The geography of democracy: Eugenio Somaini at TEDxLakeComo

Professor of Economics at various Italian universities, over the past 15 years he has worked on theoretical policy issues, with a focus on the spread of democracy over the last 40 years.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

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Yesterday I talked about equality,

freedom, a bit of political philosophy,

and even ventured
into the religious field.

I am an economist,
or at least that’s my major.

This evening I came
to have a talk about democracy,

which certainly has something to do
with yesterday's themes,

but I’ll be using a different method,
mainly descriptive.

This may arouse some suspicion,
which I hope to dispel.

In any case, I think that by dealing
with a subject we acquire tools,

we improve our mental agility,

and thus the ability
to make connections between things,

we learn to focus better,
and identify the nature of problems,

all of which, provided an effort was made,
would also allow, let's say,

one who has a discreet knowledge

in the field to come up
with something interesting.

The theme of this evening
also happens to be the title of the book,

“Geography of Democracy”,
and will mainly have us try to identify,

locate and enumerate which and where are

the democratic countries to date,

how many used to exist in the past

and what features their evolution,

this process had.

The first step is clarifying
what is meant by democracy.

Democracy is a very complex concept
and the use I make of it is very limited.

The analysis we’ll carry out

will include all the world's countries,

so the larger the area that is covered,

the more essential and somehow superficial
the features encountered will be.

We will only discuss
democracy in nation states.

I will not address the democratization
of supranational countries,

that is, of national states that have
well-defined territories,

populations and government
bodies to self-regulate.

Furthermore, it is a formal
and procedural form of democracy.

Basically, a formal democracy
is a political orientation

where civil and political
freedom are respected,

there is a plurality of parties,
freedom of the press is valued,

and the so-called
"rule of law" is enforced;

relations are law-regulated,

and the political bodies
endowed with political power

are regularly elected by free,
periodic and repeated elections,

prior to achieving
a certain balance of the powers.

This notion of formal democracy acts,

in some way, as a skeleton,
we can compare it to a skeleton.

The skeleton of an individual, or animal,
can tell us a lot but not everything:

we can say that should the skeleton
be absent or deformed,

the being will either not exist
or present malformations,

yet even with a regular skeleton
much will stay undetermined.

So the qualities of a state

that fulfills the requirements
of a formal democracy,

the quality of their political system
and of the policies that are shaped,

and even the quality of life
within the country,

will all vary significantly.

Today in Italy we justifiably
keep complaining

about the political system,

but nobody ever questions the democracy.

As a famous quote by Churchill goes:

“It has been said that democracy
is the worst form of government

except all those other forms
that have been tried from time to time”.

It does sound like
a paradox, but it’s true.

Whenever a problem is being dealt with,

democracies usually tend
to find the wrong solutions,

and it’s easy to think
that any other system would do better,

yet the other options
may turn out even worse.

According to my studies,
one of the best features

of this formal, or procedural,
notion of democracy,

is based on singularly observable events,

such as the ones I mentioned before:

regular elections,
party multiplicity, and so on,

the presence or absence
of a democracy can be claimed,

as well as the various degrees
of establishment;

basically here they have total democracies
while there it’s very shallow.

I didn’t make these,

I’ve just been working on the material
produced by various institutions,

the most notable being
the American institution Freedom House,

which has been studying
the subject since 1972

while regularly publishing
assessment charts

that give a synthetic numeric rating
for each index of a country.

Both analytic and synthetic
scores are awarded,

together with supporting
descriptive texts.

Freedom House categorizes countries
as free, partly free or not free.

In my book I used
6 categories, instead of 3,

but the main difference

is that I made a distinction
between normal democracies,

which are the best,
and low quality democracies,

which are still democracies
but with a lower score.

This is where democracies

were found in 1972.

This is the geographic
distribution of democracies,

regardless of them being normal

or low quality.

You can see that, basically,
outside the NATO territory are Japan,

India and a few countries
in Southern America.

A few.

2012, this was the situation.

Those colored dark green
are the same from the previous picture,

lime signals the newborn democracies,

that is, countries that recently
turned into democracies,

and then orange stands
for “no longer a democracy”,

which doesn’t necessarily mean
it was overthrown by a harsh dictatorship,

but sure enough the democracy
has gradually faded away.

What I did was
an elementary empiric study,

much like Francis Bacon,
with diagrams of presence and absence:

democracy, not democracy,
or somewhere in the middle?

I also identified
a series of other phenomena that,

in their own way,
can be observed and related.

Complementary to these, as I said,
are two more phenomena.

Here we can see how newborn democracies
outnumber ex-democracies,

it’s hard to tell but substantially
the number of democracies has doubled.

Now this is a particular case.

These are the democracies I call “normal”,
which means completely established etc.,

whose distribution is rather bizarre,
but does have an explanation:

in essence they border on each other
or are separated by the sea,

and sea as an open border
allows possible communications,

in fact it is very difficult
to seal sea borders,

while it is much easier
to close land boundaries.

They also share some features,
often are politically alike,

which generally is also tied to some
previous economical or military treaty.

