So, why don’t they want to fix it?
By Joel Day
May 2025
Voters around the world are growing increasingly skeptical of democracy and dissatisfied with its outcomes. Across twelve high-income democracies in 2024, 64 percent of respondents said that democracy wasn’t working. And for the first time in a generation, autocratic countries outnumber democracies. Why then, in an age of democratic discontent, are ideas for reform not more popular?
Whatever the reason for these global democratic doldrums — and there are many — there is an equal number of ideas to help the world get its democratic groove back. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences created a Commission on the Practice of Democratic Citizenship, which advocates for ranked-choice voting, constituent assemblies, and term limits on the Supreme Court. Steven Levinsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2023 book Tyranny of the Minority argue for additional broad systemic reforms like abolishing the Electoral College and first-past-the-post elections. Advocates such as Protect Democracy in the United States and the Electoral Reform Society in the United Kingdom push for proportional representation and fusion voting. Civil society seems to agree that “defending democracy requires a positive, future-oriented program to reform it.” The only problem is that people aren’t buying what they are selling.
More than half the world had the opportunity to vote in 2024. Parties from every region and political stripe competed for the office on platforms offering systemic fixes for democratic institutions. The United Kingdom’s July 2024 parliamentary elections brought the Labour Party to power on a platform promising to lower the voting age and abolish the House of Lords — yet turnout hit a historic low of less than 60 percent. In Africa, even though 2024 produced a few bright spots for the democratic process, Afrobarometer data indicate that support for democracy wasn’t what led people to the polls; rather it was corruption, impunity, and deteriorating economic conditions. In France, leftist parties beat back Marine Le Pen, but the majority of the public still felt disillusioned with the system. In the United States, “democracy on the ballot” failed to inspire, and seven states rejected ranked-choice voting.
While voters agree that something needs to change, they’re not sure what, exactly, that something is. The U.S. electorate overwhelmingly supports term limits, but 42 percent also support an unconstitutional third term for Donald Trump, according to a Change Research poll. Around the world, what citizens in some countries see as the proper fix for democracy’s challenges is precisely what another country wants to do away with. Voters in the Netherlands may want to whittle down their multiparty system, whereas citizens in the United Kingdom or Canada crave more viable parties. Cross-national survey research reveals how voters worldwide overwhelmingly want new and different political elites that are descriptively representative — that is, who reflect their own identities, values, and experiences. But while electing new politicians may signify change, it does not necessarily determine a new ideological and policy direction or guarantee reform.
Voters aren’t schizophrenic. They just don’t think institutionally. As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels describe in Democracy for Realists, politics is based on emotional, expressive behavior rather than institutional-instrumentalist rationality. Voters feel more than they think. And if people base their political decisions on a wellspring of emotions and cultural dispositions rather than on logical institutional propositions, then it is unsurprising that discontent with democracy doesn’t immediately lead to the acceptance of proposed procedural fixes. These social conditions block many reform ideas; overcoming expressive blockages is key to democratic reform.
Understanding why voters reject reform may provide an opportunity to redirect those energies and marshal them in support of democracy — a democratic jiu-jitsu, if you will. In other words, defending democracy may be less an exercise in pushing institutional change and more a project of meeting political culture on its own terms.
Why Reforms Aren’t Reforming
Fear of change is part of the problem. Secular liberalism as a cultural force, globalization as the economic foundation, and multilateralism as the crux of foreign policy define the modern world order. A state’s saying “no” to modernity gives it a certain power — it appears as a buoy in a tumultuous sea of change. Global authoritarianism benefits from a nostalgia for a bygone era of greatness, absent complexity. Voters with limited political knowledge process skepticism not through sophisticated rubrics of policy options but through how proposed fixes make them feel — and right now they feel unmoored. In the June 2024 EU elections, this manifested as a resurgence of sovereignty, not because state-centered solutions would bring about policy change but because voters craved the old stability of nationalism and locally controlled economic policy.
