If democracy is going to flourish on this planet, its practitioners must come to see themselves as members of the same team.

Unfortunately, global democracy is a field divided. And not primarily by country or language—the biggest divide is by type. Democratic activists, experts, and reformers often are fierce partisans of just one of several competing sub-fields: electoral democracy, deliberative democracy (focusing on randomly selected citizens studying tough issues), participatory democracy (where people might set a local budget or make a plan, at official invitation), direct democracy (initiative and referendum), or digital democracy (using online environments like Decidim or vTaiwan).

I routinely experience this dynamic firsthand. I’ve been a convener of global forums on direct democracy since 2008, and have been excluded or dismissed from gatherings looking at participatory or deliberative forms of democracy. After I took a fellowship at an institute that encourages new thinking on deliberative democracy, two supporters of my direct democracy work accused me of betrayal; one stopped talking to me.

This democratic divide, and how to bridge it, is the subject of a smart and urgent new white paper, “From Waves to Ecosystems: The Next Stage of Democratic Innovation,” authored by a leading democracy practitioner and thinker. Josh Lerner is co-executive director of People Powered, a global hub for communities, organizations, researchers, and funders seeking to improve democracy. His paper was commissioned by the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Ithaca Initiative, a new civil discourse program at the University of Delaware.

“Most pro-democracy movements focus on defending elections. Others call for innovations in direct, deliberative, or participatory democracy. Champions of each approach have claimed that their solution alone will deliver real democracy,” writes Lerner, before adding:

“There is, however, no one way to fix democracy.”

One problem is that most of the money spent on developing democracy is swallowed up by elections, even though elections, he writes, “have generally not resulted in equal political power or government by the people.”

In our era, he adds, elected governments increasingly exploit elections to establish minority rule, with economic elites maintaining outsized influence. Elections also “attract and put in power people who rate as more narcissistic and psychopathic than average, people who too often exploit their position for personal gain.” As a result, majorities of people in electoral democracies around the world tell pollsters that “their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed.”

Instead of system reform, however, democracies double down on elections. Lerner writes: “We are pouring so much money and time into elections that other democratic practices are pushed to the sidelines, marginal and disconnected.”

That disconnection leaves them competing for small amounts of attention and funding. Different types of democracy have enjoyed waves of popularity. Direct democracy grew rapidly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and participatory democracy became fashionable amid the turmoil of the 1960s and again in the 1990s with the creation of participatory budgeting in Brazil. Today, many democratic practitioners are riding a “deliberative wave” that focuses on using lotteries to create assemblies of everyday citizens to make decisions.

But the waves have retarded broader democratic development. Lerner writes: “Each wave’s advocates become so focused on their goals that they often dismiss other approaches…. Waves lead to groupthink. Each wave becomes top-heavy with big expectations that it will change everything and be the one solution we’ve been waiting for.

“No single kind of democracy works well for all our decisions… What if all of these democratic approaches are limited individually but more effective together? What if we could balance the weaknesses of one model with the strengths of another?”

Lerner, striking an optimistic note, sees an “emerging next stage” that involves “weaving different democratic practices into balanced democratic ecosystems.”

Why ecosystems? Because successful ecosystems are diverse, interconnected, and dynamic, with lots of species. “Healthy ecosystems change over time to remain resilient as conditions and needs fluctuate,” Lerner writes.

For example, assemblies and direct democracy don’t work well for tricky budget decisions in a fiscal crisis, but the participatory budgeting process does. Deliberative democracy’s citizens’ assemblies work well for producing proposals on difficult issues (like abortion in Ireland). But for legitimacy, all voters—not just the small assembly—should decide whether to adopt such a proposal as the actual law, via a direct democracy referendum.

What would a healthy democratic ecosystem look like? Lerner points to Paris, which has experimented with different combinations of democratic practice. There, an elected city council is working together with a deliberative, and permanent, citizens’ assembly of randomly selected Parisians on big topics like homelessness. And the deliberative assembly, chosen by sortition, works with a participatory budgeting process on how to spend 100 million Euros annually on city improvements.

