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      Roberta Metsola Elected as President of European Parliament

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      Roberta Metsola of Malta will succeed David Sassoli, an Italian politician who died last week, at a critical time for the institution.BRUSSELS — The European Parliament elected a new president on Tuesday, with Roberta Metsola, a 43-year-old Maltese deputy, picked to lead the institution as its seeks to gain a more prominent place in the E.U. power structure.Ms. Metsola’s predecessor, David Sassoli, died at age 65 last week, and she was selected by an overwhelming majority over two other candidates, all women.The European Union of 27 nations, one of the world’s most ambitious political experiments, is home to 450 million people. The Parliament is the bloc’s only directly elected institution, and voters have been electing lawmakers to the body since 1979, when the union was much smaller.Despite the holding of European Parliament elections every five years, the European Union has a complicated structure and is often accused of being a murky bureaucratic machine, detached from its citizens and lacking democratic accountability, even as it grows in power.“In the next years, people across Europe will look to our institution for leadership and direction, while others will continue to test the limits of our democratic values and European principles,” Ms. Metsola told lawmakers after being elected. “We must fight back against the anti-E.U. narrative that takes hold so easily and so quickly.”Ms. Metsola, a member of the conservative European People’s Party, the Parliament’s largest political group, has a daunting task in leading the most fragmented chamber in decades as it tackles issues such as curbing carbon emissions, upholding the rule of law and setting out rules for major technology companies.European Parliament in 2020. It is the bloc’s only directly elected institution.Sebastien Bozon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe will also have to navigate the Parliament’s relationship with the two other institutions governing the bloc: the European Commission, its executive bureaucracy; and the European Council, which pools together the heads of government of the 27 member states. The three branches often compete with one another for influence, with the Parliament struggling for relevance and usually coming out the weakest.The dance between the E.U. institutions has been unfolding against the backdrop of a larger conundrum: Can the bloc, which has positioned itself as a defender of democracy and which governs many aspects of the lives of Europeans, become more democratic while maintaining its current structure?“The European Union is an unfinished political system,” said Sophie Pornschlegel, a senior policy analyst at the European Policy Center, a Brussels-based think tank. “It’s a question of perspective,” she noted. “If you look at it like an international organization, it is one of the most democratic ones. Obviously, if you compare it to national democracies, it has a democratic deficit.”But according to Ms. Pornschlegel, that comparison would not be fair. “So far, we don’t have the United States of Europe,” she said, referring to a more deeply integrated federal power structure. “It’s much more complicated than that.”The European Parliament can veto legislation, set up budgets, ratify international agreements and has a supervisory role over various institutions. It also has the final say in approving the president of the European Commission.But in December 2019, when the current head of the commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was appointed, national leaders reneged on their promise to nominate a president from candidates proposed by the Parliament’s lawmakers, which was seen as a major blow to the institution’s standing. Lawmakers also cannot dismiss individual commissioners, but can only disband the commission as a whole.The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, second left, was appointed in 2019.Pool photo by Aris OikonomouAnd in an important divergence from national legislatures, the European Parliament does not have the power to initiate laws, which many see as a huge hindrance. “It puts you in a reactive mode,” said Marietje Schaake, a former member of the European Parliament who now teaches at Stanford University. “It is a major flaw in the design of the union.”Alberto Alemanno, a professor of European Union law at the business school HEC Paris, put it more bluntly. “The European Parliament is neither a parliament, because it has no legislative initiative, nor is it European, because its members are elected at the national and not at the European level,” he said.But analysts say that in recent years the Parliament has gained prominence, expressed both through an increased turnout in the 2019 elections and through a series of unusually bold moves.Under Mr. Sassoli, an Italian, the Parliament took the European Commission to court for not using existing rules to cut funding for member countries breaching rule-of-law standards. And in May, lawmakers blocked a high-profile investment agreement between the bloc and China, citing human rights violations and sanctions against Europeans critical of Beijing, including some lawmakers.As the position of the Parliament has evolved, so has the role of its president. “It is no longer the role of a ceremonial figure, like the president of the German republic,” Professor Alemanno said. “The president is somebody who can allow the European Parliament to advance their political goals and defend its prerogatives. But it will depend on their personality, and their political affiliation.”In many ways, Ms. Metsola, a former lawyer, brings novelty to the role. Nearly 60 percent of the legislators are men, and the average age is about 50. And Ms. Metsola is the first president to come from Malta, the bloc’s smallest member nation.But in other ways, Ms. Metsola is a mainstream choice. She belongs to the Parliament’s dominant group, which is also home to the party of Ms. von der Leyen. Critics say that the political affinity could be an obstacle to Ms. Metsola’s standing up to the commission.Ms. Metsola belongs to the Parliament’s dominant group, which is also home to the party of Ms. von der Leyen.Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersIn an interview with The Times before her selection as president, Ms. Metsola said, “We have the task to hold the commission to account, and we will keep doing that unapologetically.”“But we will keep in mind the bigger picture of E.U. unity,” she added. “I don’t want the Parliament to get stuck in inter-institutional debates.”Ms. Metsola has been outspoken against corruption and the erosion of the rule of law, especially in her native Malta. But she has faced criticism over her socially conservative views, in particular her stance against abortion. She said that once elected, she would push forward “the position of the house” on reproductive rights.Referring to Ms. Metsola’s vote against a resolution condemning Poland’s anti-abortion laws, Alice Kuhnke, a Green candidate for president, said, “All women in the E.U. should rely on the president of the Parliament to fight for us when needed.”“I find it hard to see how she would manage to do that with credibility and strength,” Ms. Kuhnke added, in an interview before Ms. Metsola was confirmed as president.The institution of the Parliament has often been chided for not upholding the principles it preaches. Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, said in a recent report that the Parliament’s internal rules were not sufficient to guarantee accountability of lawmakers. Despite the systemic flaws, there are reasons for the Parliament to be optimistic, analysts say. In a recent poll, 63 percent of Europeans said that they would like the body to play a more important role. One proposal would see some lawmakers elected from Pan-European rather than national lists, aiming to bolster the connection with voters across the bloc. But in typical E.U. fashion, it is unclear whether such a change would be ready before the next election, planned for 2024. More

