Elections are not the whole of democracy

It is tempting to measure democracy by a single event: did the election happen, and was the count honest? Those questions matter enormously. But an election is the last step in a long chain, and it can be emptied of meaning by what happens earlier.

The conditions behind the vote

The political scientist Robert Dahl, in his 1971 book PolyarchyPolyarchyRobert Dahl's term for real-world democracies that meet a set of institutional conditions, from free elections to free expression.↗, set out conditions that a working democracy requires beyond the vote itself: freedom of expression, access to alternative sources of information, the freedom to form associations, and inclusive citizenship.¹ Remove any one of them and the ballot still exists, but the choice it records becomes less free.

What erodes first

Rarely are elections simply cancelled. More often the surrounding conditions weaken. Independent media become harder to sustain. Civil society organisations face new burdens. The bodies that run and supervise elections lose their independence. Each step can be defended on its own terms; the cumulative effect is a vote that happens on schedule and decides less.

An election is the last step in a long chain, and it can be emptied of meaning by what happens earlier.

A better question

Instead of asking only whether an election was free on the day, ask whether the months before it allowed a real contest: could opponents organise, speak and be heard, and could voters find out what was at stake? That is the democratic question in full.

Sources & notes

1. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (Yale University Press, 1971). ↩