Lerner says that, instead of competing with one another, advocates of different democratic processes should build bridges, and share a common infrastructure of support (translation, staff, technology). Then they can focus on their “common enemy”—authoritarian regimes and funders of anti-democratic work.

But it’s not enough to defend the current system against such forces, writes Lerner. Democracy needs a “just transition”—a phrase he deliberately borrows from the climate movement—to this much more robust and varied ecosystem.

“What if instead of solely defending elections, we also offered something better—a broader system of democracy that gave people a more meaningful voice?” Lerner writes. “This transition will not be easy. Like for climate change, it will require changing mindsets, jobs, skills, and everyday practices.”

It also requires more urgency. Democratic practitioners love experiments and pilots, but those are too slow. “We have toyed with alternatives while the ice caps and our trust in democracy melt away…. Authoritarian regimes are wreaking havoc faster than our efforts to counterattack them.”

In other words, we need not just new systems of democracy but new ecosystems. And we need them now.

The post Democracy Advocates Should Stop Fighting About Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What makes a country great?

Great cities.

That is a lesson the United Kingdom once knew well. Britain reached its imperial heights in the late 19th century in part because its municipalities were growing into some of the world’s most productive cities.

None better symbolized British greatness than Birmingham, a manufacturing powerhouse in the West Midlands. In 1890, Harper’s Magazine called it the “best-governed city in the world,” and with good reason. Birmingham provided novel services for its people, including free libraries and museums, free education for all children, modern sanitation and affordable housing, street lighting, a municipal bank, and support for the poor.

The spirit of Birmingham was often expressed by the popular nonconformist preacher George Dawson, and two of his parishioners who became mayor—Joseph Chamberlain and his son Neville, who is better remembered for his later failures as a prime minister. The preacher and the Chamberlains evangelized for urban reform, advancing a philosophy called “The Civic Gospel,” the idea that great municipalities offer the best chance for human flourishing.

“A town,” Dawson once said, “is a solemn organism through which shall flow, and in which shall be shaped, all the highest, loftiest and truest ends of man’s moral nature.”

Today, the Civic Gospel is preached by city leaders worldwide, especially in the globally ambitious metros of Vienna, Mexico City, Seoul, and Tokyo, where governments pride themselves on pursuing cutting-edge, humanity-advancing improvements in democratic participation, environmentalism, the arts, and social policy.

But these days you won’t hear the Civic Gospel in its home city—or home country. When you ask municipal experts what the world’s best governed cities are today, you’ll get an earful about Barcelona and Bogota, but you’ll hear nothing about Britain. U.K. cities are too busy struggling just to survive.

Birmingham, still the second most populous U.K. city, with more than 1.1 million people, now draws notice as a cautionary tale. In September 2023, it became yet another British city to declare fiscal insolvency—one of eight in the past six years. Birmingham’s bankruptcy is blamed on cuts in national budgets, economic struggles, and two massive governance mistakes: an IT project that went £80 million over budget, and a failure to respond to equal pay claims by female city workers now totaling more than £700m. Unable to pay its bills, Birmingham has suspended spending on arts, youth services, and assistance to families in crisis.

The sorry state of local self-governance is not often mentioned in reports about the upcoming July 4 elections in the U.K., which are widely expected to see the current Tory government replaced by Labour. But local stagnation is at the heart of the sense of frustration and crisis that prevails in Britain.

In the face of national failures—declining life expectancy, dropping real wages, and fiscal austerity—Britons are unable to turn to their local governments for solutions, because those local governments are too weak.

After the Second World War, Whitehall (the nickname for U.K.’s national government) stripped local governments of responsibilities, in areas from utilities to hospitals, and nationalized services in new ministries and institutions. Whitehall also repeatedly reorganized local governments and their jurisdiction, thus fragmenting local power and reducing local control in fiscal matters. The resulting centralization made London a global goliath, but diminished the wealth, influence, and public services of the country’s small and mid-size cities.

The imbalance has not gone unnoticed. Over the past 15 years, British governments have sought to boost regions and localities via various strategies—like “rebalancing the economy” and “Northern Powerhouse.” In 2019, the Tories running Britain announced a plan for “Levelling Up” weaker cities and regions and their people with greater aid, and even established a ministry to pursue it.