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      Why So Many People Are Unhappy With Democracy

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      We pay too little attention to delivering effective government as a critical democratic value. We are familiar with the threats posed by democratic backsliding and the rise of illiberal forces in several democracies, including the United States. But the most pervasive and perhaps deepest challenge facing virtually all Western democracies today is the political fragmentation of democratic politics.Political fragmentation is the dispersion of political power into so many different hands and centers of power that it becomes difficult for democratic governments to function effectively.President Biden has recognized this historic challenge, calling the defining mission of his presidency to be winning the “battle between the utility of democracies in the 21st century and autocracies.”Yet even with unified control of government, the internal divisions of the Democratic Party postponed passage of his bipartisan infrastructure bill for several months and have made it uncertain which parts, if any, of the Build Back Better proposal will be enacted.When democratic governments seem incapable of delivering on their promises, this failure can lead to alienation, resignation, distrust and withdrawal among many citizens. It can also trigger demands for authoritarian leaders who promise to cut through messy politics. At an even greater extreme, it can lead people to question democracy itself and become open to anti-democratic systems of government.The struggle of the Biden administration to deliver on its policy agenda offers a good example of the political fragmentation of politics taking place throughout Western democracies. It takes different forms in the multiparty systems of Europe and the two-party system of the United States. The European democracies are experiencing the unraveling of the traditionally dominant center-left and center-right major parties and coalitions that have governed since World War II. Support for these parties has splintered into new parties of the right and left, along with others with less-easily defined ideological elements. From 2015 to 2017, over 30 new political parties entered European parliaments. Across European democracies, the percentage of people who identify strongly with a political party or are members of one has declined precipitously.The effects on the ability to govern have been dramatic. In Germany, the stable anchor of Europe since the 1950s, the two major parties regularly used to receive over 90 percent of the vote combined; in this fall’s elections, that plummeted to less than 50 percent. Support has hemorrhaged to green, anti-immigrant, free-market and other parties. After its 2017 elections, with support fragmented among many parties, it took Germany six months to cobble together a governing coalition, the longest time in the country’s history. The Netherlands, after its 2017 elections, needed a record 225 days to form a government.The coalitional governments assembled amid this cacophony of parties are also more fragile. Spain, for example, was forced to hold four national elections between 2015 and 2019 to find a stable governing coalition. Spain had effectively been a two-party democracy until 2015, but mass protest movements spawned a proliferation of new parties that made forging stable governments difficult. In Sweden, the prime minister lost a vote of no confidence this summer — a first in the country’s modern political history. Digital pop-up parties, including anti-party parties, arise out of nowhere and radically disrupt politics, as the Brexit Party did in Britain and the Five Star Movement did in Italy.The same forces driving fragmentation in other democracies are also roiling the United States, though our election structures make effective third parties highly unlikely. Here the forces of fragmentation get channeled within the two major parties. The most dramatic example on the Republican side is that when the party controlled the House from 2011 to 2019, it devoured two of its own speakers, John Boehner and Paul Ryan. Mr. Boehner’s memoir portrays a party caucus so internally fragmented as to be ungovernable.Similarly, the central story of the Biden administration is whether the Democratic Party can overcome its internal conflicts to deliver effective policies. Remarkably, Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled floor votes on the infrastructure bill, only to pull it because she could not deliver enough Democratic votes — extraordinary evidence of how difficult it is for a speaker to unite her caucus amid the forces of fragmentation. It took a disastrous election night for progressives to bury their concerns and support the bill — and several now regret having done so.The recent collapse of Build Back Better, at least for now, led to a remarkable public bloodletting between different elements within the party.Large structural forces have driven the fragmentation of politics throughout the West. On the economic front, the forces include globalization’s contribution to the stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, rising inequality and outrage over the 2008 financial crisis. On the cultural side: conflicts over immigration, nationalism and other issues.Since the New Deal in the United States and World War II in Europe, the parties of the left had represented less affluent, less educated voters. Now those voters are becoming the base of parties on the right, with more affluent, more educated voters shifting to parties on the left. Major parties are struggling to figure out how to patch together winning coalitions in the midst of this shattering transformation.The communications revolution is also a major force generating the disabling fragmentation of politics. Across Europe, it has given rise to loosely organized, leaderless protest movements that disrupt politics and give birth to other parties — but make effective government harder to achieve.In the United States, the new communications era has enabled the