Disclaimer: I haven’t actually read all that much about democracy. I would not be stunned if parts of this post are silly or misleading in ways that experts could easily identify. ↩︎

The democracy ratings used to produce this graph are taken from the PolityV dataset. Although the dataset is widely used by political scientists, and the broad historical picture it paints is probably roughly right, some its individual ratings are admittedly bizarre. For example, according to the Polity team, the United States is currently less democratic than it was in 1845. ↩︎

“Proper democracy” isn’t a standard term. It is loosely equivalent, though, to what David Stasavage calls “modern democracy.” In his book The Decline and Rise of Democracy, Stavage mainly uses the concept of “modern democracy” to draw a contrast with “early democracy.” An early democracy is a complex society that does not qualify as a modern democracy, but that still places some significant constraints on leaders and still allows for some significant public participation. Participation can take a number of forms and may emphasize discussion more than it emphasizes elections. Opportunities to participate are also usually much more limited for common people than for elites.

The Roman Republic is one famous state that qualifies as an “early democracy.” In general, in the premodern world, early democracies were not extremely rare, although they were most likely to arise in places where states were small and weak. ↩︎

From The Decline and Rise of Democracy:

Over time, early democracy persisted in some societies, but it died out in many others. It did so as societies grew in scale; it also did so as rulers acquired new ways of monitoring production; it did so finally when people found it hard to exit to new areas. It is for all these reasons that the title of this book refers first to a decline in early democracy and then to the rise of modern democracy.

People have been debating the robustness of the rise of democracy for a long time. My impression is that, among proponents of democracy, the dominant intellectual mood has ranged from quasi-religious faith in the trend (in response to early progress and Enlightenment-era interpretations of history) to grave doubt (in response to the rise of fascism and communism) to incautious optimism (in response to the end of the Cold War) to gnawing worry (in response to the past twenty years).

Here are some long quotes that give a taste of intellectual thought in each era.

From Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1831):

Whithersoever we turn our eyes we shall witness the same continual revolution throughout the whole of Christendom. The various occurrences of national existence have everywhere turned to the advantage of democracy; all men have aided it by their exertions: those who have intentionally labored in its cause, and those who have served it unwittingly; those who have fought for it and those who have declared themselves its opponents, have all been driven along in the same track, have all labored to one end, some ignorantly and some unwillingly; all have been blind instruments in the hands of God.…

The whole book which is here offered to the public has been written under the impression of a kind of religious dread produced in the author’s mind by the contemplation of so irresistible a revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of such amazing obstacles, and which is still proceeding in the midst of the ruins it has made. It is not necessary that God himself should speak in order to disclose to us the unquestionable signs of His will; we can discern them in the habitual course of nature, and in the invariable tendency of events: I know, without a special revelation, that the planets move in the orbits traced by the Creator’s finger. If the men of our time were led by attentive observation and by sincere reflection to acknowledge that the gradual and progressive development of social equality is at once the past and future of their history, this solitary truth would confer the sacred character of a Divine decree upon the change. To attempt to check democracy would be in that case to resist the will of God; and the nations would then be constrained to make the best of the social lot awarded to them by Providence.

From Jean-Francois Revel's in "Can the Democracies Survive?" (1984):

Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.

If so, in its modern sense of a form of society reconciling governmental efficiency with legitimacy, authority with individual freedoms, democracy will have lasted a little over two centuries, to judge by the speed at which the forces bent on its destruction are growing. And, really, only a tiny minority of the human race will have experienced it. In both time and space, democracy fills a very small corner. The span of roughly two-hundred years applies only to the few countries where it first appeared, still very incomplete, at the end of the 18th century. Most of the other countries in which democracy exists adopted it under a century ago, under half a century ago, in some cases less than a decade ago.

Democracy probably could endure if it were the only type of political organization in the world. But it is not basically structured to defend itself against outside enemies seeking its annihiliation, especially since the latest and the most dangerous of these external enemies–Communism–parades as democracy perfected when it is in fact the absolute negation of democracy, the current and complete model of totalitarianism.

From Philip Slater and Warren Bennis's "Democracy is Inevitable (1990):

[B]arring some sudden decline in the rate of technological change, and on the (outrageous) assumption that war will somehow be eliminated during the next half-century, it is possible to predict that…democracy will be universal. Each revolutionary autocracy, as it reshuffles the family structure and pushes toward industrialization, will sow the seeds of its own destruction, and democratization will gradually engulf it.