Many voters respond emotionally to reform proposals. New systems like proportional representation or citizen assemblies feel unfamiliar and unsettling, especially in a climate of political anxiety. People want to “throw the bums out,” but not the whole system.
Also contributing to voters’ disillusionment is the pervasive sense that gamesmanship, rather than genuine responsiveness, drives governance. While party platforms and reform pledges persist year after year, enactment is often shallow or absent altogether. Despite repeated promises, meaningful reform has failed to materialize, reinforcing skepticism toward elite intentions and cynicism about reform proposals.
In the United States, data from the 2024 Notre Dame Health of Democracy Survey underscore this trend: More than 85 percent of Republicans, 80 percent of Democrats, and 76 percent of Independents agree that “elected officials very quickly lose touch with ordinary people.” The bipartisan nature of this perception indicates that distrust is not simply a product of polarization but reflects a more profound structural disconnect.
This context helps explain the global rise of populist and reactionary movements positioning themselves as vehicles for reasserting popular sovereignty. While these movements vary in ideological orientation, they share a common diagnosis: Democratic institutions have been captured by unaccountable actors, whether in the form of corporate interests, international bodies, or technocratic elites. Reforms not based on a broad cross-partisan agenda will be suspected of furthering these special interests.
Finally, citizens hunger for a more authentic governing foundation than “politics.” Populist leaders worldwide can be called a lot of things, but they don’t lack vision for collective projects. In contrast, changes to democratic procedure, such as multimember districts or fusion voting, can feel like small or convoluted tweaks. If politics is expressive, then the prodemocracy agenda needs a bold alternative to the lure of autocratic populism. It needs a powerful liberal nationalism, paired with constitutionalism and equal membership, to oppose autocratic ethnonationalism. Poland’s Donald Tusk, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, India’s Rahul Gandhi, and the growing Hungarian opposition to Viktor Orbán serve as examples of how stemming the tide of autocrats runs through the state, not against it.
Promoting and strengthening democracy has always been tied to state-building. Anticolonialism and self-determination movements beginning in the 1970s and accelerating after the Cold War produced a wave of democratic transitions. And before that, from the New Deal to the Marshall Plan, democracy has historically thrived alongside strong state-building initiatives. Today that connection feels broken. As Yael Tamir, a former Israeli Labour Party politician, argues: “Enchanted with what seemed to be their conclusive victory, liberal democracies felt secure and ignored the ongoing work of state building.” Democratic states, complacent and hollowed of capacity, seem incapable, unresponsive, and untrustworthy. Perhaps the problem is that “fixing democracy” has become too small an enterprise; small procedural reforms feel inadequate. Faith in democracy is about seeing yourself flourish within a system, which is why procedural “fixes” don’t inspire the same way big, bold policies like military service, paid family leave, and social security do, all of which could be better fixes for building social cohesion. Democracy reforms must stimulate that collective imagination for flourishing. Voters need to believe that fixes will actually work.
Get the Money Out
How can resistance to democratic reform be overcome? A realistic reform proposal needs to answer voters’ emotional and expressive reality rather than a rational institutionalism. Reforms must meet people where they are. They should be bold rather than tinkering, and focused on nation-building. They should also be clearly defined and capable of garnering cross-ideological support.
Saving one’s country from plundering plutocrats is an issue that animates voters more than any other. Getting money out of politics should be priority number one — and a lynchpin that will open up a host of follow-on reforms.
Eighty-two percent of U.S. voters see money in politics as a threat to democracy, and 72 percent support limits on campaign contributions. Political campaigns in the United States spent an estimated US$20 billion in 2024. Contributions from ten billionaires made up 44 percent of President Trump’s total campaign donations. Beyond campaigns, Big Tech spent $61.5 million on lobbying in 2024. Reducing the influence of money in politics is a top issue for Americans, alongside defending against terrorism and improving the economy.