rise of free-agent politicians. A Congress with more free agents is more difficult to govern. Even in their first years in office, individual members of Congress (like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ted Cruz) no longer need to work their way up through the party or serve on major committees to attract national visibility and influence.Through cable television and social media, they can find and construct their own national constituencies. Through internet fund-raising (particularly small donations), politicians (particularly from the extremes) can become effective fund-raising machines on their own. In this era, party leaders lack the leverage they once had to force party members to accept the party line. That is why speakers of the House resign or reschedule votes on which they cannot deliver.The political fragmentation that now characterizes nearly all Western democracies reflects deep dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional parties and governments to deliver effective policies. Yet perversely, this fragmentation makes it all the more difficult for governments to do so. Mr. Biden is right: Democracies must figure out how to overcome the forces of fragmentation to show they once again can deliver effective government.Richard H. Pildes, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, is the author of the casebook “The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Los aliados de EE. UU. impulsan el declive de la democracia en el mundo, afirma un nuevo estudio

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      Los países alineados con Washington retroceden casi el doble que los no aliados, según las cifras, lo que complica las viejas suposiciones sobre la influencia estadounidense en el establecimiento de modelos democráticos.Según un nuevo análisis, Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron una parte considerablemente grande del retroceso democrático global experimentado en la última década.Los aliados de Estados Unidos siguen siendo, en promedio, más democráticos que el resto del mundo. Pero casi todos han sufrido algún grado de erosión democrática desde 2010, lo que significa que elementos centrales como elecciones justas o independencia judicial se han debilitado, y a un ritmo que supera con creces los declives promedio entre otros países.Con pocas excepciones, los países alineados con Estados Unidos no experimentaron casi ningún crecimiento democrático en ese periodo, aunque muchos de los que están lejos de la órbita de Washington sí lo hicieron.Los hallazgos son extraídos de los datos registrados por V-Dem, una organización sin fines de lucro con sede en Suecia que rastrea el nivel de democracia de los países a través de una serie de indicadores, y fueron analizados por The New York Times.Las revelaciones dejan en claro las penurias de la democracia, una tendencia característica de la era actual. Sugieren que gran parte del retroceso del mundo no es impuesto a las democracias por potencias extranjeras, sino que es una podredumbre que está creciendo dentro de la red más poderosa de alianzas mayoritariamente democráticas del mundo.En muchos casos, las democracias como Francia o Eslovenia vieron cómo se degradaron sus instituciones, aunque solo ligeramente, en medio de políticas de desconfianza y críticas adversas. En otros, dictaduras como la de Baréin restringieron libertades que de por sí no eran plenas. Pero con frecuencia, la tendencia fue impulsada por un giro hacia la democracia no liberal.En esa forma de gobierno, los líderes elegidos se comportan como caudillos y las instituciones políticas son más débiles, pero los derechos personales permanecen en su mayoría (excepto, casi siempre, para las minorías).De manera frecuente, los aliados de Estados Unidos lideraron esta tendencia. Turquía, Hungría, Israel y Filipinas son ejemplos de eso. Varias democracias más establecidas también han dado pasos pequeños en esa dirección, incluido Estados Unidos, donde los derechos electorales, la politización de los tribunales y otros factores son motivo de preocupación para muchos estudiosos de la democracia.Los hallazgos también socavaron las suposiciones estadounidenses, ampliamente compartidas por ambos partidos, de que Estados Unidos es, por naturaleza, una fuerza democratizadora en el mundo.Desde hace mucho tiempo, Washington se ha vendido como un defensor mundial de la democracia. La realidad siempre ha sido más complicada. Sin embargo, a través de los años, una cantidad suficiente de sus aliados se ha movido hacia ese sistema como para crear la impresión de que la influencia del país genera libertades al estilo estadounidense. Estas tendencias actuales sugieren que eso quizás ya no es cierto, si es que alguna vez lo fue.“Sería demasiado fácil afirmar que todo esto puede ser explicado por la existencia de Trump”, advirtió Seva Gunitsky, politólogo de la Universidad de Toronto que estudia cómo las grandes potencias influyen en las democracias. Los datos indican que la tendencia se aceleró durante la presidencia de Donald Trump, pero es anterior a ella.En cambio, los académicos afirman que lo más probable es que este cambio esté impulsado por fuerzas a más largo plazo. Por ejemplo, la disminución de la creencia en Estados Unidos como un modelo al cual aspirar; la disminución de la creencia en la propia democracia, cuya imagen se ha visto empañada por una serie de conmociones del siglo XXI; décadas de política estadounidense en la que solo se les dio prioridad a temas a corto plazo como el antiterrorismo; y un creciente entusiasmo por la política no liberal.Debido a que el mundo alineado con Estados Unidos lidera en la actualidad el declive de un sistema que alguna vez se comprometió a promover, “el consenso internacional sobre la democratización ha cambiado”, dijo Gunitsky.Reclusos en una cárcel superpoblada en 2016 en Ciudad Quezón, en Filipinas. El presidente Rodrigo Duterte supervisó una brutal represión contra los consumidores de drogas.Daniel Berehulak para The New York TimesUna crisis globalDesde el final de la Guerra Fría, los países alineados con Estados Unidos se habían movido muy lentamente hacia la democracia pero, hasta la década de 2010, la mayoría había evitado tener retrocesos.En la década de 1990, por ejemplo, 19 aliados se volvieron más democráticos, incluidos Turquía y Corea del Sur. Solo seis, como el caso de Jordania, se volvieron más autocráticos, pero todos por márgenes muy pequeños.Eso es lo que indica el índice de democracia liberal de V-Dem, que considera decenas de métricas en una puntuación de 0 a 1. Su metodología es transparente y se considera muy rigurosa. El índice de Corea del Sur, por ejemplo, aumentó de 0,517 a 0,768 en esa década, gracias a una transición a un gobierno civil pleno. La mayoría de los cambios son más pequeños y reflejan, por ejemplo, un avance gradual en la libertad de prensa o un ligero retroceso en la independencia judicial.Durante la década de 1990, Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron el nueve por ciento de los incrementos generales en los puntajes de democracia en todo el mundo, según las cifras del índice. En otras palabras, fueron