Global experts are looking for lessons abroad in a super election year

Voters in more than 60 countries are going to the polls to elect new leaders in this record-breaking “super election year.” In many of these countries, democracy itself is on the ballot.

Global Cornell contributes to Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff’s campus-wide Freedom and Responsibility Project by hosting a year-long event and discussion on global democratic trends. Next up is the annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

On October 23rd at 5:00 p.m., author and activist Naomi Klein will speak about the “mirror world” of doppelganger politics, in which the populist right has adopted concerns and language associated with the left. After her lecture, Klein will meet with former General Secretary of the Community of Democracies Thomas E. Garrett and political scientists Kenneth Roberts and Suzanne Mettler (both College of Arts and Sciences) for a discussion about the US election. A free ticket is required.

Global Cornell invited Garrett, Roberts, Mettler and other area studies and government specialists to comment on elections in the countries and regions they studied. You can find your answers on a new Global Democracy website.

Although this year’s global electoral record is mixed, experts noted some points of convergence. Perhaps most heartening is her observation that well-organized citizens can – sometimes – stand up to autocrats and win.

“Some global democracy watchers feared that 2024 could lead to a shift toward greater authoritarianism at the ballot box,” wrote Garrett, who headed campus this fall as Einaudi Center Lund Practitioner in Residence and Distinguished Global Democracy Lecturer at Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy). “The reality was different – ​​at least in cases where the elections were transparent.”

Garrett pointed to India, where voters re-elected increasingly iron-fisted Prime Minister Narendra Modi but denied him an absolute legislative majority, and Senegal, where the Constitutional Council rejected incumbent Macky Sall’s attempt to remain in power and the people in a year elected an opposition candidate in an open and peaceful process.

Rachel Beatty Riedl (A&S/Brooks), Peggy Koenig ’78 director of the Center on Global Democracy, is particularly impressed by the Senegalese example. “Democracy thrives in Senegal because citizens demand compliance with electoral rules,” she wrote.

Senegal is one of 13 African countries holding elections this year. Constitutional lawyer Muna Ndulo (Cornell Law School) reported that the democratic landscape on the continent is changing in some ways for the better and in others for the worse. He cited misinformation on social media and the influence of money as particularly annoying. “Although elections are a necessity, they are not enough to consolidate democracy,” Ndulo wrote.

Elsewhere in Africa, Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford sees parallels between the U.S. and Mozambique, where the ruling FRELIMO party “will only support the democratic process if it wins.”

“Mozambique and the United States both show how political parties can pay lip service to democracy while using coercive tactics to maintain control,” Wolford wrote. “And they show how important it is for ordinary local people to organize themselves.”

Daniel Bass, anthropologist and manager of the Einaudi Center’s South Asia program, calls Sri Lanka a country where grassroots organizations have led to an orderly transfer of power after many years of unrest and violence. In September, a third-party candidate defeated the incumbent in a largely peaceful process.

“This election shows that democracy can still work and gives people hope for the future,” Bass wrote.

According to political scientist Thomas Pepinsky (A&S), the election in Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, was “free and fair”. But he noted that voters ultimately elected “a disgraced former general with a violent past” as president. The result, he wrote, “reminds us that even democracies can elect highly divisive and problematic politicians as their leaders.”

With elections in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and Guatemala, Latin America has been “a microcosm of broader international patterns around the world,” wrote Kenneth Roberts, a faculty member at the Einaudi Center Democratic Threats and Resilience.

“In Venezuela and El Salvador, autocratic rulers manipulated elections to consolidate their authority and marginalize opposition forces,” he wrote. “In Guatemala, however, the elections led to a democratic upsurge.”

For Roberts, the Guatemalan case shows “how social mobilization from below and effective coalition building can help rebuild democracy, even when institutions have been significantly weakened by incumbent autocrats.” The lesson, he concluded, “is that the best response on those who challenge democracy, there is usually more democracy.”

In Mexico and El Salvador, other considerations outweighed democracy on voters’ list of priorities. Political scientist Gustavo Flores-Macías (A&S) found that both countries elected candidates from governing parties even though those parties had “exploited their widespread popularity to undermine civil liberties in the name of public security.”

Mexico’s election was notable because it made Claudia Sheinbaum the country’s first female president, something unprecedented in the 248-year history of the United States.

“Western Europe is having a moment,” wrote sociologist Mabel Berezin (A&S). The director of the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies noted that the right dominated June’s European Parliament elections, Italy elected a president from a party with neo-fascist roots and right-wing movements had grown stronger in France, Germany and elsewhere. But overall the picture is murky.

Berezin predicted that Europe’s populist parties will not influence the election results in the United States, but after the election “their positions on Ukraine and Middle East policy will be significant in world politics, in which the United States is a key player.”

This US election is the most important in the memory of many young and older voters on campus.

“The American presidential election represents a choice between a candidate who has threatened fundamental pillars of democracy… and a candidate who, like other candidates from both parties dating back decades, will uphold those fundamental pillars,” wrote Suzanne Mettler, John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions (A&S). “It is reminiscent of other periods in U.S. history when democracy – whatever form it took at the time – was at stake.”

Polls show that the election is a bad decision. What is certain is that the consequences will be felt far beyond America’s borders.

Jonathan Miller is a freelance writer for Global Cornell.