But these efforts have failed, because the approaches are top-down, directed by the national government. Indeed, the national “Levelling Up” department has dispensed cash for projects through a slow bidding process, orchestrated by consultants who charge local governments large fees for their assistance. The Economist, in calling the process “scattershot,” noted that 60 of the first 71 projects funded through Levelling Up were behind schedule.

Since “Levelling Up” became policy five years ago, economic disparities between rich and poor regions have actually widened. British cities and counties, have become beggars, asking for bailouts for in-demand services like homeless programs, child care, and adult care that they no longer can afford.

The challenge will get worse for the new government post-election. Of the 300-plus local governments in England alone, more than half say they will be in severe financial distress by next year. It’s not clear that any help is on the way. Labour has made vague promises to “Level Up” better than the Tories.

For now, Birmingham and other insolvent cities feel stuck.

The most promising path forward is for the national government to restore the local autonomy that once made Birmingham and other U.K. cities great. There have been small moves in this direction, with so-called “trailblazer” deals that allow some metro regions to establish their own elected chief executives.

But such devolution deals are full of limits on local control that are nutty as anything in the classic British government comedy, “Yes, Minister.” Among the ludicrous documents of so-called devolution are a “scrutiny protocol” listing all the ways the national government will watch over cities, and a 2022 Levelling Up White Paper laying out a complex four-tier regime for devolving power to cities.

What’s really needed, but so far not on offer, is a restoration of the fiscal autonomy and local freedom that allowed Birmingham to build a city so great it had its own gospel.

The post Why the U.K. Can’t ‘Level Up’ appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last year, while organizing a global democracy forum in Mexico, a member of that country’s national electoral court requested I add a speaker to our program: an American judge who was an expert in how elections work.

First, I contacted election lawyers, who told me they knew of no judges with such expertise. Then I called judges, eight leading U.S. jurists in all. Among this diverse group of judges were Republicans and Democrats, those who work at the state level and the federal level, in district courts and appellate courts.

Seven of the eight judges said they didn’t know of any U.S. judge who was an expert in elections either. They suggested that I instead invite a leading scholar of American election law—Richard Hasen of UCLA School of Law.

The eighth judge suggested I try a friend and judge on the East Coast who had handled some election cases. When I called up this jurist, he replied: “I’m no election expert. But hey, aren’t you in L.A.? Don’t you know Rick Hasen?”

My search turned out to be an endorsement of the brilliant Professor Hasen, whose new book A Real Right to Vote is well worth your time. But it was more than that, too. It was a lesson in just how clueless American judges are about politics and elections.

To redress that problem, California and the U.S. should follow the lead of other countries in the Western hemisphere and establish a separate, specialized court system for handling all election-related cases.

A dedicated election tribunal would produce judges with the deep knowledge that is increasingly essential as politically polarized Americans contest elections more frequently in the courts. Indeed, one prominent law scholar—yep, Hasen—has documented that election litigation nearly tripled since the 1990s.

But, as my search showed, election law expertise is hard to come by. That’s partly because most judges went to law school when the issue was not such a big concern, and partly because judges, seeking to avoid politics, rarely come to understand it on the job.

This means, unfortunately, that American elections are shaped by a judiciary with little knowledge of, or feel for, electoral politics. And it is precisely why the 2024 election season is a mess.

You can see judicial cluelessness about elections at work in all four ongoing criminal cases against Donald Trump. The former president and his savvy team have made mincemeat of judges, attacking them to score points with the Republican base and outmaneuvering them to create so many delays that it’s unlikely any case will go to trial before the November election.

A specialized court for elections also could save the U.S. Supreme Court from itself. The court’s justices are losing credibility because of perceived political bias in their decisions and public appearances. Most recently, the court’s conservative majority all but endorsed Trump’s delay strategy by agreeing to hear the former president’s plainly phony claim that former presidents are “absolutely” immune from this country’s laws.

But the Supreme Court’s bigger problem is that it is a citadel of election ignorance. Not one justice has ever been elected to political office, much less administered an election. No justice has a strong scholarly background in election law. Unsurprisingly, then, in their decisions, the Court consistently misunderstands the basics of our political and electoral systems.

