Self-Governance Is Growing Locally as National Elections Are Foundering—And That’s a Good Thing
Stop conflating democracy with the nation-state, writes columnist Joe Mathews. “Ecclesiastical, and, political, state of the nation” (1780) by James Gillray. Courtesy of Yale University Library.
by JOE MATHEWS | OCTOBER 8, 2024 (ZocaloPublicSquare.org)
Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.
Making that distinction—between democracy and the nation—is crucial to understanding what’s really going on when it comes to self-government on this planet.
It’s a distinction we rarely make. When people around the world talk about how democracy is doing, we talk about democracy almost exclusively at the national level.
We see this every year, when think tanks and NGOs issue reports and rankings on the state of democracy—that consider the national governments only.
Take International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization that supports elections and democracy worldwide. In its September 2024 Global State of Democracy Report, IDEA declared that democracy remained in decline because only 1 in 4 nations were becoming more democratic, while 4 in 9 nations were becoming less so. IDEA also noted that 1 in 5 national elections is now contested by the loser, and that the global average for electoral turnout declined by 10 percentage points (65.2 % to 55.5 %) in the last 15 years.
Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington D.C., points to growing numbers of nation-states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline. And, in its 2024 report, Varieties of Democracy, a global think tank in Sweden, says that democracy has been in decline for 15 years in a row because the share of the population living in nations that are becoming more autocratic is higher than the share living in democratizing countries.
To be sure, these national-level trends are not good news. But they paint an incomplete and misleading picture of the state of democracy on this planet, for three big reasons.
The first is rather obvious. Democracy is self-government, the business of everyday people governing themselves. And most democracy on this planet takes place where most people experience the ins and outs of day-to-day existence—in local communities, rather than at the national level.
Second, these global rankings of democracy rest heavily on elections, which are only one democratic process. Yes, trust and participation in elections are declining. But other forms of democracy—in which people themselves make decisions, rather than delegating power to elected representatives—are growing.
Consider four of these forms.
Direct democracy, in which people vote to enact laws or amend constitutions through referenda, is now a part of governance in more than half of countries. But such procedures are mostly used at the local and sub-national levels, according to the new Global State of Direct Democracy report.
Participatory democracy, involving tools that allow residents of a neighborhood or other jurisdiction to formulate budgets or development plans themselves, has been expanding rapidly since the launch of one such tool in 1990 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. People Powered, a global hub for democracy and participation, reports that more than 7,000 budgets—mostly in cities and local schools—have been made through the participatory budgeting process.
Deliberative democracy has become so popular in recent years that practitioners speak of a “deliberative wave.” The most popular forms of such democracy are citizens’ assemblies—bodies of everyday people, assembled using “sortition” or lotteries rather than through elections. At a recent global conference for the network Democracy R&D, panelists estimated that about 1,000 such assemblies have been held to deliberate on and find solutions to difficult challenges, most at the local level.
Digital democracy is being used worldwide, often locally, to allow ordinary citizens to make proposals, develop policies, and govern their own communities. Among the best-known digital democratic tools is Decidim, an open digital platform developed by the city of Barcelona and now used in hundreds of localities and institutions worldwide.
Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world.
But beyond all this growth in local democratic practice, there’s a bigger reason why we are misunderstanding the state of democracy: Nation-states are in retreat, regardless of their systems of government. The signals so often interpreted as democratic decline are actually evidence of something larger and more fundamental.
Nation-states everywhere—be they more democratic or more authoritarian—are in crisis, with their rulers losing the ability to govern their own countries. The United States, as a nation, is in danger of breaking apart. So too is Russia, which is caught up in a war in Ukraine, and suffering long-term declines in the health and life spans of its people. Germany is losing its dynamism and cohesion, for sure, but so is China—struggling with a debt crisis, an aging population, profound corruption, and an increasingly isolated dictator in Xi Jinping.
Why is this happening?
“The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation-state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance,” the British novelist and scholar Rana Dasgupta writes in his book After Nations. “National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world.”
Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world. Looking up, nation-states have proven incapable of handling planetary forces and threats—climate change, finance and capital flows, technological advances, disease, religious-oriented terrorism. If anything, nation-states have made such problems worse, while ceding more and more power (and formerly national functions like surveillance) to multinational institutions like big tech companies from my home state of California.
Looking down, nation-states can no longer unify their peoples. Instead, national leaders routinely exploit divides to maintain power. Almost all wars are between groups of people inside nation-states that are breaking down. Many of these civil wars have been internationalized by other nation-states, seeking short-term advantage. The most awful example is the current civil war in Sudan, fueled by Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which has displaced millions, killed hundreds of thousands by starvation, and reduced the city of Khartoum to a ruin.
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War is not the only tool that nation-states use to cling to their diminishing power. Leaders of nation-state democracies and autocracies alike have taken to scapegoating outsiders, especially migrants, and pledging to exert dictatorial power. But such authoritarian performances are really signs of desperation and weakness.
The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening, because of the potential for violence as our world’s governance infrastructure falls apart. But that same void is also an enormous opportunity for democracy and for those forms of democracy being practiced more often on the local level.
Tellingly, democracy is finding ways to grow even inside hostile and authoritarian nation-states. Turkey, with a religious autocrat as prime minister, has seen a wave of democratic participation in its cities, particularly Ankara and Izmir. Syria, ruled by a ruthless dictator, is the site of democratic cantons along its border with Turkey. Myanmar, in the midst of a crackdown by its military rulers, is sprouting new forms of local self-government.
Attacks on democracy also are redounding, to democracy’s favor. Ukraine, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic and sustainable ways.
Around the world, alliances of cities are working together to address climate change, poverty, and other problems that the failing nation-states can’t solve and in fact are making worse. These alliances, which often combine democratic processes with technocratic expertise, point the way to a brighter future, in which stronger and more democratic local governments handle more of their own problems, together.
Visions of a local planetary replacement for the nation-state system might be dismissed as implausible, but the nation-state idea dates only to 1648, and the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.
And democracy—and particularly the people-driven forms of democracy now on the rise at the local level—is our best bet to replace that system.
JOE MATHEWSis a columnist for Zócalo Public Square and founder-publisher of the planetary publication Democracy Local.
