New Orleans A political science professor at NYU, Adam Przeworski, has a disturbing theory about democracies, their stability, and their sustainability, which has gained increasing prominence. If he’s right, and there’s a lot of evidence that he’s got a point, even if he’s a bit off the mark, then none of us can assume that democracy and its institutions are set in concrete in any country, including the United States.
Prevailing theories had held that once countries established democratic norms through a number of election cycles and successful transitions of power, then democracy would be set in stone. Przeworski looking at more modern experience has applied a sort of game theory to political practice.
In a New York Times profile running before the election, his views are easily extracted:
Over decades of research, Przeworski developed a theory that has become part of the bedrock of political science: that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections — because that’s the way to maximize their self-interest over time.
To create those conditions, Przeworski found, it is crucial for the stakes of power to remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods — such as coups — of reversing it. That means winners of elections need to act with restraint: They can’t “grab too much” and make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. “When these conditions are satisfied,” Przeworski told me, “then democracy works.”
But the events of recent years suggest that even “working” democracies can be far more fragile than was once believed. Przeworski, long a voice of optimism, once believed that it would be essentially impossible for a democracy like the United States to collapse. But today, not only does he see real reason for concern about the health of American democracy, he said in a recent interview, he does not see an obvious way to protect it from being weakened further.
Events like January 6th in the US and the current efforts to call the election into question even before the ballots are counted underpin this theory, as does the similar chaos after the last election in Brazil. The autocracy in Hungary and similar attempts in Poland, the retreat in Tunisia, Indonesia, India, Venezuela, and others all make the list. The rise of far right parties and tendencies across Europe also feed into these fears for democracies.
Trump and both his committed mass base and self-interested million and billionaires seem to calculate advantages now in chaos, rather than institutions. The Supreme Court has diluted the balance of powers that provided a guardrail in the rule of law. The polarity and partisan divisions in Congress fit the pattern.
We can’t allow democracy to see as one more game without rules. It’s up to all of us to make sure that is not allowed to happen.