Until quite recently, the world's future looked decidedly democratic. Between 1972 and 2018, accelerating after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, the proportion of democratic countries rose from 25 to 62 per cent – more than half the population of the planet, for the first time in history, living in some form of popular participatory government – or, to put it another way, substantially fewer people living under overtly despotic rule (Figure 13.1) (IDEA, 2019).

Since the turn of the millennium, however – and acutely in the last decade – we have seen a reversal in that process (Maerz et al, 2020; Boese et al, 2021; Larry, 2022). This involves not just a deceleration in the conversion of oppressive regimes or the reversion of newly reforming governments to older ways, but also deterioration in the quality of established democracies – the level of executive, judicial and administrative standards they espouse and, perhaps correspondingly, the depth of popular faith in the democratic model on which their legitimacy depends. In 1980, almost half of the world's democracies were classed as ‘high-performing’. By 2018 this had fallen to around one in five.

If there is a democratic crisis, it is one which is epitomised by the slowgrowing confrontation between America and China. But what is the nature of the crisis? To what extent is it a genuine clash of political civilisations; to what extent the distressed construction of Western countries fearing the loss of global ascendancy; and to what extent is it simply democracy bending under the weight of its own contradictions – the growing disconnect, fuelled by climbing inequality, between constitutional ideal and popular reality?

We are, without doubt, seeing a resurgence of authoritarian rhetoric in some of the world's most powerful democracies – from America and Brazil to India and Turkey. And we are seeing stalled democratic reform and reversion to policy-by-diktat in significant parts of Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia. How, then, to respond? Assuming that, in a crude sense, democracy is preferable to autocracy – not least with respect to matters of bodily integrity and psychosocial dignity – how are we to reaffirm the value of democratisation?

Part of the problem is that while a rhetorical idealisation of democracy has long been enthusiastically promulgated around the world, its practical characteristics – how it works and what it must and cannot do – remain rather less well defined (Lührmann et al, 2018).