Take its recent decision overturning Colorado’s move to ban Trump from the ballot because of his actions to overturn the 2020 election by corruption and violence. The decision was unanimous but also egregious. The justices both misread the plain text of the 14th Amendment, which bars insurrectionists from office and failed to understand basic democratic principles.

They took the bizarre, up-is-down position that states should not get to determine who gets to be on the ballot and serve as president—even though our entire electoral system is state-based. There are no national elections in this country; our presidential contests are really just 50 separate state elections.

It should frighten us that these nine democracy dimwits may well decide the outcome of a presidential election that promises to be close.

Many countries around the world have moved to redress this problem of judges’ lack of expertise and sophistication in contentious elections. Latin America, which has a long history of bitterly contested elections like the one we in the U.S. are experiencing now, has led the charge in trying to develop more judicial expertise and independence on election cases.

More than half of Latin American countries have established specialized electoral courts to handle election disputes. By now only three countries in the Americas—Argentina, Venezuela, and the U.S.—still give the decision-making power to their regular Supreme Court.

The electoral courts are not a panacea. Mexico’s has been dogged recently by internal conflict between its justices. But as Victor Hernández-Huerta, a Wake Forest University scholar of comparative and Latin American politics, writes in Election Law Journal, specialized courts develop expertise over time. And they have numerous benefits. Separate election courts can protect the reputation and independence of the regular court system by shielding it from the stains and strains of tackling controversial electoral questions.

Dedicated election judges also are accustomed to ruling quickly and efficiently under election time pressure, unlike the American judges in Trump’s cases, who keep delaying things to deal with unfamiliar questions.

Specialized electoral courts have produced particularly important successes when candidates or parties sought to overturn election results.

In Guatemala, in the face of threats of retaliation and prosecution, the country’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal intervened to keep Bernardo Arévalo, of the anti-corruption party Movimiento Semilla, on the 2023 presidential ballot when the ruling powers sought to disqualify him on dubious grounds. As a result, Arévalo won the election and managed to take office in January despite attempts at sabotage.

The Brazilian Electoral Court—a system that includes the national Tribunal Superior Eleitoral, along with regional electoral courts and boards—is widely considered the world’s best, because of its structural independence and its record. The court proved its mettle in 2022 when President Jair Bolsonaro made unfounded allegations of election fraud and sought to overturn the result. The electoral judges not only upheld the election but also held Bolsonaro accountable for “abuse of authority” by banning him from running for public office for eight years.

Last spring, I ended up taking all that judicial advice about Hasen and having him speak at the Mexico conference about how courts handle tricky questions of democracy. When I caught up with him recently, I asked whether he agreed with me that the U.S. needs its own separate electoral court. He said that I was “putting the cart before the horse.”

He pointed out that the countries with such courts also have national elections (unlike our state-based system) and national election administrative bodies. When I noted that the U.S. judicial branch does have special judges and courts on bankruptcy and immigration, Hasen pointed out that each of those areas has a federal body of law associated with it. That’s not yet true of elections.

“You’re asking me a graduate-level question,” he said of the idea of a specialized electoral court, “when we’re not even in kindergarten yet.”

The post America’s Judges Are Bungling the 2024 Election appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Please don’t save democracy.

If you’re a politician—stop promising to save it.

Please! Stop even trying.

Because you can’t. Democracy isn’t something you save. The sooner we stop talking about saving democracy, the better off democracy will be.

Our mindless recitation of “saving democracy”—everyone from President Biden to Sacha Baron Cohen has pledged to come to its rescue—demonstrates how little we understand about the governing systems that organize our lives.

To start, the words “democracy” and “save” don’t fit together.

Democracy is not a penalty shot that can be saved by a goalkeeper. Democracy is not a dollar that can be saved by putting it in the bank. Democracy is not a file that you can save in Microsoft Word.

Democracy is not even the migrant whom you save from drowning in the Mediterranean or the Rio Grande.

It’s easy to get confused about democracy’s meaning because we use the word “democracy” promiscuously. We use the word to refer to things we see in politics or government with which we agree. We use it to describe the status quo in countries that think of themselves as democracies.