responsables del nueve por ciento del crecimiento democrático global. Esto es mejor de lo que suena: muchos ya eran altamente democráticos.También durante esa década, los países aliados solo representaron el cinco por ciento de las reducciones globales, es decir, retrocedieron muy poco.Esas cifras empeoraron un poco en la década de 2000. Luego, en la década de 2010, cayeron a niveles desastrosos. Estados Unidos y sus aliados representaron solo el cinco por ciento de los aumentos mundiales de la democracia. Pero un impactante 36 por ciento de los retrocesos ocurrieron en países alineados con Estados Unidos.En promedio, los países aliados vieron disminuir la calidad de sus democracias casi el doble que los no aliados, según las cifras de V-Dem.El análisis define “aliado” como un país con el que Estados Unidos tiene un compromiso formal o implícito de defensa mutua, de los cuales hay 41. Aunque el término “aliado” podría definirse de varias maneras, todas ellas arrojan resultados muy similares.Este cambio se produce en medio de un periodo de agitación para la democracia, que se está reduciendo en todo el mundo.Los datos contradicen las suposiciones de Washington de que esta tendencia está impulsada por Rusia y China, cuyos vecinos y socios han visto cambiar muy poco sus puntuaciones, o por Trump, que asumió el cargo cuando el cambio estaba muy avanzado.Más bien, el retroceso es endémico en las democracias emergentes e incluso en las establecidas, dijo Staffan I. Lindberg, un politólogo de la Universidad de Gotemburgo que ayuda a supervisar el índice V-Dem. Y estos países suelen estar alineados con Estados Unidos.Esto no significa que Washington sea exactamente la causa de su retracción, subrayó Lindberg. Pero tampoco es irrelevante.Una bandera estadounidense usada para una fotografía de los presidentes Joe Biden y Recep Tayyip Erdogan en la cumbre del Grupo de los 20 celebrada en Roma el mes pasado.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesLa influencia estadounidense, para bien o para malA pesar de décadas de narrativa de la Guerra Fría en la que se consideraba a las alianzas estadounidenses como una fuerza para la democratización, esto nunca ha sido realmente cierto, afirmó Thomas Carothers, quien estudia la promoción de la democracia en el Fondo Carnegie para la Paz Internacional.Si bien Washington alentó la democracia en Europa occidental como contrapeso ideológico de la Unión Soviética, suprimió su propagación en gran parte del resto del mundo.Estados Unidos apoyó o instaló dictadores, alentó la represión violenta de elementos de izquierda, y patrocinó grupos armados antidemocráticos. A menudo, esto se realizó en países aliados, con cooperación del gobierno local. Los soviéticos hicieron lo mismo.Como resultado, cuando terminó la Guerra Fría en 1989 y disminuyó la intromisión de las grandes potencias, las sociedades tuvieron más libertad para democratizarse, y así lo hicieron, en grandes cantidades.“Muchas personas alcanzaron la mayoría de edad en esos años y pensaron que eso era lo normal”, ya que confundieron la oleada de los años noventa como el estado natural de las cosas y como algo que había logrado Estados Unidos (debido a su hegemonía mundial), dijo Carothers.“Pero entonces llegó la guerra contra el terrorismo en 2001”, explicó, y Washington nuevamente presionó para establecer autócratas dóciles y frenos a la democratización, esta vez en sociedades donde el islam es predominante.El resultado han sido décadas de debilitamiento de los cimientos de la democracia en los países aliados. Al mismo tiempo, las presiones lideradas por Estados Unidos en favor de la democracia han comenzado a desvanecerse.“La hegemonía democrática es buena para la democratización, pero no a través de los mecanismos en los que la gente suele pensar, como la promoción de la democracia”, dijo Gunitsky, estudioso de la política de las grandes potencias.En vez de alianzas o presidentes que exijan a los dictadores que se liberalicen, ninguno de los cuales tiene un gran historial, dijo, “la influencia de Estados Unidos, donde es más fuerte, es una influencia indirecta, como un ejemplo a emular”.Su investigación ha descubierto que Estados Unidos estimula la democratización cuando los líderes de otros países, los ciudadanos o ambos ven que el gobierno de estilo estadounidense promete beneficios como la prosperidad o la libertad. Algunos pueden considerar que adoptarlo, aunque sea superficialmente, es una forma de ganarse el apoyo estadounidense.Sin embargo, las impresiones de la democracia estadounidense, que solían ser positivas, se han ido deteriorando rápidamente.“Muy pocos de los encuestados piensan que la democracia estadounidense es un buen ejemplo a seguir para otros países”, reveló un estudio reciente del Centro de Investigaciones Pew. En promedio, solo el 17 por ciento de las personas en los países encuestados dijo que la democracia en Estados Unidos era digna de ser emulada, mientras que el 23 por ciento afirmó que nunca había sido un buen ejemplo.Es posible que la prosperidad estadounidense ya no parezca tan atractiva, debido a problemas cada vez mayores como la desigualdad, así como el surgimiento de China como modelo económico alternativo.Además, el conocimiento de los problemas internos de Estados Unidos —tiroteos masivos, polarización, injusticia racial— ha afectado enormemente las percepciones.Podría ser más acertado pensar que la situación actual se debe más al surgimiento de la democracia no liberal como modelo alternativo. Ese sistema parece ser cada vez más popular, mientras que ya no lo es tanto la democracia más plena, con sus protecciones para las minorías y su dependencia de las instituciones establecidas.Pero incluso las personas que quieren una democracia no liberal para su país tienden a considerarla poco atractiva en otros, gracias a sus tendencias nacionalistas. A medida que se degradan las opiniones sobre la democracia estadounidense como modelo global, también lo hace la propia democracia.“Gran parte del atractivo de la democracia en todo el mundo está vinculado al atractivo de Estados Unidos como modelo de régimen”, dijo Gunitsky. “Cuando una de esas cosas decae, hará decaer la otra”.Max Fisher es reportero y columnista de temas internacionales con sede en Nueva York. Ha reportado sobre conflictos, diplomacia y cambio social desde cinco continentes. Es autor de The Interpreter, una columna que explora las ideas y el contexto detrás de los principales eventos mundiales de actualidad. @Max_Fisher — Facebook More

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      U.S. Allies Drive Much of World’s Democratic Decline, Data Shows