Publics around the world, too, find money in politics repugnant: 75 percent of voters in the Western Hemisphere believe that the rich buy elections. In Romania, a Kremlin-supported neofascist presidential candidate is accused of substantial campaign-finance crimes, even as Big Tech dumped millions into EU elections to boost laissez-faire parties. One hundred thirty countries have no ban on corporate donations to political parties, and more than half the world’s countries have no limit on individual contributions to candidates.
Unlike most other democracy reforms that lost on election day, there is real momentum and success behind getting money out of politics. In one of the only democratic reforms passed in the United States in 2024, Maine voters overwhelmingly approved a campaign-finance law to cap the amount of money individuals can donate to a political action committee. The U.K.’s Labour Party is eager to close loopholes to keep foreign donors out of their elections. The surge of cryptocurrencies, crowdfunding initiatives, and online-spending platforms will outpace regulatory infrastructure to such an extent that curtailing money in politics is a global imperative.
While alternative, institutionalist fixes to democracy are laudable — and necessary — targeting the money in politics has the most expressive cultural cachet, and therefore offers the best bet for enacting reform. The unregulated and flagrant campaign-finance abuses seen in recent elections feel unsettling and unfamiliar to many people. A fair system that doesn’t allow the rich to skew results is trustworthy and stable. Few alternative ideas for reform can say the same. For all their merits, schemes such as ranked-choice voting, multimember districts, and the like are perceived as fairly destabilizing departures from the status quo.
Campaign-finance regulation also offers a strong foundation for reasserting popular sovereignty over politics. Of course, many other reforms can claim the mantle of reasserting the sovereign voice: Proportional representation was part of the South African Democratic Alliance’s platform, and is a goal of both left- and right-leaning parties in France. Ranked-choice voting may also offer a sovereign stamp of approval. However, the technical nature of these changes makes them seem more complicated than they are, and the idea that moderates may win makes party diehards skeptical. At the end of the day, the strongest case for campaign-finance reform is that supermajorities see it as a top issue.
Democracy-reform ideas are all inherently about building a fairer and stable state — change is the point. The problem is that sweeping changes to state structures don’t read to voters as reforms but as fundamentally destabilizing the collective compact. Almost every party in the U.K. election, besides the Conservative and Reform Parties, has advanced platforms with the abolition or significant democratization of the House of Lords. Abolishing the U.K. House of Lords, the Canadian Senate, or the U.S. Senate enjoys a notable scholarly foundation; but these are destabilizing proposals. Opposition parties around the world campaigned heavily on changing systemic rules: India’s Congress party advocated restoring the statehood of Jammu and Kashmir, and the anti-Orbán Tisza party in Hungary emphasized amending the Basic Law to limit the terms of MPs. Regulating money in politics stands in contrast as a familiar defense of collective institutions from special interests.
Fixing democracy depends on swaying voters who are skeptical of change, ambivalent to institutional gimmicks, and feel in their gut that strong, sovereign, nationalist responses are more likely to improve their lives. Democracy advocates would be well served by setting aside the esoteric and prioritizing the boldest, clearest nation-building project: reclaiming elections from billionaire moguls and returning democracy to popular control. If politics is more about emotions than rationality, then offering institutional reform propositions isn’t enough to stimulate change. Voters will show up for reforms that meet them where they are, which is why democracies must start by getting money out of politics.
Joel Day is managing director of the University of Notre Dame Democracy Initiative.
Copyright © 2025 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
|
FURTHER READING |
||
Delivering for Democracy: Why Results Matter |
Why the World Is Down on DemocracyCitizens across the globe still value democracy, but they have become dissatisfied with the way it is working. A new era of representation is in order — one featuring more diverse leaders, responsive politicians, and empowered publics. |
Misunderstanding Democratic BackslidingThomas Carothers and Brendan Hartnett If democracies did a better job “delivering” for their citizens, so the thinking goes, people would not be so ready to embrace antidemocratic alternatives. Not so. This conventional wisdom about democratic backsliding is seldom true and often not accurate at all. |