The US is no longer the world’s longest consistent democracy


Politicians in the US (and many ordinary Americans) like to boast about how this country is the greatest and the oldest continuing democracy. The former claim has always been dubious since from the beginning the country has gone out of its way to limit the right to vote to a favored class: first by not giving Blacks and women to vote, then by placing restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests that excluded the poor, and to this date seeking to find novel ways to discourage poor and minority communities from voting by making them jump through various hoops and by gerrymandering electoral districts so that the elected representatives are not representative of the electorate.

Democracy has always been a vague and slippery concept. Whether a country is one or not depends upon how one defines it. Since claiming to be one carries significant moral heft, many countries want to have that label so it is often defined self-servingly so that people of a particularly country can claim that it is one, even if in practice it falls far short.

But how about the second claim, that it is the longest consistent democracy? That claim depends upon when one considers that the US became a democracy. Even if one lets pass the claim that it became a democracy in 1776 or even 1800 despite its major shortcomings, more objective observers claim that in recent times it ceased to be so for a while and instead became what is known as a ‘anocracy’, a state falling short of. democracy.

Barbara Walter, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego, and a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations, explains that an anocracy lies somewhere between a democracy and an autocracy, and describes the differences between the three.

“The first was what we call anocracy, and that’s just a fancy term for a country that’s neither fully democratic nor fully autocratic. Some people call it partial democracy. Fareed Zakaria has called it illiberal democracy, but those are the countries that tended to be most likely to experience civil war. Turns out that if you’re a full liberal democracy, you don’t tend to experience civil war. If you’re a full autocracy, you’re also at lower risk of civil war. It’s those countries in the middle that experience violence. The second factor, and this turns out to be even more important is whether in these weakening partial democracies, citizens begin to organize themselves politically, not around ideology, but around identity. So they start forming ethnic or religious political parties, or racially based parties with the goal of gaining power so that they can essentially exclude everyone else. So you could imagine I’m sitting in a conference room in Washington, D.C., and we’re talking about Ukraine or we’re talking about Iraq, and I’m watching as the US’s democracy is declining and we know that it has declined in the last 5 years. It was first downgraded in 2016 because of elections that were deemed not entirely fair. It was downgraded again in 2019 as a result of the refusal by the executive branch to answer subpoenas.

[T]he Center for Systemic Peace, a nonprofit organization that every year gives countries a measure of the quality of their democracy. By the end of the Trump administration, the United States was downgraded to an anocracy for the first time since 1800. And so the United States is no longer considered the world’s longest consistent democracy. That honor now goes to Switzerland.

Switzerland is now the world’s oldest consistent democracy? How dare they! Clearly it is time to invade that usurping country.

Listen to the full interview

The Center for Systemic Peace, the body that makes these determinations, is partially funded by the US government which puts its impartiality in doubt. The fact that even it has lowered the US’s rating makes that all the more significant.

For the past twenty-five years, CSP/INSCR data resources, such as Polity, have been generously supported with funding from the US Government (through association with the Political Instability Task Force, PITF); that financial support was terminated on 29 February 2020. Beginning with the year 2019 annual updates, updated CSP/INSCR data resources will be embargoed until a new funding mechanism is implemented.

NOTE: The USA dropped below the “democracy threshold” (+6) on the POLITY scale in 2020 and was considered an anocracy (+5) at the end of the year 2020; the USA score for 2021 returned to democracy (+8).

You can read their 2016 State Fragility Index for all countries, based on 14 criteria. The larger the number, the more fragile a democracy it is, with the best score being zero. There are 23 countries with that score. The US score is three.

Comments

  1. says

    I prefer the term “pseudo-democracy” since it didn’t just wind up there by accident; it was constructed to deceive and “pseudo” seems to me to capture that better.

  2. mnb0 says

    Why Switzerland? Apparently not because of universal suffrage; in the canton Appenzell Innerrhoden women only received suffrage in 1990. Then it would be New Zealand, 1893. Btw in the USA women can only vote since 1920, after several more countries.
    Are we talking restricted suffrage then England and Scotland were already democracies before the USA became independent.
    Also Switzerland had a civil war in 1847.
    So this analysis is quite nonsensical and quite representative for the poor knowledge and understanding of non-American politics.

  3. Pierce R. Butler says

    Let’s step out ahead of the trend and launch a groundbreaking Anocratic Party!

  4. Tethys says

    I would say the oldest democracy is Iceland. Switzerland was ruled by Popes until well into the modern age.

  5. jrkrideau says

    @ 2 mnb0

    I’d go for Iceland but its intermittent independence/non state situation makes this dicy to someone like me who knows almost nothing of Islandic history.

    Are we talking restricted suffrage then England and Scotland were already democracies before the USA became independent.

    No idea about Switzerland but I’d vote for England—UK since establishing the primacy of Parliament by chopping off Charles I’s head.

  6. tuatara says

    Sorry, but humans had effective democracy long before the Greeks “invented” it.

    Aboriginal society enjoyed a widespread egalitarian ethos based on the rule of law not of men. All adults could have a say on any important matter. Conflict certainly occurred but not as wars over land. Land was locked into each persons identity, and could never be “owned”, so war over territory was simply unthinkable. Every adult had responsibilities for maintaining the health of the land and the society,. These responsibilities were encoded in the dreamtime laws (individual responsibility for the collective is obvious really in a society of shared “ownership”).

    Pre-colonial Aboriginal society comprised of over 200 “nations” or language groups spanning thousands of kilometers, yet remarkably all had a common basis of law in the dreamtime.

    An interesting resource that explains it in a way a “Western” mind might understand (it is instinctive to me as part of my life experience so personally I dont need to see someone elses explanation of it to know how it works)
    https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-first-australian-democracy/

    I also highly recommend the film Tanna https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanna_(film) An open-minded watch of this will help non-indigenous people glimpse a little of the strength and beauty of these people. We must allow them to continue their ways. We will need them as our guides.

    Of course, many indigenous Americans also practised democtratic governance long before the nation of ancient Greece was even formed.

    The USA is a pretend democracy, as are most modern nations who call themselves democracies. In fact, modern nations whose legal systems are based soecifically on British law are plutocracies, with a few autocratic-type plutocraces thrown in for good measure.

    Remember, most modern nations are founded on the principle best expressed thus. “Under British law, alienation of property rights is total and in perpetuity.” -- Sir Douglas Graham. Minister of Justice of New Zealand (1990–1999)

  7. birgerjohansson says

    I am told that the peoples of Botswana (I hesitate to use the word “tribes” as it is associated with the assumption of people being “primitive”) practised such a form of ur-democracy. And it made the transition to independence more smooth. In former colonies where the state was built purely on colonial structures being inherited by locals, independence too often led to runaway corruption often followed by military dictatorship.
    .
    NB -former African kingdoms were *not* some kind of ur-demicracies, but autocracies. For instance the Zulu kings were a nasty lot.

  8. antaresrichard says

    Switzerland? Uh oh, now I’m reminded of Harry Lime’s infamous “Cuckoo clock” speech in ‘The Third Man’ (1949)!

    😉

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