Rethinking Democracy?

This chapter addresses two final questions. First, what are the specific and more general perspectives of the democracies we studied in terms of implementation of the two democratic values? The three patterns developed in Chapter 8 cover almost all the existing empirical possibilities in Europe. Moreover, the external challenges faced by democracies in the early twenty-first century directly affect not only the goods to be delivered (possibly a mix of freedoms and equalities) but also resilience and de-consolidation. We can accept action in defence of rights and institutions and the limits of protest lie in the fact that the related actions cannot violate existing laws. A parallel question is how much the repeal of constraints, legal or of another sort, on the incumbent authorities can be pushed. No doubt, interinstitutional accountability is the necessary cornerstone of a working democracy. Second, what could we do to promote a better, doable, reasonable implementation of the two values? The formula of pursuing broader social cooperation would recall neo-corporatist past solutions, today unfeasible, but still appears as the right social recipe that has not yet been overcome. As seen in Chapter 8, we have to restate that there is a close connection between interinstitutional accountability and protection of freedoms, and, although indirectly, of equalities. Among the rights, the most important one in a democracy is the right to vote, which is grounded on other freedoms that concur to form the voter’s own political opinion. The commitment to combat different forms of disinformation needs to continue in order to provide further meaningfulness to the right to vote. Finally, to craft solid majorities in favour of the strengthening of the welfare state beyond the protection of poverty, we do need to promote a European Union able to complement national and European solidarities.

Domestic Explanations: Inequalities

The most salient empirical results can be summed up in a few points. First, despite the complexities and necessary distinctions, the consensual democracies with coordinated economies tend to have redistributive policy solutions and to correct inequalities. Second, the salience of the migration issue derives either from the consequences of the economic crisis (Italy, Spain, and France) or from basic ideological orientations (Poland). Third, with the Great Recession, the presence of new parties and populist parties became a distinguishing aspect of our six countries. Greater dissatisfaction and the growth of the new protest parties pushed the incumbent leaders to be more responsive. Fourth, we distinguish between a revendicative populism (leftist or inclusionary) and an identitarian populism (rightist or exclusionary). Identitarian populism mainly prevailed in Poland—but has a specific salience also in other countries: from France, with the Front National, to Italy with the League of Salvini, the United Kingdom with UKIP and also with Boris Johnson, and, to a more limited extent, Germany with AfD, and lastly Spain with Vox. Revendicative populism became politically and electorally relevant where the economic crisis was felt most, as Southern European democracies. Fifth, the relationship between the vote of the left parties (moderate and radical) and the trend of inequality shows a rather random connection. It is possible to identify a few patterns in the six countries. Finally, the connection between protest movements and the related institutionalization is different from case to case, with Germany, the United Kingdom, and Poland, where there are no relevant social movements.

How to Grasp the Key Democratic Transformations

This chapter provides the theoretical framework for the following comparative analysis. For the two democratic values, equality and freedom, the author proposes the justification, definition, specific subdimensions, and the main empirical questions to be addressed in the subsequent chapters. This also allows giving the necessary references to the literature on the two topics and has helped to provide the theoretical framework and develop the empirical analysis. To translate the two notions into empirically detectable concepts, equality and freedom were broken out into more dimensions. For equality, they are economic equality, social equality, ethnic equality. For freedom, they are personal dignity, civil rights, and political rights. The research design and the background approach are also briefly sketched.

External Explanations

When checking the influence of European Union empirically, as for inequalities, first, the amount of resources which are devoted to cohesion policy is still negligible. Second, looking at the effects of the crisis and the impact of austerity measures, compounded by significant reforms of the EMU institutional architecture, the six countries under examination were affected to different degrees. Germany was mostly immune to the crisis, and Poland even experienced sustained growth during the crisis years. As a non-member of the Eurozone, the UK was affected by the crisis but retained its monetary sovereignty, and its commitment to austerity with a decline in social protection, healthcare and education cannot be directly traced to EU-level commitments. France avoided a significant overhaul of its welfare system, while Spain and Italy experienced a contraction, especially in the sectors of healthcare and education. As for freedoms, in the case of the possible ‘trade-off’ between the need to guarantee security in the face of domestic and international terrorism and citizens’ right to privacy, the middle ground established by the current EU ‘Privacy Shield’ paradigm leaves several problems unsolved. Moreover, it is essential to mention that the mechanism put in place by Article 7 of the Treaty on the European Union to sanction possible violations of those values and principles, has not been sufficient to stop the current democratic backslides in some member states, notably Poland and Hungary. To sum up, the new scenario seems to depict a more nuanced predominance of the transnational provisions in terms of European freedoms and a reshaping of the domestic-European balance.

