The Princeton Public Library is pleased to share a selection of resources to help make sense of democracy in crisis.
Twenty-five years ago, it seemed that totalitarianism had been defeated and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of our times. But today, the very values democracy embodies are under assault and in retreat globally.
The democratic deficit has a number of causes. Many of them are related to the erosion of constitutional checks and balances and democratic norms, a phenomenon often called “democratic backsliding.” Its most dangerous form is what scholar Guillermo O’Donnell calls “the electoral road to breakdown,” where elected autocrats subvert democracy’s institutions by packing and weaponizing courts and other neutral agencies, buying off or bullying media or the private sector into self-censorship, and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against their opponents.
These efforts are often presented as legitimate, or even necessary improvements to democracy—making the judiciary more efficient, addressing corruption, or cleaning up elections, for example. As a result, citizens do not immediately realize that they are living under a form of government that is no longer democratic.
The most worrying development is that the rising tide of authoritarian power has reached some leading democracies. The United States, for example, has accelerated its slide toward democratic backsliding. Its leaders have sped up the pace of political polarization, threatened to deny federal funding to states that do not bring their actions into line with Trumpian policy, and defy established legal procedures in ways that strain law-bound democracy’s credibility.