citizens, the scientific basis of political science was dramatically transformed.

“What happens in the 1950s is that the scientific foundation for our understanding of mass politics is totally changed by the emergence of representative surveys,” Dr Lovett tells Impact. “For the first time, we could ask a small number of citizens questions and work out how an entire population of tens of millions would have answered, and as a result of this advance, we now know more about American democracy than we ever have before.”

The problem, says Dr Lovett, is that much of the work that has resulted from this methodological advance has painted a dark picture of democracy, focusing on the fact that many citizens in democracies are ill-informed, and that the rich have too much power.

Rather than viewing democracy as fundamentally valuable for its contributions to equality and autonomy, this empirical work tends to see it as only good when it leads to good things.

“The underlying idea here is that democracy’s value is purely instrumental – so if democracy has good consequences, like averting famine or reducing the risk of war, then that’s what is valuable about it,” he says.

“I certainly think those are valuable things, but I’m interested in how the pessimistic picture of ordinary citizens as uninformed and politically ignorant interacts not with these instrumental values, but with the intrinsically valuable things about democracy that I mentioned earlier, like equality and autonomy.”

Democratic decline

So, if we accept that democracy is valuable in and of itself, why the rising scepticism about democracy? Why are so many voters supposedly “turning their backs” on a political order that has served us well for so long?

In the context of the United States, it would be tempting to point the finger at Donald Trump, a polarising figure who has been widely described as bad for democracy. However, Dr Lovett says the problems with American democracy “go back much farther than 2016” and will not dissipate any time soon.

The newer element that has gathered strength in recent decades is the deepening polarisation of the political system.

“In the United States, that basically means Democrats and Republicans hating one another,” he says. “It’s a really salient feature of modern-day politics, and a kind of emotional loathing between cross-partisans that has caused a vast ideological chasm.”

In his book, Dr Lovett argues this has “woeful implications for American democracy”.

“It snuffs out America’s ability to [realise] democratic values,” he writes.

But he hastens to point out, once again, that this deepening polarisation cannot be put solely at the feet of Trumpian politics.

“The United States was already a deeply polarised society before Trump’s emergence,” he says, “and in fact, polarisation is likely one of the preconditions to him being elected.”

He also says that many of the factors that have led to democratic failure in the United States – including the political ignorance of voters, and to the disproportionate influence of the wealthy – are “just as applicable” to other democracies (including Australia’s). 

Which brings us back to our earlier question: Why are citizens so sceptical about democracy?

Given the many failures of democracies to uphold democratic ideals, Dr Lovett believes citizens “have good reason to be sceptical”. However, it does not follow that the rational response is to turn our backs on democracy.

“Despite all the ways our current democracies fall short of democratic ideals, any feasible autocracy is going to do much, much worse,” he says.

Rather, the rational response is two-fold: from a collective point of view, it is to explore and be open to institutional reforms that might improve the health of our democracies. And as individuals, it means asking ourselves ethical questions about our behaviour as democratic citizens, with a focus not only on our rights, but also on our duties.

This includes being thoughtful about how we participate in the democratic process, and respecting the rights of those who hold different views.

“Political competition in a well-functioning democracy is not a no-holds-barred conflict,” Dr Lovett says. “You should respect the autonomy and care about the wellbeing of your opponent.”

And despite American democracy’s many ailments, Dr Lovett is not ready to sound its death knell.

“The United States faces extreme difficulty in solving its political problems, but this is against a backdrop of a country that is still extraordinarily vibrant both culturally and economically,” he says.

“I can see the logic behind both the optimistic predictions and the pessimistic ones, but predicting the future is hard to do, and I’m predisposed towards the optimistic ones. I believe American democracy can make a recovery.”

Adam Lovett is a lecturer in the National School of Philosophy, based at ACU’s Melbourne Campus. His work is on the ways that real-world democracies fall short of democratic ideals. His book, Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy, can be purchased through Penn Press.

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