DEMOCACY WATCHThe Paradox of Democracy’s Success: Behavioral Science Helps Explain Why We Miss Autocratic Red Flags
The era of global liberal democracy led some scholars celebrated the “the end of history,” as risks to democracy appeared ever more remote. But in the same way that a nuclear power plant may appear to be operating safely until the last safety valve is broken, democracies can appear stable right up until they flip into autocracy. The growing electoral success of extreme rightwing parties in many Western countries, from France to Finland and from the Netherlands to Germany, has turned the end of history into the possible end of democracy.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the democratization of many eastern European countries and triumphantly ushered in the era of global liberal democracy that some scholars celebrated as “the end of history”. The idea was that human political history followed a steady path and that Western liberal democracy was the end point of the evolution of human government. Unfortunately, events unfolded a little differently.
The last 20 years did not follow a linear arc of progress, let alone marked the end of history. The growing electoral success of extreme rightwing parties in many Western countries, from France to Finland and from the Netherlands to Germany, has turned the end of history into the possible end of democracy.
What is prompting so many Europeans to turn away from a political system that has successfully rebuilt the continent after the second world war and transformed it into the world’s most prosperous single market?
The reasons are manifold, ranging from economic crises and rising inequality to the negative impact of social media on political behavior and breaches of democratic norms by elites. But there is another driver that is rarely discussed: the power of personal experience.
Over the past two decades, behavioral scientists have extensively explored how our actions are driven by our experiences. The pain, pleasure, rewards, losses, information and knowledge that arise from living through events help us evaluate our past actions and inform future ones.
A positive experience that is associated with a particular option increases the likelihood of that option being chosen again; a negative experience has the opposite effect. Mapping people’s experiences – especially in response to life’s risks – can illuminate otherwise perplexing risky behavior such as people building homes on flood plains, in regions with high seismic risk or at the foot of an active volcano.
The last violent eruption of Vesuvius, Europe’s “ticking time bomb”, occurred 81 years ago. Vesuvius is considered one of the highest-risk volcanoes in the world. Nonetheless, some 700,000 residents live in the “red zone” at its foot, apparently disregarding the dire warnings from volcanologists.
To comprehend this complacency in the face of possible Armageddon, one must analyze individual and collective experience with the risk in question. Most residents in the red zone have never personally experienced Mount Vesuvius erupting. Their personal experience, day in and day out, probably reassures them with a sense of “all clear”.