Freedoms

Freedoms include personal dignity, civil rights, and political rights. For personal dignity, when considering violence perpetrated by police, there is a significant improvement until the very beginning of the twenty-first century, with the strengthening of existing institutions and the creation of new ones. Later, the index of Amnesty International displays the growth of State violence, mainly in 2015–17. As regards civil rights, a national movement is less affected than foreign movement. Especially in Poland, freedoms of movement protection have suffered the most from the recent change to some constitutional rules. Moreover, all countries—but especially France and the UK—saw restrictions on freedoms of mobility due to a set of administrative measures aimed at preventing terrorism. The protection of freedom of religion is stable. Finally, citizens continue to experience limitations to economic freedom. As for political rights, they were affected by the decline of the freedom of the press. The right to citizenship was affected by the waves of migration and the rise of international terrorism. These phenomena brought about defensive reactions and paved the way for a broad and easily politicized opposition to the extension of the rights to political participation and citizenship for people with foreign origins. Poland shows the most worrying deterioration, notably in terms of fundamental rights. There is relative stability in all other cases with lower and higher results. However, when considering all the freedoms, the critical aspect of putting at the core of our analysis is timing.

Demand and Supply

In analysing attitudes and perceptions of people and political party proposals, and how we can lay the bases for searching the explanations of characteristics and level of implementation of our two values, first, we recall one of the key findings discussed in this chapter: the changes, the levels, the characteristics of the demand and elite supply of the two values are highly context- and time-dependent. Citizens’ demands and party supply are dependent on the historical trajectory and the economic situation. This partial finding shows that in the middle and long run there is a steady consistency between people’s attitudes and leader actions, on the one hand, and social, economic, cultural reality, on the other. Consequently, the requests for equality and freedom are consistent with the existing socio-economic-cultural reality. A second remark is a difference in terms of volatility/resilience between attitudes and realities. The demand and party supply of equality and freedom can be more or less volatile as reactions to the changes and uncertainties brought about by the economic situation, or other factors, such as technological changes, industrial organization developments, working conditions changes, economic mobility and the whole existing structure of external opportunities. Finally, up to now, the empirical evidence suggests that the demand for implementation of the two values seems to follow different logic and different paths. What this discussion and the related findings are pointing to is also the responsiveness seen from a more realistic perspective.

Inequalities

Equality is a multidimensional concept. As regards economic aspects, there is a trend towards more inequality in most countries. Italy and Spain perform worse than the other countries, while France and Germany do better. Poland shows a trend towards more equality since early on in this century. Expenditures on health and education decrease in Italy and Spain with the onset of the crisis. The United Kingdom shows a sharply declining trend in education, a more moderate but still declining expenditure on social protection and more recent decline in health as well, which once was the pride of that system. Thus, overall it is becoming slightly more unequal over time. The economic crisis has been bringing about changes regarding equality in some countries, but less in others. Under conditions of economic recession in the advanced economies, social rights are partially protected through ‘automated stabilisers’. Moreover, when measures of social protection were intensified, this sometimes also entailed a reduction in expenditures for ‘softer’ aspects, such as health and education. As for ethnic aspects, immigration has remained stable over time. Consequently, ethnic equality has not changed seriously. Poland is an exception: especially after 2012 the acceptance of immigration sharply declined. When matching the six countries on the three kinds of inequality, the results are mixed. There is some inconsistency between a form of equality and another one within the same country.

Domestic Explanations: Freedoms

When explaining the trends and level of the three freedoms, the role of the rule of law with regards to governmental effectiveness, the control of corruption, and the compliance of public order with fundamental rights should be considered. Besides, there is the paradox of more information and less freedom and the paradox of more rules and less freedom. We also focused on economic freedom, freedom of religious association, freedom of movement, and improvement of protection of dignity because of the modernization of the judicial systems and the prisons. Moreover, the wave of technological development did not translate into an improvement of individual freedoms, especially for privacy protection, freedom to access information, and freedom of movement. The media and pluralism of information are considered critical in helping individuals to make conscious choices and ensuring the possibility of shedding light on rulers’ behaviour and filling the gap between the asymmetry of information that marks the hiatus between rulers and ruled. Despite the undeniable advantage of being provided with a potentially infinite range of information and being able to access a spectacular plurality of sources of information, citizens easily fall victim to what is now labelled as fake news. Overall, the Web is ill-prepared to cope with the risks of the biased information available on the Internet. Freedoms seem to be running the risk of being subverted by the overwhelming availability of data and information if a sound plural and institutionally embedded system of media pluralism is not in place.

Is There a Comprehensive Explanation?

Thinking over the empirical results, discussed in the previous chapters, we have to acknowledge that there is no direct intertwining between the freedoms and equalities when checking the domestic and external explanations. At the same time, the immediate and strong tension that also emerges in our analysis of freedoms concerns the contradictory demands of citizens about achieving security to cope with terrorism, with security that comes first. When reflecting on the data presented in the previous chapters, we can single out three patterns. The first is balanced democracy, characterized by the attempt of implementing both freedoms and equalities. The second is protest democracy, where the more substantial attention to equality is complemented by different possible types of protest, of a revendicative kind, a weak rule of law and inter-institutional accountability. The third is unaccountable democracy, where there may be relatively higher equality, complemented by weaker freedoms and above all the absence or the weakening of inter-institutional guardians who were relevant in establishing democracy. Corruption may be present along the lower side of the triangle to reinforce both patterns. The last part of the chapter proposes an overview of the literature about the questions addressed in the book. However, as in the published literature, there is no empirical work that addresses our questions, but works that address similar questions concerning equality only, freedom only or also the entire democratic regime.