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      Washington-aligned countries backslid at nearly double the rate of non-allies, data shows, complicating long-held assumptions about American influence.The United States and its allies accounted for a significantly outsize share of global democratic backsliding in the last decade, according to a new analysis.American allies remain, on average, more democratic than the rest of the world. But nearly all have suffered a degree of democratic erosion since 2010, meaning that core elements like election fairness or judicial independence have weakened, and at rates far outpacing average declines among other countries.With few exceptions, U.S.-aligned countries saw almost no democratic growth in that period, even as many beyond Washington’s orbit did.The findings are reflected in data recorded by V-Dem, a Sweden-based nonprofit that tracks countries’ level of democracy across a host of indicators, and analyzed by The New York Times.The revelations cast democracy’s travails, a defining trend of the current era, in a sharp light. They suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances.In many cases, democracies like France or Slovenia saw institutions degrade, if only slightly, amid politics of backlash and distrust. In others, dictatorships like Bahrain curtailed already-modest freedoms. But, often, the trend was driven by a shift toward illiberal democracy.In that form of government, elected leaders behave more like strongmen and political institutions are eroded, but personal rights mostly remain (except, often, for minorities).U.S. allies often led this trend. Turkey, Hungary, Israel and the Philippines are all examples. A number of more established democracies have taken half-steps in their direction, too, including the United States, where voting rights, the politicization of courts, and other factors are considered cause for concern by many democracy scholars.The findings also undercut American assumptions, widely held in both parties, that U.S. power is an innately democratizing force in the world.Washington has long sold itself as a global champion for democracy. The reality has always been more complicated. But enough of its allies have moved toward that system to create an impression that American influence brings about American-style freedoms. These trends suggest that may no longer be true — if it ever was.“It would be too easy to say this can all be explained by Trump,” cautioned Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist who studies how great powers influence democracies. Data indicates that the trend accelerated during his presidency but predated it.Rather, scholars say this change is likely driven by longer-term forces. Declining faith in the United States as a model to aspire to. Declining faith in democracy itself, whose image has been tarnished by a series of 21st century shocks. Decades of American policy prioritizing near-term issues like counterterrorism. And growing enthusiasm for illiberal politics.With the American-aligned world now a leader in the decline of a system it once pledged to promote, Dr. Gunitsky said, “The international consensus for democratization has shifted.”Inmates in an overcrowded jail in 2016 in Quezon City, in the Philippines. President Rodrigo Duterte oversaw a brutal crackdown on drug users.Daniel Berehulak for The New York TimesA Global CrisisSince the Cold War’s end, American-aligned countries have shifted toward democracy only slowly but, until the 2010s, mostly avoided backsliding.In the 1990s, for instance, 19 allies grew more democratic, including Turkey and South Korea. Only six, like Jordan, became more autocratic, but all by very small amounts.That’s according to V-Dem’s liberal democracy index, which factors dozens of metrics into a score from 0 to 1. Its methodology is transparent and considered highly rigorous. South Korea’s, for example, rose from 0.517 to 0.768 in that decade, amid a transition to full civilian rule. Most shifts are smaller, reflecting, say, an incremental advance in press freedom or slight step back in judicial independence.During the 1990s, the United States and its allies accounted for 9 percent of the overall increases in democracy scores worldwide, according to the figures. In other words, they were responsible for 9 percent of global democratic growth. This is better than it sounds: Many were already highly democratic.Also that decade, allied countries accounted for only 5 percent of global decreases — they backslid very little.Those numbers worsened a little in the 2000s. Then, in the 2010s, they became disastrous. The U.S. and its allies accounted for only 5 percent of worldwide increases in democracy. But a staggering 36 percent of all backsliding occurred in U.S.-aligned countries.On average, allied countries saw the quality of their democracies decline by nearly double the rate of non-allies, according to V-Dem’s figures.The analysis defines “ally” as a country with which the United States has a formal or implied mutual defense commitment, of which there are 41. While “ally” could be plausibly defined in several different ways, all produce largely similar results.This shift comes amid a period of turmoil for democracy, which is retrenching worldwide.The data contradicts assumptions in Washington that this trend is driven by Russia and China, whose neighbors and partners have seen their scores change very little, or by Mr. Trump, who entered office when the shift was well underway.Rather, backsliding is endemic across emerging and even established democracies, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a University of Gothenburg political scientist who helps oversee V-Dem. And such countries tend to be American-aligned.This does not mean Washington is exactly causing their retrenchment, Dr. Lindberg stressed. But it isn’t irrelevant, either.An American flag used for a photo-op between President Biden and Mr. Erdogan at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Rome last month.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesAmerican Influence, for Better or WorseDespite decades of Cold War messaging calling American alliances a force for democratization, this has never really been true, said Thomas Carothers, who studies democracy promotion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.While Washington encouraged democracy in Western Europe as an ideological counterweight to the Soviet Union, it suppressed its spread in much of the rest of the world.It backed or installed dictators, encouraged violent repression of left-wing elements, and sponsored anti-democratic armed groups. Often, this was conducted in allied countries in cooperation with the local government. The Soviets did the same.As a result, when the Cold War ended in 1989 and great power meddling receded, societies became freer to democratize and, in large numbers, they did.“A lot of people came of age in those years and thought that was normal,” Mr. Carothers said, mistaking the 1990s wave as both the natural state of things and, because the United States was global hegemon, America’s doing.“But then the war on terror hit in 2001,” he said, and Washington again pressed for pliant autocrats and curbs on democratization, this time in societies where Islam is predominant.The result has been decades of weakening the foundations of democracy in allied countries. At the same time, American-led pressures in favor of democracy have begun falling away.