There is only some good electoral news

The contrasting recent election outcomes a month apart in India and the United Kingdom tell a complicated story. The Economist’s Democracy Index told a similar story, while Sweden-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, claimed that “across every region of the world, democracy has continued to contract”. And yet, voters in India — which Sweden’s Varieties of Democracy Institute, had downgraded to an “electoral autocracy” — surprised the doomsayers by cutting autocrats down to size, while those in the United Kingdom and France confirmed that the health of the oldest democracies remained robust. Thanks to its two-phase electoral system, France produced a mixed result in its parliamentary elections, making a xenophobic far-right party its largest in the first phase and then producing a “hung Parliament” in the second phase, failing to give any of the three main party coalitions a majority to form a government. A Pew poll Still, for all the good electoral news, a Pew poll in 24 countries found support for “representative democracy” sliding, with some 59% respondents “dissatisfied with how their democracy is functioning”, three-quarters of those polled feeling that elected officials “don’t care” what they think, and mounting support for alternatives to democratic rule: “In 13 countries,” noted Pew, “a quarter or more of those surveyed think a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts is a good form of government.” As columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote in The Washington Post earlier this year, “In society after society, illiberal values and politicians who embrace them are gaining ground.