We also use “democracy” to refer to our post-World War II liberal order, supposedly superior to all other systems, even though that order often protects military and corporate powers that undermine democracy. We use “democracy” to mean elections, even though many countries with autocracies stage elections. In the United States, we use “democracy” to refer to our 18th-century constitutional system—even though that system is profoundly anti-democratic, especially when it comes to the unbalanced representation in the Senate and our peculiar Electoral College.

After 18 years of reporting on and convening events about democracy around the world, I have found a better, more useful definition of democracy. Democracy is best understood as four words: Everyday people governing themselves.

When you think about democracy this way, you quickly realize that democracy isn’t something you save. It’s something you do—on your own and with other people. When people in your neighborhood or your city or your nation are doing the work of governing—deliberating, making decisions, implementing policies—you are in a democracy.

Thus, democracy is, quite literally, work—and very much a do-it-yourself enterprise. The Christian philosopher G.K. Chesterton famously observed in his book Orthodoxy that democracy is like writing love letters or blowing one’s nose—one of those things that “we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.”

So when you judge whether a particular place or institution counts as democratic, consider democracy to be a spectrum, with “everyday people governing themselves” as its most democratic pole.

Soon, you’ll recognize that most democracy exists at the local level, in the smaller entities where it’s easier for everyday people to get together and govern. As Mahatma Gandhi wrote days before his assassination: “True democracy cannot be worked by 20 men sitting at the center. It has to be worked from below, by the people of every village.”

Unfortunately, when asked whether they live in a democracy, people today don’t think of their village, precinct, or city, but of their nation-state. They usually answer the question based on whether their national leaders are fairly elected, and whether they seem respectful of the country’s constitutional norms.

The word “democracy” has become a synonym for a safe destination, the political-economic equivalent of a comfortable sofa where we can lie down, relax, and breathe. From this sofa conception flows the idea that democracy can be “saved”—from authoritarians or foreign powers or misinformation or anything else that might tear us from our sofas.

This sofa perspective is also why relatively peaceful and rich nation-states can call themselves democracies even though they are governed by small numbers of officials, technocrats, interest group leaders, or super-rich businesspeople. In our planet’s largest so-called democracies, everyday people don’t get to decide much. They can only vote, occasionally, in elections dominated by the same power entities running the country.

But real democracy is not a sofa. It is not cushy. Democracy, at least democracy on the spectrum of “everyday people governing themselves,” is not about voting for one powerful person. It’s about decentralizing decision-making power and handing it to regular people.

For this reason, President Biden’s pledges to preserve and protect democracy—coming from an officeholder with the power to govern by executive order and take military action around the world, without public notice or deliberation—will never be broadly credible.

The task of democracy requires us to get up off our couches. This is the sort of work that involves faith and competition, and thus resembles a religion or a sport as much as a system of government. Democracy is maintained through practice; you lose it when you stop showing up. If people stop going to Mass, saying the rosary, and listening to the Pope, Catholicism dies. If people stop throwing balls at rounded bats, there is no baseball.

So, if you value democracy, practice it—wherever you can. Let the kids in your local Little League vote to choose the all-stars, instead of the coaches or parents. Let workers and customers make the big decisions at your company. Create assemblies of everyday ls that write the local ordinances in your city or school district.

And please don’t waste another moment hoping your leaders will save democracy. Get out there and do it yourself.

The post Stop Trying to ‘Save’ Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Then participate in your community’s local government.

Because authoritarians do not teleport fully formed from Jupiter into the leadership of nations. They have to learn how to rule anti-democratically here on earth, usually at the local level. Stopping authoritarianism globally requires all of us to identify and defeat our hometown autocrats, and make sure that local governments are as democratic as possible.

Imagine, for example, how much more peaceful the world might be if citizens of St. Petersburg had managed to stall the political career of deputy mayor Vladimir Putin back in the 1990s.

Detecting would-be authoritarians isn’t necessarily easy. Oftentimes, they spend too little time in local government to be noticed. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro served just two quiet years on the city council in Rio de Janeiro—biographers suggest he sought the post to avoid accountability for his actions in the military—before moving into federal office.

