Elections and Democracy in 2024: Three Overriding Trends

1. The significance of the electoral success of far-right and anti-system parties

Elections in 2024 have been marked by anxiety over the advance of far-right, anti-system and populist parties, as pointed out by Bullon-Cassis. The repercussions of their strong showings are immediate. They have contributed to mainstream far-right ideas and to push governments further to the right. As shown by Tonne in the context of the European Union, the dilemma for centre-right parties is whether and how to collaborate with the far right. Political calculations will have a bearing on the governing coalitions emerging from the 2024 elections, as well as on the challenge of protecting democracy from elected parties that seek to change the rules in their favour and to dismantle institutions from within.

Elections also have broader, symbolic, significance on democracy and its perceptions. The worldwide historic influence that the US “democratic model” has exerted has faded (Hanhimäki) but other regions of the world have long been models of participatory and deliberative democracy and laboratories of (democratic) politics. As Galvin and Welp point out in their analysis of Nayib Bukele’s electoral success in El Salvador, South America’s smallest state may well constitute a top-tier laboratory of authoritarian populism in the first half of the 21st century.

Hence the crucial importance, in academic research and public debates, to decentre – and reverse – the gaze. To understand the repercussions of the electoral successes of 2024 on the very nature of democracies and their political institutions, we need to critically consider, across time and space, the political choices that have led to establish democracy and to garner support for it. The analysis by López of the 2024 elections in South Africa well illustrates it.

2. Accountability and trust in electoral processes

As free and fair elections constitute a pillar of democracy, the functioning of institutions and oversight are the cornerstone of trust in electoral processes. Elections take place, though, even in authoritarian regimes (Klimentov). Considering that the results of the presidential elections in Iran and the national legislative elections in Jordan have affected the balance of cooptative and coercive strategies, Parreira suggests that elections may still matter in autocratic regimes.

The integrity of the electoral process itself is central, even in established democracies such as the US (Hanhimäki). To ensure free and fair elections, international observation has played a key role to avoid violence and, across contexts, to provide legitimacy for electoral processes (Welp).

Independent institutions and courts act as safeguards for protecting the integrity of elections: Singh analyses the role that the Indian Supreme Court has played in invalidating “electoral bonds”, a financial instrument enabling anonymous donations to political parties. As observed by Singh, “opacity in political funding tends to corrode the basic tenet of accountability in democracies, fuelling discontent and disillusionment”. Therefore, oversight on financial inflows is key to trust in elections and democracy.

3. Elections in a reshuffled polity

Exploring electoral campaigns in 2024 is telling about styles and forms of politics: digital campaigning and political advertising, the strategic use of social media, as well as misinformation and disinformation have shaped political preferences and voters’ views about candidates. Strategies resting on an anti-politically correct discourse have, however, ambiguous effects: Sposito observes that perceptions of a politician’s authenticity are often connected to higher levels of political trust. As citizens seem to be increasingly prone to profoundly dislike parties they do not identify with, affective polarisation has influenced elections while informing the experiences and the perceptions of democracy. It also risks to put a strain on the pluralistic values of respect for diversity that democracies are expected to protect and promote.

Those changes have brought about realignments in the content of campaigns: from Europe to North America, cultural issues have gained prominence over economic ones and are defining political divides in many places. However, the example of Mexico examined by Tronco suggests that focusing on welfare policies may indeed lead to electoral success even for incumbent parties. The 2024 elections have taken place in a context generally marked by deep polarisation. Hanhimäki points to “the many fault lines found within virtually all transatlantic democracies in the 2020s, the seemingly irreconcilable views over such issues as race, gender, climate, and migration”.

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The contributions to this issue of Global Challenges illustrate the multiple disconnections that mark democratic spaces, for example between public concerns and political party agendas (Moreno refers to environmental concerns in Argentina) or between partisan politics and disruptive activism (Bullon-Cassis explores civil disobedience). Large segments of citizens feel increasingly disconnected from the ways in which politics is being practiced. There is a crisis of trust, not only on the vertical axis but also on the horizontal one. Albert Hirschman already pointed out this phenomenon more than three decades ago: commenting on the “universal celebration of the democratic model”, he argued that it was precisely the “crumbling of certain walls that calls attention to those that remain intact or to rifts that deepen. Among them there is one that can frequently be found in the more advanced democracies: the systematic lack of communication between groups of citizens …”. His point highlights the reflexivity that democratic societies need to adopt about themselves. Hirschman’s legacy is very useful today as we feel the need to better understand, across the world, citizens’ experiences of democracy in their everyday lives. At a time of increasing polarisation and disconnection between citizens and institutions, some key questions come to the fore: Why do citizens engage or disengage in democratic processes and spaces? What motivates them to participate? Which means do they consider to bring about social and political change? As elections in 2024 show a picture of divided societies, exploring the gamut of these practices, from protest to engagement, is key to (re-)thinking the social fabric of a democratic polity.