Since 1911, democratic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide – there are now more democracies than any other system, and even authoritarian tyrannies find it expedient to ape at least the outward symbolism of democratic forms, via rigged elections and life presidencies.
As the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, and then the Arab Spring demonstrated, popular support for democracy and freedom of speech is not exceptional: it exists and is expressed everywhere where it is not actively suppressed. Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it – but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent. If enough people get angry they can vote the bums out, and the bums will go – you don’t need to hold a civil war.
Unfortunately there are problems with democracy. In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years: if a project doesn’t come to fruition within their time in office, it’s less than useful to them. Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies, or disciplined radical parties that simply refuse to negotiate. The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents – such as responses to climate instability or resource shortages or new communications media. Finally, representative democracy scales up badly – on the largest scales, those of national governments with populations in the tens to hundreds of millions, it tends towards voter apathy and alienation from the process of government – a pervasive sense that “voting doesn’t change anything” – because individual voters are distant from their representatives. Questionable e-voting technologies with poor anonymization or broken audit capabilities don’t help, of course.
Nor are governments as important as they used to be. National governments are constrained by external treaties – by some estimates, up to two-thirds of primary legislation in the UK has its origins in EU directives or WTO and WIPO trade treaties. Even the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
Ultimately, a lot of the decision-making power of government in the 21st century is pushed down a level, to civil service committees and special interest groups: and so we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability. At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
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Note that while democratic governments have trouble thinking long term beyond the "electoral event horizon", corporations also have trouble seeing beyond the quarterly and yearly reporting horizons. And us individuals are changing jobs more often so we have difficulty planning beyond the 2 yearly job change cycle. We're living in a short term world.
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