Will the global economic crisis enhance the appeal of authoritarian alternatives to market-based liberal democracies? Our colleague Marc F. Plattner doesn’t think so.
Declining incomes and high unemployment rates may spark political crises in fragile or unconsolidated democracies. But, on balance, democracy is likely to prove more resilient than the supposed alternative models based on authoritarian regimes with limited ideological appeal – even to their own people – and which rely on performance-based legitimacy. “When such regimes stop delivering, what other sources of legitimacy can they fall back on to justify their rule?” asks Plattner, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and vice president for research and studies at the National Endowment for Democracy:
The global economic crisis may well stimulate a similar kind of [competitive] dynamic between democracy and its rivals. But democracy’s advantages in such a struggle are not limited to its ability to take a punch and outlast its glass-jawed competitors. Democracy has often displayed a remarkable ability to reform and renew itself. This gives it a resilience that may prove decisive in the competition with its more brittle authoritarian challengers.
RTWT.
[...] Allen links to this Washington Post piece by Marc Plattner in which he wonders if the appeal of market-based [...]