Are Democracies Failing Their Citizens?
By: Dalia Research
Tags: Research, Politics, Freedom, Global, Democracy

From June 6th to June 18th, we asked 125,000 people around the world how well they perceive their governments to be delivering on the following democratic benefits:

Political Voice: Sense of participation in politics Public Interest: Trust that government is working for the people Free Speech: Freedom to express opinions Information: Access to balanced and neutral information

To get nationally representative results for the 50 countries we looked at — which represented roughly 75% of the world’s population — we used a statistical technique called model-based post-stratification (MRP). With MRP we can use the data collected from some respondents to make predictions for how other respondents would answer. This allows us to model the response behavior of niche groups, and thus improve the accuracy of our overall results by making them more representative of each country’s population. For more details, we’ve written about how MRP works and how it helps reduce fieldwork time here.

People do not feel like their government listens to them or acts in their interest.

The insights we gathered from the survey were sobering to say the least. Overall, respondents from around the world reported huge levels of dissatisfaction with their governments. For one, most people do not believe their governments are providing basic democratic benefits: 51% think their voice “never” or “rarely” matters in politics, 59% say their government never or rarely acts in their interest, 46% rarely or never feel free to share their political opinions, and 56% rarely or never feel that the news they read offers neutral information.

Surprisingly, we found that this public discontent is even higher in democratic countries than in non-democratic countries (labeled “free” versus “not free” by the 2018 Freedom House ratings). The largest divide was in the public interest dimension, where 64% of the public in “free” countries feel that their government “never” or “rarely” is acting in their interest, compared to 41% in “not free” countries. To see the results across all 4 dimensions and the individual country rankings, check out the full report here.

Key Takeaways

These results show that democracies need to become much better at explaining how citizens benefit from the democratic system. People feel that their voice doesn’t matter, and they feel that their governments aren’t acting in their interest. Even though people around the world show a high level of support for the idea of democracy, they also feel that it is not living up to its name in practice.

We sincerely hope that research like this can be used to help political leaders address the rising public discontent and to find ways to increase their governments’ accountability and responsibility for the people they serve. This is only the first attempt, but much more work needs to be done to understand and strengthen democracy! For now, we’re proud to be able to contribute to this debate — if you have ideas for researching this further, please let us know.

Also: if you’d like to conduct your own analysis with the full set of results, please send a request to Fred DeVeaux.