We might, of course, rue the day. A world of mass democracies may well prove homogenized and ugly. It is perhaps beyond human social capacity to maximize both equality and understanding on the one hand, diversity on the other. Faced with this dilemma, however, many people are willing to sacrifice quaintness to social justice, and we might conclude by remarking that just as Marx, in proclaiming the inevitability of communism, did not hesitate to give some assistance to the wheels of fate, so our thesis that democracy represents the social system of the electronic era should not bar these persons from giving a little push here and there to the inevitable.

From Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy (2020):

It is possible that we are already living through the twilight of democracy; that our civilization may already be heading for anarchy or tyranny, as the ancient philosophers and America’s founders once feared; that a new generation of clercs, the advocates of illiberal or authoritarian ideas, will come to power in the twenty-first century, just as they did in the twentieth; that their visions of the world, born of resentment, anger, or deep, messianic dreams, could triumph. Maybe new information technology will continue to undermine consensus, divide people further, and increase polarization until only violence can determine who rules. Maybe fear of disease will create fear of freedom.

Or maybe the coronavirus will inspire a new sense of global solidarity. Maybe we will renew and modernize our institutions. Maybe international cooperation will expand after the entire world has had the same set of experiences at the same time: lockdown, quarantine, fear of infection, fear of death. Maybe scientists around the world will find new ways to collaborate, above and beyond politics. Maybe the reality of illness and death will teach people to be suspicious of hucksters, liars, and purveyors of disinformation.

Maddeningly, we have to accept that both futures are possible. No political victory is ever permanent, no definition of “the nation” is guaranteed to last, and no elite of any kind, whether so-called “populist” or so-called “liberal” or so-called “aristocratic,” rules forever. The history of ancient Egypt looks, from a great distance in time, like a monotonous story of interchangeable pharaohs. But on closer examination, it includes periods of cultural lightness and eras of despotic gloom. Our history will someday look that way too.

I think this whipsaw pattern suggests that people sometimes give too much weight to recent events and sub-trends when thinking about the future of democracy. For example, this past year, public intellectuals who have written about the future of democracy have tended to dwell a lot on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. If someone writes a new history of democracy in 2100, though, I’m skeptical that the pandemic will actually show up in a major way. Similarly, I think we probably shouldn’t read too much into reports that democracy has recently been experiencing a global recession. Although the past decade should make us feel somewhat more worried, our overall predictions for the world shouldn’t change very much. ↩︎

You could argue, on the other hand, that it’s unfair to draw an analogy between the modern rise of democracy and premodern trends that burned out after a few centuries. The pace of economic and technological change is much faster in modern times than it was before the Industrial Revolution. If a political trend can survive for two centuries in the modern world, then this may be more impressive than surviving for a couple centuries when the background pace of change is low.

On the other other hand, if change will be just as fast (or even faster) in the coming centuries, then maybe this gives us an opposing reason to expect existing trends to burn out quickly. I think these two considerations might balance each other out. ↩︎

An important nuance to A&R’s theoretical framework, which I’ve glossed over, is the idea that democractization is also a solution to a commitment problem faced by elites. You might think elites could placate commoners simply by making policy concessions, while still retaining their dictatorial powers. However, A&J point out that promises of future concessions can be difficult to trust. Simply stepping out onto your balcony and anncouning “I’ll never screw you people over again” probably won’t do much much to resolve a crisis. Actively reducing your ability to screw common people over in the future, by moving from dictatorship to democracy, might produce better results. ↩︎

One alternative framework for explaining democratization is the elite competition framework. This framework emphasizes conflict between political elites and economic elites with limited political power. Ben Ansell and David Samuels argue that economic elites have an interest in supporting democratization as a way of protecting their wealth from political elites. They correctly believe that they have less to fear from pro-redistribution voters than they have to fear from political elites with extractive tendencies. Industrialization tends to support democratization, according to this theory, because it creates a large new class of wealthy people with limited political authority. ↩︎

We can break down the A&R story down into three high-level pieces, which each seem pretty plausible to me:

• First: The prevalence of democracy depends (in part) on how strenuously elites oppose it.
• Second: The level of elite resistance depends (in part) on the costs and benefits that democratization poses for them.
• Third: Industrialization has tended to raise these benefits and lower these costs.

