How Democracy Ends

Abstract

In recent years, the debate over the loss of quality or the reversal of liberal democracies has strengthened. Yasha Mounk (2018), one of the main scholars of this agenda, considers that in several countries the enthusiasm for democracy has decreased, and that this can be seen from the low turnout in elections or the decline in confidence in institutions. The election of Donald Trump in the USA contributed to a greater debate on democratic reversal. An example of this is the bestseller How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018), arguing that democracies would be losing quality or failing with the election of populist governments. There is no convergence between scholars. Norris (2017), for example, argues that there is no robust empirical evidence that civil and political rights have deteriorated in western democracies. The book How Democracy Ends by David Runciman – professor in the Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge University – participates in this debate. Although it does not develop an open debate with the aforementioned authors (since everyone is practically writing at the same time), the book makes clear Runciman’s knowledge of the agenda in question. First published in 2018 in the UK, the work is divided into four chapters and aims to discuss what the author considers the main current threats to democracies. The main criticism that the book brings to contemporary studies on how democracy can fail is that scholars tend to see the end of democracy as a setback or a relapse. Runciman argues that history does not go back, and that is why democracy never returns to what it was before. In addition, studies generally look at experiences from the historical past as a parameter to explain what could cause the collapse of a current democracy. One of the main criticisms developed by Runciman in the book is that, although democratic institutions can maintain themselves, the expected results and guarantees may not be the