“Democratic hegemony is good for democratization, but not through the mechanisms that people usually think about, like democracy promotion,” said Dr. Gunitsky, the scholar of great power politics.Rather than alliances or presidents demanding that dictators liberalize, neither of which have much of a track record, he said, “The U.S. influence, where it’s strongest, is an indirect influence, as an example to emulate.”His research has found that the United States spurs democratization when other countries’ leaders, citizens or both see American-style governance as promising benefits like prosperity or freedom. Some may see adopting it, even superficially, as a way to win American support.But once-positive impressions of American democracy have been rapidly declining.“Very few in any public surveyed think American democracy is a good example for other countries to follow,” a recent Pew Research Center study found. On average, only 17 percent of people in surveyed countries called U.S. democracy worth emulating, while 23 percent said it had never offered a good example.American prosperity may no longer look so appealing either, because of growing problems, like inequality, as well as the rise of China as an alternate economic model.And awareness of the United States’ domestic problems — mass shootings, polarization, racial injustice — has greatly affected perceptions.It may be more precise to think of what’s happening now as the rise of illiberal democracy as an alternate model. That system appears to be increasingly popular. Fuller democracy, with its protections for minorities and reliance on establishment institutions, is becoming less so. But even people who want illiberal democracy for their country tend to find it unappealing in others, thanks to its nationalist tendencies. As impressions of U.S. democracy as a global model degrade, so does democracy itself.“A lot of the appeal of democracy around the world is tied to appeal of the U.S. as a regime type,” Dr. Gunitsky said. “When one of those things decline, the other will decline.” More

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      Will 2024 Be the Year American Democracy Dies?

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      This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.Nearly nine months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election, a question still lingers over how to place it in history: Were the events of Jan. 6 the doomed conclusion of an unusually anti-democratic moment in American political life, or a preview of where the country is still heading?Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law and an expert in election law, believes the second possibility shouldn’t be ruled out. In a paper published this month, he wrote that “The United States faces a serious risk that the 2024 presidential election, and other future U.S. elections, will not be conducted fairly, and that the candidates taking office will not reflect the free choices made by eligible voters under previously announced election rules.”It could be a bloodless coup, he warns, executed not by rioters with nooses but “lawyers in fine suits”: Between January and June, Republican-controlled legislatures passed 24 laws across 14 states to increase their control over how elections are run, stripping secretaries of state of their power and making it easier to overturn results.How much danger is American democracy really in, and what can be done to safeguard it? Here’s what people are saying.How democracy could collapse in 2024In Hasen’s view, there are three mechanisms by which the 2024 election could be overturned:State legislatures, purporting to exercise the authority of either the Constitution or an 1887 federal law called the Electoral Count Act, swapping in their own slate of electors for president, potentially with the blessing of a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican-controlled Congress.Fraudulent or suppressive election administration or vote counting by norm- or law-breaking officials.Vigilante action that prevents voting, interferes with ballot counting or interrupts the legitimate transfer of power.These mechanisms are not outside the realm of possibility:Recent reporting from Robert Costa and Bob Woodward revealed that the previous administration had a plan, hatched by the prominent conservative lawyer John Eastman, for former Vice President Pence to throw out the electoral votes of key swing states on the basis that they had competing slates of electors. Next time around, “with the right pieces in place, Trump could succeed,” the Times columnist Jamelle Bouie writes. “All he needs is a rival slate of electoral votes from contested states, state officials and state legislatures willing to intervene on his behalf, a supportive Republican majority in either house of Congress, and a sufficiently pliant Supreme Court majority.”On top of passing voting administration laws, Republicans have also recruited candidates who espouse election conspiracy theories to run for positions like secretary of state and county clerk. According to Reuters, 10 of the 15 declared Republican candidates for secretary of state in five swing states have either declared the 2020 election stolen or demanded its invalidation or investigation.Skepticism of or hostility toward election administration is widespread among Republican voters as well, 78 percent of whom still say that President Biden did not win in November. That conviction, Reuters reported in June, has sparked a nationwide intimidation campaign against election officials and their families, who continue to face threats of hanging, firing squads, torture and bomb blasts with vanishingly little help from law enforcement. One in three election officials feel unsafe because of their job and nearly one in five listed threats to their lives as a job-related concern, according to an April survey from the Brennan Center.“The stage is thus being set for chaos,” Robert Kagan argues in The Washington Post. Given a more strategically contested election, “Biden would find himself where other presidents have been — where Andrew Jackson was during the nullification crisis, or where Abraham Lincoln was after the South seceded — navigating without rules or precedents, making his own judgments about what constitutional powers he does and doesn’t have.”Some experts worry about democratic backsliding even in the event of a legitimate Republican victory in 2024, Ashley Parker reports for The Washington Post. In such a scenario, Trump or a similarly anti-democratic figure might set about remaking the political and electoral system to consolidate power.“We often think that what we should be waiting for is fascists and communists marching in the streets, but nowadays, the ways democracies often die is through legal things at the ballot box — so things that can be both legal and antidemocratic at the same time,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a Harvard political scientist. “Politicians use the letter of the law to subvert the spirit of the law.”Experts told Parker that perhaps the most proximate example is Hungary under Viktor Orban, who returned to power in 2010 after being ousted in 2002 and over the past decade has transformed the country into a soft autocracy. Admirers of the country’s government include Tucker Carlson, who in August extolled it as a model for the United States, and the high-profile Conservative Political Action Committee, which will host its next gathering in Budapest.Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, believes there are many reasons — the threat of primary challenges against Republicans who defy “Stop the Steal” orthodoxy, gerrymandering, the influence of social media — that the Republican Party’s anti-democratic turn might not just continue but accelerate: “There are no countervailing forces. There’s nothing that rewards being a sober moderate who believes in democracy and tries to govern by consensus.”‘The quicksand we’re already in’Could a plan of the kind Eastman devised to manipulate the Electoral College count really have succeeded? Teri Kanefield, a lawyer, doesn’t think so. The plan was “alarming,” to be sure, but “It was never within the realm of possibility that Americans would passively tolerate” a de facto dictatorship, she writes in The Washington Post, “and at any rate, U.S. military leaders had no interest in using force to keep Trump in power, either.”The same argument could apply to the other methods of subversion Hasen outlines. After all, if Republicans feel they must change election rules to win, might they not be said to be operating from a place of weakness rather than strength? “The only person or party that attempts a coup d’état is the one that cannot win by other means,” Jack Shafer writes in Politico. “It would only inspire a counter-coup by the majority, and maybe a counter-counter coup, and a counter-counter-counter coup.”But some analysts worry that U.S. elections are already so undemocratic that an anti-democratic movement doesn’t need to subvert them. Consider, for example, that the Senate now heavily favors, more than it has before, a minority of voters controlling a majority of the seats, while the Electoral College has become more likely to deny victory to the winner of the popular vote. Conceivably, an Orban-like candidate without a popular mandate could win legitimately in 2024, without violence or fraud, and feel little need to transform these institutions much further.“As things already stand today, the Republican Party can return to power in Washington without the support of the majority of the American electorate,” Osita Nwanevu writes in The New Republic. “Democrats, by contrast, had to win more than simple majorities or pluralities to gain the power they tenuously hold now — if Joe Biden had defeated Donald Trump by any less than 3.2 points in the popular vote, he would have lost outright in November. None of this is privileged information; these and other related facts have been widely disseminated in recent years by academics, analysts, and journalists who also tend to imply, nevertheless, that an undemocratic America is merely a hypothetical looming ahead of us. It isn’t. It is the quicksand we’re already in.”What happens next? It’s up to the DemocratsThe partisan biases of the Electoral College and the Senate are not easily altered, and whether they should be is a debate all its own. But at the very least, members of Congress could act to prevent the kind of explicit subversion of existing election rules that Hasen warns of: In the House of Representatives, Democrats have passed a new voting rights act aimed at stemming the tide of restrictive new election laws from Republican state legislatures. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, reviving the Justice Department’s power to bar some discriminatory election changes and easing the path to challenge others in court.In the Senate, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has introduced a bill that promises to “expand protections for election administrators by extending existing prohibitions on intimidating or threatening voters to include election officials engaged in the counting of ballots, canvassing, and certifying election results.”To guard against an Eastman-style plan to overturn the Electoral College vote, Congress could modernize the ambiguous Electoral Count Act that governs the counting procedure — far too ambiguously, Meredith McGehee and Elise Wirkus argue in The Hill.All of these measures would require changing the Senate filibuster, but doing so is completely within Democrats’ power, as the Times columnist Ezra Klein has noted. “In that way,” he argues, “Republicans perceive the threat correctly: A country that is far closer to being truly democratic, where the unpopularity of their ideas would expose them to punishing electoral consequences.” More

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      The Gavin Newsom Recall Is a Farce

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      After a slow start, California ranks 10th in the nation for coronavirus vaccinations. It’s down to about three cases per 100,000 residents. Its economy is booming. According to Bloomberg, the state “has no peers among developed economies for expanding G.D.P., creating jobs, raising household income, manufacturing growth, investment in innovation, producing clean energy and unprecedented wealth through its stocks and bonds.” State coffers are flush: The governor’s office estimates a $76 billion budget surplus. The Legislative Analyst’s Office puts it at $38 billion. (The difference turns on the definition of the word “surplus.”) More

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      The Rest of the World Is Worried About America

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      This weekend, American skies will be aflame with fireworks celebrating our legacy of freedom and democracy, even as Republican legislature after Republican legislature constricts the franchise and national Republicans have filibustered the expansive For The People Act. It will be a strange spectacle. More

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      Trump and the Republican Party's Cruel Logic

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      Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.After more than a decade in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton provided fruitful targets for an audience fearful of cultural change, conservative media has struggled to turn the older white president who goes to Mass every Sunday into a compelling villain. Yet the apocalypse remains nigh, threatened by the presence of those Americans they consider unworthy of the name.On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”Under such an ideology, depriving certain Americans of their fundamental rights is not wrong but praiseworthy, because such people are usurpers.