If we want to explain why India is a long-standing democracy and China is still a dictatorship, for example, then talking about industrialization is not going to do us much good. Clearly many other factors matter too. ↩︎

The general idea that economic change can be a major driver of political change is also supported by the Neolithic Revolution. The low population densities of hunter-gatherers, along with their inability to store large food surpluses, made it nearly impossible for states to emerge for most of human history. When people transitioned to sendentary agricultural production, in several different parts of the world, this transition tended to be followed by the emergence of states. The causal link in this case is very clear.

The Neolithic Revolution is also an interesting case to consider, because it shows us that economic change does not always push in the direction of greater liberty. Hunter-gatherer groups tend to be quite egalitarian, often take consensus-oriented approaches to major decisions, and rarely hold slaves. The rise of states therefore meant the rise of inequality, social hierarchy, and slavery. ↩︎

When thinking about the future of automation, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the human brain is just a physical object. It was produced through a physical process, without even a blueprint or guiding plan. At first glance, then, there is no obvious reason to think that engineered objects will never be able to match its functionality. We also should keep in mind that the entire field of computer science is less than a century old. Furthermore, for most of this time, computer scientists lacked access to anything close to the amount of computing power used by human brains. The fact that we have not yet achieved anything close to full automation is not very telling. ↩︎

Complete automation is importantly different than partial automation. When only some jobs are automated away, there will often an increase in demand for workers to perform jobs that haven’t yet been automated. This dynamic has allowed average wages to rise despite the tremendous amount of automation that has followed the Industrial Revolution. The dynamic should break down, though, if we eventually approach full automation. See this paper and this paper for discussions that touch on this point. ↩︎

All of my analysis of the impact of complete automation assumes that people still at least kind of exist and call the shots politically. If AI systems call the shots by this point in history, on the other hand, then the appropriate analysis becomes very different.

More abstractly, I suppose, the one really necessary assumption behind my analysis is that there is some kind of thing that has political power but no longer has a major role to play in production. These things could in principle be normal humans, really heavily biologically modified humans, brain emulations, or any other sci-fi staple. The less human the future is, though, the less I trust my analysis or even the general concept of democracy to be applicable. It’s also conceivable that there will be only be a short window of time between complete automation and the world becoming a pretty much unrecognizably post-human fever dream. In that case, my analysis of the impact of complete automation might only apply to a brief (but still potentially consequential) moment in history. ↩︎

I can also see at least a couple ways that complete automation could bolster democracy. First, by dramatically increasing economic output, complete automation could reduce elite fears about redistribution. If there are strongly diminishing returns on pie, then, when the size of a pie grows, the difference between the value of eating the whole pie and the value of eating half-the-pie shrinks. In a subjective sense, then, elites in a wealthy world may have less to lose from wealth redistribution.

Second, automation might make it easier to “lock in” democratic insitutions. If you can automate much of the work involved in enforcing the law, counting votes correctly, and so on, then it may become much easier to safeguard these institutions against future meddling. On the other hand, by the same logic, automation might also make it easier to “lock in” dictatorial institutions. ↩︎

I feel conflicted about exactly how likely the survival of democracy is. Still, I think it’s a good habit to attach numbers to your predictions, so I’ll try to say something more precise.

Let’s suppose that one thousand years from now individual people still at least sort of exist, with a population of at least one million, and still largely govern themselves. I think, then, that there is something like a 4-in-5 chance that the portion of people living under a proper democracy will be substantially lower than it is today. For reference, depending on how you draw the line, between ten and fifty percent of people currently live under a proper democracy.

The main thing driving my prediction is the observation that democracy is very rare historically. If the recent wave of democratization is mostly a cultural phenomenon, which doesn’t reflect some deeper form of economic determinism, then historical analogies suggest that we should expect the wave to crest eventually. We’ll probably regress back toward the cultural baseline sometime in the next thousand years. If the wave does reflect a kind of economic determinism, on the other hand, then it’s not clear what we should predict. There are some at least vaguely plausible stories we can tell in which automation seriously harms democracy. These particular stories might turn out to be speculative nonsense, of course, but even if we dismiss them as such, I don’t think we can trust future economic changes to support democracy. At best, I think, we could suppose that the odds of a net positive impact and the odds of a net negative impact are roughly even.

[[EDIT: After some reflection, 4-in-5 feels too high to me. For a mix of reasons, some raised in the comment section, I'll now give 65% as my mostly made-up credence.]] ↩︎