The nature of a crisis

Article by Vision Team 

"Freedom is not a free space; freedom is participation." A reflection on the nature of a crisis that nobody seems to deny – the crisis of liberal democracies can start by paraphrasing Giorgio Gaber’s words in 1973. It is worth noting that "freedom" and "democracy" are not synonymous and can, in fact, diverge. Nevertheless, the idea that citizens exercise sovereignty presumes, as the fundamental principle of democracy, that they actively “participate in the organization of the country” and that the State removes the obstacles to “the development of the human person" that is a prerequisite to participation (as for the words of the Italy’s Constitution).

Today, there is an enormous novelty affecting both participation and development of “persons”. It is technology that is challenging the forms of participation envisaged by the generations who wrote Constitutions; and technology can perhaps solve the problem that it itself created.

The reality of democracy’s crisis is evident not so much in the rise of so-called populist parties (it is not inherently clear that adjusting the political agenda to the people’s demands is undemocratic) but in the thirty-year relationship between countries' levels of democracy and their growth rates.

Several prestigious institutions assess how democratic a country is, or, more precisely, its alignment with a parliamentary and typically liberal model of democracy—invented by the English dating back to 1689. The Economist identifies that only 24 of 190 countries as "full democracies" and indicates a steady decline in the number of liberal democracies. More importantly, over the past three decades, a negative correlation has emerged between the level of democracy and GDP growth rate. In other words, the more democratic a country is, the less it grows—a finding that holds true for both developing and already developed countries.

This evidence suggests that democracy might carry an economic cost, and European leaders seem resigned to this reality. As then-European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker remarked, “We know exactly what to do to fix our economies, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we’ve done it.”

However, if we extend the analysis beyond the last thirty years, the trend reverses. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, democracies proliferated, proving themselves more capable than autocratic rivals (such as Nazism and later communism) of generating wealth and distributing it equitably. This outcome contrasts sharply with the period since 1989, when the liberal democracy model was seemingly definitively triumphant.

For two centuries, democracies held an economic advantage due to an informational edge. Unlike scientific socialism, democracies more effectively incorporate the needs, opinions, and individual intelligences of the populace into decisions that affect everyone. This informational advantage is the core issue of democracy’s crisis—one that often tries to understand its essence by chasing its myriad symptoms (in nations as disparate as Austria, Italy, and the United States) goes unaddressed.

Today, democracy has lost this advantage because information (and therefore power) has been radically reallocated by the technological revolution such as the invention of the printing press.

Technology (the invention of internet and AI) has rendered obsolete the participation mechanisms (in Gaber’s sense), necessitating the invention of new ones. Estonia has used electronic voting for decades, greatly reducing voting costs. In Switzerland, direct democracy—used even for issues like abolishing banking secrecy—demonstrates that referendums are not all as problematic as the infamous Brexit vote. In cities like Vancouver and Melbourne, citizen involvement in public works planning has increased public support and improved project quality. Countries and cities that employ more varied participation channels beyond mere elections—such as Canada, Estonia, Australia, and Switzerland—are also among those with the highest quality of life.

Technology, by reallocating information, transforms the way power is acquired, exercised, and restrained. Just as what happened with Gutenberg leading us to the downfall of monarchies and the modern era, the internet demands a change in how we transform individual intelligences into political decisions. This issue can no longer be deferred by pretending that we are merely victims of national crises. And viewing the crisis in isolation fails to form a coherent theory of current events, let alone point to a potential solution. While technology is eroding the democracy we have, it may also serve as the leverage to develop a more advanced form of democracy.

References:

The Economist (2024). Democracy Index: conflict and polarisation drive a new low for global democracy. Link.