But in many circumstances, local authoritarians offer clues to their larger intentions. Some make their tyrannical ambitions explicit.

“If I make it to the presidential palace, I will do just what I did as mayor,” then-Davao mayor Rodrigo Duterte told crowds while campaigning for the Philippine presidency. “All of you who are into drugs, you sons of bitches, I will really kill you. I have no patience, I have no middle ground, either you kill me or I will kill you idiots.”

Tragically, he was as good as his word—presiding over the killing of more than 30,000 people during his drug war, while rolling back the rights of those who dared to dissent from his policies.

Duterte, like many local autocrats, was comfortable with official violence. Reporters found he backed assassins—one group was called the Davao Death Squad—who carried out executions of suspected criminals. As journalist Jonathan Miller recounts in his Duterte biography, the mayor—nicknamed “Duterte Harry”—also patrolled the streets, sometimes violently, by motorcycle. In one case, he pulled a gun on a tourist who was smoking against local laws and forced the man to swallow his cigarette butt.

Duterte’s defenders trumpet the decline of reported crime in Davao—but dramatic drops in crime can be a sign of an emerging authoritarian. Duterte’s case echoes that of El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, who was the crime-fighting mayor of two different cities—Nuevo Cuscatlán and the capital, San Salvador—before rising to national office. Bukele’s tactics have included tens of thousands of questionable arrests by security forces and secret collaboration with the MS-13 gang.

Supporters of Bukele point to a mayoral track record of improvements in local services, including the creation of educational scholarship programs and libraries. But governing competence in local office is not a requirement for the successful authoritarian.

Putin, and his record as the top economic and foreign investment official in St. Petersburg, under a novice mayor, is an example of how incompetence can provide a path to power.

In Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Russia experts Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy report how St. Petersburg fell behind Moscow and other Russian cities in incomes, profits, and investment—and surged in unemployment, out-migration, and suicides—during Putin’s time as deputy mayor.

According to Steven Lee Myers’ book The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, Putin arranged contracts for St. Petersburg to buy food and basic goods from state-owned enterprises that never materialized. He also gave away the rights to operate casinos, without getting significant public benefits in return.

Of course, serving St. Petersburg’s people wasn’t Putin’s real job. He used licensing authority to target business and investors—both legal and illicit—in service of his own power, and that of his allies. Foreign authorities investigated one company, which he had licensed, for laundering money for the Cali drug cartel.

Putin avoided accountability for his corruption by increasing the mayor’s power while reducing the oversight power of the city council, which had called for Putin’s firing for “complete incompetence bordering on bad faith,” Myers reports. In the process, Putin developed the model of corruption and oligarchy he’s used to rule Russia, and enrich himself, ever since.

Putin’s sins in St. Petersburg were so obvious that he should have been stopped before he ever rose to national office. It’s harder to spot budding authoritarianism when it’s wrapped in a record of competence and governing in the public interest.

That’s the story of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who made his reputation leading the western state of Gujarat. In his underappreciated book, Inside Out India and China: Local Politics Go Global, the American scholar Bill Antholis described how Modi “combined the pragmatic and efficient spirit of Gujarat’s entrepreneurs with charismatic and potentially destructive, divisive and bellicose Hindu nationalism.”

Indeed, Modi’s national leadership has followed his local formula from Gujarat—aggressive action to improve the economy, efforts to advance electrification and other services in underserved areas, and greater seriousness about climate change. (He even wrote a thoughtful book, Convenient Action: Continuity for Change, about fighting global warming in Gujarat.) But as president, Modi also has nurtured a cult of personality that has punished dissenters (including journalists) and exploited religious nationalism in ways that endanger the lives of Muslims.

Checking such relentless, successful authoritarians requires matching their relentlessness. Even removal from office may not be enough.

Take the case of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who in the 1990s was elected mayor of Istanbul, representing an Islamist party. He successfully addressed difficult problems—from water to curbing traffic to garbage collection—but was removed from office after two-and-a-half years, on charges of inciting religious hatred. His career appeared to be over. Then he made a show of abandoning Islamist politics, returned to public life, and eventually won election as prime minister.

