Democratic Governance and the Performance of Democracy

Today the world celebrates the International Day of Democracy, highlighting the universality of democratic principles and human aspirations that those principles embody. The UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon put it well in his message for today, “Let us recognize that democratic governance is a yearning shared and voiced by people the world over. Democracy is a goal in its own right, and an indispensable means for achieving development for all humankind.”

But what exactly does democratic governance mean? What makes democracies endure and deliver to their people? In this Feature Service article, Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, answers those crucial questions. He notes that the growing incidence of democratic breakdowns around the world is related to problems with the quality of democratic institutions beyond elections. They include functioning legislative, checks and balance on the executive power, independent judiciary, rule of law and many other facets of democracy that citizens want to experience in their daily life. If the quality of those institutions is poor, democracies will not perform well, they will not engender trust and confidence of their citizens, and thus will be prone to breakdowns.

There is also an important economic component to the performance of democracy. There is plenty of evidence that once democracy is established in a country, the richer the country, the lower is the probability that democracy will fail. The rationale for that is simple: if democracies consistently do not deliver prosperity to their citizens, they again fail to engender public trust and confidence.

Larry Diamond concludes, “There is a common, core problem in all badly governed democracies: pervasive corruption, cronyism, clientelism, and abuse of power. To change the way government works means changing the way politics and society work, and changing the values and expectations of how people will behave when they acquire power and control over resources.”

Article at a Glance

  • Good economic performance helps to sustain democracies and bad economic performance undermines them.
  • Citizens’ support for democracy and satisfaction with the way democracy is working is key for democratic persistence.
  • If democracy is to deliver to its people, it needs a comprehensive system of overlapping checks and balances to monitor, constrain, expose, and punish the abuse of power.

Published Date: September 15, 2010