In the upper area can be found
countries belonging to NATO,

on the Pacific side is the ANSUR,

Japan, etc…

the strategic-military factors
also are important

as democracies that confront
with non-democracies

do not always come to terms pacifically.

Always at this level
of general superficiality,

various cases often associated

to democracy can be identified,
although not system-wise,

and which can subsequently provide clues
about why there is a democracy,

or why there isn’t,
and hints on future developments.

I identified three main criteria.

In my book a higher number
are taken into consideration but,

to give a global view
of the matter, they are:

first, the level of economic development.

Let’s take a little step back.

Complementary to the distribution
of the democracies,

which border on one another
and so, in some way,

we can say the fact that a country
borders on a democracy

generally means its chances
of becoming a democracy -

or democratizing if it isn’t already -

are increased, but then some seemingly
insurmountable walls are met.

Here we see the main ones.

They are the three colored areas,

they are those in which
democracy has not entered yet,

colored brown are all
the former communist countries,

in which communism was not simply brought
by foreign occupation,

as in Eastern Europe,

but in which it was,
in some way, indigenous:

China, Russia,

some former Soviet republics,

Vietnam, Cambodia, etc.

That curious white island
in there is Mongolia,

which oddly passes
the tests of a democracy,

even though of low quality;

this is to show that there aren't
complete obstacles

or absolute favorable factors.

The green area is, I would say,
the Arab-Islamic area,

Islamic with Arab-Islamic prevalence,

although Afghanistan and Pakistan
are also included in there;

I will then come to the religious problem,

which does not completely exclude
the hypothesis of Islam

and democracy being compatible,

yet Middle Eastern and Northern African
Islam have proved to be quite impermeable;

a couple of years ago,
during the Arab Spring,

it seemed as though it could face an end;

in some way it was certainly
a significant phenomenon,

but it hasn’t taken over anywhere yet;

however it goes without saying that
a considerable uproar was generated.

The third area is the African area,

where the main obstacle
is the underdevelopment

or even the unsure
formal existence of some states.

Democracy is national states’ thing,

to become a democracy
a state needs to functional,

in other words the government
need to have complete control

over their territory, and in charge
there must not be criminal gangs.

In Africa, along
with many other countries,

this factor plays a major role,

besides the fact that a compact area
of autocracies can be found,

meaning a country surrounded
by autocracies

will certainly have difficulties
in democratizing.

As I said before,
economic development is vital.

If you look at the colors,

green represents the democracies,

lime the semi democracies,

while red stands for the autocracies.

The four pie charts are labeled
according to the per capita income levels,

along with purchasing power:

above 10,000; between 5,000 and 10,000;

between 1,000 and 5,000 and under 1,000.

It is clear that there is
a strong correlation.

82% of countries with a per capita

income above 10,000 are democratic,

and those non-democratic in there are
all oil-producing countries.

Oil an obstacle itself
to the development of democracy,

for reasons I won’t be discussing.

But basically, if oil is discovered
in a democratic country, like Norway,

nothing goes wrong,
it’s actually better for them;

if an autocratic country
finds oil in its territory

it will be much more difficult
for that autocracy to collapse.

So let's see how the percentage

of democracies definitely tends to rise,

while that of autocracies is fairly stable

and that of semi-democracies
follows a strange fashion:

it rises, falls,
and then shrinks significantly.

From this framework
one would be tempted to be optimistic.

As the world is developing economically
and today, among other things,

a large part of poor countries
are doing it at fairly rapid rates,

they probably will end up in those charts.

There is no certainty that they will,

because many countries today

were already democratic back
when they were still poor.

The United States became democratized
when they were still underdeveloped.

Therefore the economic process
gives us encouraging

but insufficient hints.

Another significant factor is religion:

democracy first established itself
in Protestant countries,

it was considered unlikely
for it to develop in Catholic countries,

then it actually boomed;

today, somehow,

we see that Catholicism
is largely democratic,

and so is orthodox Christianity;

in the areas of Buddhism, Confucianism,

Hinduism too, the same Islam,

far fewer democracies can be found,

although even in the Islamic world
some managed to establish.

The third major factor
is economic integration,

if you remember I showed you

how bordering and physical closeness
favor democratization.

Entering a relationship with democracies

already entails a certain degree
of democratization,

as in order to exchange
or to freely negotiate with a country,

it is necessary to confer
one's own citizens and their companies

the sufficient freedom
needed to allow them to communicate.

A significant aspect of democracies
is the so-called democratic peace.

A democracy has declared war to another.

This is a purely empirical fact,
maybe sooner or later it will be denied.

All the pairs of states
that in the past allied or confronted

have been studied,

and it resulted there never was any case
where two democratic countries

fought on opposite sides.

I repeat, it never happen,

but it’s no ironclad law
and sooner or later,

if democracy will, hopefully,
survive long enough,

some exceptions will occur,

but certainly the probability
of conflict is considerably lower.

Look, I’m not implying that democracies
are necessarily peaceful,

they've fought in countless wars,
but so far, only against non-democracies.

(Applause)