Today, commentators remark on how little Erdogan’s agenda has changed since he was mayor. He has made significant improvements in government services, but also is centralizing power, attacking secularism, ramping up spending (which fuels hyper-inflation), and building expensive monuments funded through corruption.

Of course, just as corruption is not the exclusive practice of authoritarians, anti-corruption can be a tool of autocracies. Look at Chinese president Xi Jinping, who made the leap to national power in 2007 when he was sent to Shanghai to clean up a corruption scandal.

Before then, as an official in other provinces, Xi tolerated corruption. In Shanghai, he saw firsthand that cleaning up malfeasance can be both good policy and a pretext for purging opponents. Since ascending to the presidency in 2013, his never-ending purges have eliminated all rivals for supremacy- and most limits on his power.

The authoritarians I’ve mentioned here are very different people, but they share one common experience: All worked in contexts where everyday people had relatively little power in local government. Because of this, these budding autocrats were able to do mostly as they wished, without being confronted by citizens.

In the years since these men were in local government, it’s only become easier to build anti-democratic local empires. Political scientists blame a decline of political diversity around the world. Too many cities and regions are effectively controlled by one party. Highly polarized countries—like my nation, the United States—are full of politically monochromatic localities and states that provide the perfect breeding grounds for authoritarian extremists.

Ironically, local authoritarianism can be a bigger problem in newly democratic nations than in authoritarian ones. As countries democratize nationally, they often decentralize power and authority—creating stronger regional and municipal governments that can become power bases for aspiring autocrats.

That is why the greatest weapon the world has against authoritarians is you, and your participation in your local government.

To challenge your local leaders—or even better, to launch a new opposition party or movement—is to defend democracy not just where you live, but also in your nation and our world.

The post How You Can Spot—and Stop—the Next Putin appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This is not new territory for Balta, which like much of Ukraine has been contested over centuries of wars. But in recent years, Balta has actually broken a lot of new ground, at least when it comes to the practice of citizen-centered democracy. In 2016, Balta adopted participatory budgeting, an innovative process—originated in Brazil—in which citizens rather than officials determine their local budget. Balta also gave its young people their own governing council and a decision-making process to influence local policies.

Democracy, in its essence, is everyday people governing themselves. Such self-government happens most often at the local level, which is why countries tend to get more democratic when they decentralize.

Since the 2014 Maidan revolution, Ukraine has been among the more rapidly decentralizing, and democratizing, countries on Earth.

This context is crucial to understanding what is now at stake in Eastern Europe. The war is being described as a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, between Russia and the West, or between Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky. But it’s really a clash between two of the most powerful trends in worldwide governance: increasing authoritarianism in nation-states and increasing democracy in our local communities.

In other words, Ukraine is now a battlefield where the international democratic recession meets the local democratic expansion.

Balta’s advances in local democracy are representative of this shift toward greater local power and responsibility in 21st-century Ukraine. A generation ago, Ukraine was a post-Soviet state, with a centralized government conducting top-down rule of 24 oblasts, and nearly 500 rayons (territorial units of about 50,000 people). Localities—including larger cities and nearly 12,000 hromadas, orlocal communities—could hold elections, but their officials had little influence over local affairs.

In this century, and especially in the last eight years, Ukraine has devolved power to those local communities, more than 90 percent of which have fewer than 3,000 people. For many smaller hromadas, Ukraine authorized amalgamation—mergers of small communities into larger municipal units, called “amalgamated territorial communities,” which would have enough heft to provide services and lead economic development.

To incentivize these mergers—towns made rich by gas or property taxes sometimes were resistant—amalgamated communities were given a greater share of both national and local budgets, new power to impose local taxes, and greater responsibility for education, health care, transportation, social programs, and agricultural land. To improve governance, these communities were authorized to experiment with democratic tools like participatory budgeting; in the past year, Ukraine has also advanced legislation permitting more popular referenda.

In a politically divided Ukraine, this devolution of local power had support across the spectrum, for a couple reasons.

The first was positive, and driven by economics. Putting more money and power in localities was seen as the best bet for addressing poverty and inequality, and developing Ukraine in a balanced way that would make it a better fit with the rest of Europe, which has strong local governments.

