Who Really Cares About Democracy?

Protest in Hong Kong: what a blank sheet of paper conveys

Source: Wikimedia Commons (HKU student white paper protest 2022). Voice of America/Tang Huiyun. Public domain.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, many observers took the collapse of Communism in Europe as a sign that democracy had triumphed over totalitarianism. Democratic institutions were then on the ascent in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa as well. But today, as we approach the 35th anniversary of the wall’s demise—the 2024 presidential election will take place the same week as that anniversary this November—many voices are expressing concern about the future of democratic institutions in the world.

China had halted its 1989 democracy movement by mowing down demonstrators with tanks, just months before Communism’s demise in eastern Europe. Its Communist Party held onto power in the three decades that followed by intensifying its repression of dissent, on the one hand, and achieving record-shattering rates of economic growth on the other. In 1991, the Soviet Communist Party fell from power and the Soviet Union broke up, but after less than a decade of partial economic and political liberalization, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, assumed power and began the march back to totalitarianism that was so chillingly symbolized by the funeral of opposition leader Alexey Navalny last week.

Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin famously stood atop a tank in 1991 to rally Moscow’s public against an attempt by Communist hardliners to sideline reformer Mikhail Gorbachev, leading to the fall of both the hardliners and Gorbachev himself. Chinese university students in 1989 created a Goddess of Democracy figure, and thousands of Beijing citizens slowed the progress of the first wave of tanks sent to quell pro-democracy demonstrations. Ordinary Beijing residents walked among the tanks, handing flowers to the soldiers manning them to discourage their advance against their own people. Military leaders had to bring fresh troops from units based far from Beijing in order to successfully crush the protests.

The People’s Power demonstrations against Ferdinand Marcos in Manila in 1986, the popular protests that brought down Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, the Orange Revolution demonstrations in Kyiv in 2004-5, the Arab Spring demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt that brought down sitting strongmen in 2011, and the valiant street protests demanding democracy in Sudan in 2018-19 are among the many examples in recent history of people bringing down authoritarian regimes through non-violent collective action, although many of these nations witnessed subsequent reversals.

A question here is: Does anyone actually care about democracy as an end in itself? Or is democracy just a convenient rallying cry against dictators whom one opposes for more specific reasons? Many demonstrators in Egypt were students hoping for a more Western-style democracy, and were less than thrilled when the elections following the ouster of Hosni Mubarak resulted in the voting into office of conservative Islamists. Commentators suggest that the U.S. itself has a significant minority that favors making voting more difficult and that continues to embrace the disproportionate representation of less populous areas resulting from the structure of the Senate and the electoral college system because it favors policies the majority don’t support. If correct, this would be an example of putting policy preferences above reverence for democracy as a good in its own right.

Yet some people do appear to value the principle that power be in the hands of the general population, with the majority prevailing if consensus can’t be reached. This might help to make sense of polling which indicates that at least 20 percent of swing-state residents who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020 tell pollsters in early 2024 that they would not vote for him this year if he is convicted of a criminal offense. These respondents, that is, appear ready to treat the judgment of a jury of their peers with surprising sanctity, even when so much already public information has not yet persuaded them.

Measuring sentiment for democracy is a tricky business. A recent report from the Pew Research Center shows that the percentage of respondents in 24 countries who said that representative democracy is a somewhat good or very good way to govern a country remains above 75% in all countries in which surveys were done except for Brazil, where it is 72%, and South Africa, where it is 68%. When the Gallup World Survey has asked similar questions even in China, most respondents express a favorable view of democracy. Most Chinese respondents probably didn’t worry that their response would be taken as being critical of their government, since China’s government itself claims to be democratic! Even so, about a quarter of the Chinese survey respondents chose not to answer the Gallup question, perhaps worried about its sensitivity.

China’s people understand that neighboring countries including Japan, South Korea, India, and Pakistan have competing political parties between whose candidates their people decide by voting, something that hasn’t happened above the village level in China since the Communist Party (C.C.P.) seized power in 1949. The Party sponsors eight loyal non-Communist “parties” to which members can elect delegates who attend an annual National People’s Congress session for democratic window-dressing. It publicizes the consensual nature of decision-making within top C.C.P. ranks, and it even succeeded in grooming a new “generation” of leaders to take the Party helm every 10 years starting shortly after the Tiananmen debacle, ending only when Xi Jinping arranged to be re-appointed for an additional five years in 2023. Presumably, saturation of the permitted official media with reports of the chaos, political dysfunction, and elite capture associated with elections in countries like the U.S., India, and Brazil, and memories of political chaos in China itself at numerous junctures in the 19thand 20th centuries, convince most of China’s population to feel no jealousy toward those living in western-style democracies. Others undoubtedly see no good coming from even forming an opinion about the matter. But seeing more than a million people take to the streets of Hong Kong in the fall of 2019 to try to stave off more direct rule by Beijing and observing the growing resilience of the democratic institutions that have taken hold in Taiwan since the 1990s made me wonder whether one could study underlying attitudes toward democracy in those three ethnically Chinese polities that have evolved such different political institutions in recent decades by using a method that avoids asking questions too explicit to pass censorship. For example, there’s no possibility of polling people in China about whether they would ‘prefer to switch to a political system allowing competitive elections.’

Together with two research collaborators--Josie Chen of National Taiwan University and Diego Ramos-Toro of Dartmouth--I designed a set of surveys including one completed by a representative set of adults within China; one completed by emigres from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan to the U.S. and Canada; and one completed by representative Americans as a comparative benchmark. Each survey included an embedded experimental module in which participants made two decisions that (together with random elements) determined whether they won a money prize equivalent to a typical hour’s earnings, which roughly doubled their guaranteed payment for completing the survey. In this module, the participant was made a member of a group with four other anonymous participants, and all group members would either win or fail to win the prize, together. Whether they won or not was determined by the success of either a single group member designated to act as an “authority,” or of the majority of group members, at choosing the correct one of two possible answers to a yet-to-be revealed “challenging question.” One group member would be randomly picked to determine whether the decision should be made by an authority or by the majority of the members. But which individual’s choice of method would prevail was determined only after all had completed the survey, so every participant had to express their preference for a decision method.

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Responses to the survey module’s preferred method choice question turned out to be a good indicator of an underlying inclination to value majority rule as a political system, despite the fact that the module was free of political language or references, thus posing no apparent risk of censorship within China. The study confirmed a conjectured ordering of average preference for democracy—namely that that preference is highest (among the three) for the American sample, next highest for Taiwan and Hong Kong emigres, and lowest for citizens in Mainland China. Interestingly, though, it suggested substantial variation of views within China, with an average attraction to democracy there that is higher than that of emigres from the country who reported that political freedom played no role in their emigration. University students in China were also more favorable toward majority choice than were other respondents. I’ll discuss what this augurs for the prospect of democracy in China, and report more about the study, in my next post.