*The origin of this politics can arguably be found in the aftermath of the Civil War, when Radical Republicans sought to build a multiracial democracy from the ashes of the Confederacy. That effort was destroyed when white Southerners severed emancipated Black Americans from the franchise, eliminating the need to win their votes or respect their rights. The founders had embedded protections for slavery in the Constitution, but it was only after the abolition war, during what the historian Eric Foner calls the Second Founding, that nonracial citizenship became possible.The former Confederates had failed to build a slave empire, but they would not accept the demise of white man’s government. As the former Confederate general and subsequent six-term senator from Alabama John T. Morgan wrote in 1890, democratic sovereignty in America was conferred upon “qualified voters,” and Black men, whom he accused of “hatred and ill will toward their former owners,” did not qualify and were destroying democracy by their mere participation. Disenfranchising them, therefore, was not merely justified but an act of self-defense protecting democracy against “Negro domination.”In order to wield power as they wanted, without having to appeal to Black men for their votes, the Democratic Party and its paramilitary allies adopted a theory of liberty and democracy premised on exclusion. Such a politics must constantly maintain the ramparts between the despised and the elevated. This requires fresh acts of cruelty not only to remind everyone of their proper place but also to sustain the sense of impending doom that justifies these acts.As the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote, years after the end of Reconstruction, Southern Democrats engaged in “intensive propaganda of white supremacy, Negrophobia and race chauvinism” to purge Black men from politics forever, shattering emerging alliances between white and Black workers. This was ruthless opportunism, but it also forged a community defined by the color line and destroyed one that might have transcended it.The Radical Republicans believed the ballot would be the ultimate defense against white supremacy. The reverse was also true: Severed from that defense, Black voters were disarmed. Without Black votes at stake, the party of Lincoln was no longer motivated to defend Black rights.*Contemporary Republicans are far less violent and racist than the Democrats of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. But they have nevertheless adopted the same political logic, that the victories of the rival party are illegitimate, wrought by fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s rise to power began with a lyrical tribute to all that red and blue states had in common and that Mr. Trump’s began with him saying Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.Their conviction in this illegitimacy is intimately tied to the Democratic Party’s reliance on Black votes. As Mr. Trump announced in November, “Detroit and Philadelphia — known as two of the most corrupt political places anywhere in our country, easily — cannot be responsible for engineering the outcome of a presidential race.” The Republican Party maintains this conviction despite Mr. Trump’s meaningful gains among voters of color in 2020.Even as Republicans seek to engineer state and local election rules in their favor, they accuse the Democrats of attempting to rig elections by ensuring the ballot is protected. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who encouraged the mob that attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 with his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, tells brazen falsehoods proclaiming that voting rights measures will “register millions of illegal aliens to vote” and describes them as “Jim Crow 2.0.”But there are no Democratic proposals to disenfranchise Republicans. There are no plans to deny gun owners the ballot, to disenfranchise white men without a college education, to consolidate rural precincts to make them unreachable. This is not because Democrats or liberals are inherently less cruel. It is because parties reliant on diverse coalitions to wield power will seek to win votes rather than suppress them.These kinds of falsehoods cannot be contested on factual grounds because they represent ideological beliefs about who is American and who is not and therefore who can legitimately wield power. The current Democratic administration is as illegitimate to much of the Republican base as the Reconstruction governments were to Morgan.*This brand of white identity politics can be defeated. In the 1930s, a coalition of labor unions, urban liberals and Northern Black voters turned the Democratic Party from one of the nation’s oldest white supremacist political institutions — an incubator of terrorists and bandits, united by stunning acts of racist cruelty against Black Americans in the South — into the party of civil rights. This did not happen because Democratic Party leaders picked up tomes on racial justice, embraced jargon favored by liberal academics or were struck by divine light. It happened because an increasingly diverse constituency, one they were reliant on to wield power, forced them to.That realignment shattered the one-party system of the Jim Crow South and ushered in America’s fragile experiment in multiracial democracy since 1965. The lesson is that politicians change when their means of holding power change and even the most authoritarian political organization can become devoted to democracy if forced to.With their fragile governing trifecta, Democrats have a brief chance to make structural changes that would even the playing field and help push Republicans to reach beyond their hard-core base to wield power, like adding states to the union, repairing the holes the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts blew in the Voting Rights Act, preventing state governments from subverting election results and ending partisan control over redistricting. Legislation like the PRO Act would spur unionization and the cross-racial working-class solidarity that comes with it. Such reforms would make Republican efforts to restrict the electorate less appealing and effective and pressure the party to cease its radicalization against democracy.We know this can work because of the lessons of not only history but also the present: In states like Maryland and Massachusetts, where the politics of cruelty toward the usual targets of Trumpist vitriol would be self-sabotaging, Republican politicians choose a different path.The ultimate significance of the Trump era in American history is still being written. If Democrats fail to act in the face of Republican efforts to insulate their power from voters, they will find themselves attempting to compete for an unrepresentative slice of the electorate, leaving the vulnerable constituencies on whom they currently rely without effective representation and democratic means of self-defense that the ballot provides.As long as Republicans are able to maintain a system in which they can rely on the politics of white identity, as the Democratic Party once did, their politics will revolve around cruelty, rooted in attempts to legislate their opponents out of existence or to use the state to crush communities associated with them. Americans will always have strong disagreements about matters such as the role of the state, the correct approach to immigration and the place of religion in public life. But the only way to diminish the politics of cruelty is to make them less rewarding.Adam Serwer (@AdamSerwer) is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of the forthcoming “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More