The second reason, however, was defensive: the threat of separatism. In a country the size of Texas, greater local control was seen as the best way to placate localities and regions that might think of leaving—especially Donetsk and Luhansk, two Russian-speaking Ukrainian oblasts where Russia would make incursions (and which Putin would declare “independent” as a pretext for his new invasion).

“The path of decentralization was an asymmetrical response to the aggressor,” said Andriy Parubiy, a former speaker of Ukraine’s parliament, in 2017. “The process of the formation of capable communities was a kind of sewing of the Ukrainian space.”

Many of these newly empowered Ukrainian local governments have seized the opportunity, and not just for economic development. Municipalities have embraced political reforms—adopting ethics codes, making their records and decision-making transparent, establishing citizen-directed processes like participatory budgeting, and adding new guarantees for representation and participation of women, men, and underrepresented groups in local politics.

Just this past December, two Ukrainian cities, Khmelnytskyi and Vinnytsia, finished first and third, respectively, in a global contest for innovation in government transparency. Mariupol, a city in the southeast reportedly under siege by the Russian military, has won international praise for its model of sharing governance power with local organizations.

These newly empowered cities have also been eager to collaborate with one another, especially in infrastructure, waste management, and extending internet services. Planning is increasingly long-term. Kamianske, a locality of 240,800 in the oblast Dnipropetrovsk, is using a democratic, citizen-led process to compose a municipal development strategy for 2027.

The commitment to building includes infrastructure for democracy itself. In the Poltava oblast, where localities are especially collaborative, the larger city of Kremenchuk was preparing to launch a school for participatory budgeting while a smaller town, Pyriatyn, established a city council ethics code and a “Dialogue Club” that allows students to debate proposed decisions and participate in planning. In Luhansk, Sievierodonetsk, population 112,950, has prioritized initiatives to make it easier for internally displaced persons to participate in local decision-making.

Of course, not all the results of decentralization are praise-worthy. A 2018 assessment of three cities, sponsored by the intergovernmental democracy support organization International IDEA, identified problems such as greater local partisanship and political fighting under the new system, and a lack of clarity about which local officials and institutions are in control. In larger cities, notably Odesa and Kharkiv, critics see decentralization as having enabled corruption by powerful business interests and patronage-dispensing political machines.

Ukraine also faces an underappreciated but enormous global problem for democratic governance: too few people have the skill and expertise to do the complicated work of running a local democratic government. As a result, too many local democracies struggle, or even fail, because they don’t have people who can organize consultations, manage a budget and contracts, prevent corruption, or lead a strategic planning process.

Putin’s determination to conquer Ukraine means these problems won’t be solved any time soon. Even if his invasion is repelled, the war could tear at all this newly sewn democratic fabric in Ukrainian communities. And the fighting may reinforce media and political narratives that Ukraine is a country dangerously divided between its Ukrainian-speaking, Europe-oriented west and the Russian-speaking, old-fashioned east.

But the true Ukraine picture is more complicated than that. And, despite all the human costs of this conflict, it’s quite possible that the recent rise of local democracy may allow community collaborations to continue, even through difficult times. Perhaps the war, for all its dangers to life and liberty, might even open up new possibilities for more democracy and development.

That’s not a blind hope. It’s history. The horrors of nation-state autocracies have long inspired the desire for local self-government, just as the weakness of democratic systems offers openings for dictators. Big authoritarianism and little democracy go together, like darkness and light—a reality famously recognized by the Ukraine-born Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov in his classic Stalin-era novel, The Master and Margarita.

The plot is driven by a visit from the devil to the Soviet Union. “What would your good do if evil didn’t exist,” Satan asks an evangelist-writer, who is full of despair, “and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared?”

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Democracy You Can Watch

The historic convention to draft a new Chilean constitution is meeting again as the South American summer ends. Watching people write can be boring, but your columnist, a Spanish speaker, is enjoying the proceedings live on the broadcast site https://convencion.tv.

Closing Words

“True democracy cannot be worked by twenty men sitting at the centre. It has to be worked from below by the people of every village.” —Mahatma K. Gandhi, 1948

This is the debut of Democracy Local, a new global column.

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