Leading Democracies, part 2.

Why do people vote for leaders who break norms of democratic government and human rights?

If you missed part 1, it’s here:

Leading Democracies: what went wrong?

Political distrust

International surveys from affluent democratic societies reveal dissatisfaction with or distrust in politicians and political parties. Dissatisfaction with democracy itself has grown since the mid-1990s[1]; most Europeans surveyed in 2018 believed that the average person in their country trusted politicians to tell the truth less than they did 30 years before;[2] only about one quarter of people in OECD countries trusted political parties in 2022.[3] An international survey asked people “how to improve democracy”, and the most frequent responses suggested getting better politicians – and less often changing the system, although people who say that may underestimate the importance of institutional and social contexts of leadership. People are nonetheless right to call for leaders who are responsive, competent, honest, reliable and hence trustworthy,[4] but they feel there aren’t enough like that.

Political party systems have fragmented, so that smaller parties or fringe coalitions have grown and the combined support for traditional centre-left and centre-right parties has declined. The US looks like an exception to this, with its entrenched two parties. But the Republican and Democratic parties have both been transformed from within by insurgent minorities, sometimes pejoratively labelled by their respective opponents as “MAGA Right” and “Woke Left”. Elsewhere, many voters defect to more radical minor parties of the left or right, but what unites many across the spectrum, according to a report by the Tony Blair Institute, is concern about the cost of living and “a growing belief that economic progress for them and their children is unlikely”. Hence they’re seeking “honesty, competence and effective reform”. [5] People look for competent leadership and effective government more than consistency with values or ideologies. They feel there are too many obstacles to social and economic progress, be it over-regulation, discrimination or adherence to ideology. Many feel pessimistic about the future, believing that political leaders and traditional models of leadership and governance have failed them.

Distrust in political leaders isn’t altogether a bad thing, though. It’s rational for citizens of a democracy to be sceptical and to withhold trust in political leaders, at least up to a point. Only a dictator expects unconditional or unquestioning trust from their people. Indeed, a democratic constitution has checks and balances, and it requires periodic elections, precisely because the people trust no one with unlimited power. And the trust that’s granted by voters is strictly conditional and subject to accountability at the next election. In a democracy, there may be a large number of ardent and loyal followers of a prominent political leader, but we don’t expect everyone to regard just one leader in that way. A cult of personality should not pervade state and society in a democratic culture. There needs instead to be competition, and hence open expression of differing opinions about leaders and their values. So, a degree of distrust, dissatisfaction and disagreement is healthy for democracy. But surveys tend to show a long-term decline in political trust, notably in the United States which has survey data dating back as far as the late 1950s. This decline of trust has been accompanied by rising political polarisation or reduced cross-party consensus and collaboration.

On the face of it, getting better leaders looks like a great idea, then, if we’re serious about remedying these political problems and restoring trust in government. This gets tricky at step one, however, when we try to define leadership, let alone create a model of good or better political leadership. The Blair Institute report found that more than half of their international survey sample could be sorted into two groups with differing views about what they want from political leaders. Those preferences were for either

• strong decisive leaders who take a commonsense approach to straightforward problems with less input from unelected backroom people, or

• decision-making by elected leaders that results from discussion, negotiation and compromise on complex issues using the best independent evidence.

So, when people say they want better leaders, the question is: what kinds of leaders and what styles of leadership are better? That in itself is a political debate. The distrust of politicians won’t be solved by simply replacing one generation of leaders with another, without thinking about the quality of leaders and the most appropriate styles of leadership. Moreover, for many people, the social-group identity of a candidate for leadership matters as much as, if not more than, generic skills. The category of human to which a candidate belongs may be more important to many voters than what that person can actually do for them. I’ll come back to that issue, but what about those leaders who are consciously breaking norms of democratic leadership?

Norm-breakers

Political leaders don’t always keep their promises, which erodes trust. Maybe the promise wasn’t realisable to start with; maybe unexpected circumstances necessitated a change of policy. A leader may need to make trade-offs that sacrifice their ethical principles for the sake of national security. They may refuse to bow to public pressure or abandon a cherished plan in the interests of a greater good. A leader may have to make a tough decision in which “doing the right thing” may be hard to defend, but then it looks like hypocrisy or a breach of promise to disappointed citizens.

There are some prominent political leaders, however, who’ve made careers in spite of – or even because of – their open breaches of (formerly taken-for-granted) norms of democratic political and personal conduct. US President Donald Trump, whose private life prior to politics had already been scandalous, and who often speaks bluntly or offensively, is a prime example. Trump refused to accept defeat in the 2020 election and sought to retain office. He was impeached twice during his first term and was later convicted of falsifying business records, and yet he was returned to office in 2025, having dismissed the actions against him as “a witch hunt”. He’s now conducting his own “witch hunt” against opponents whom he openly admits he hates. Well before Trump entered politics, though, Italy’s former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi (1936–2023) exploited his advantage as a media tycoon, kept up an extramarital sex life and never apologised for politically incorrect, if not offensive, remarks. He went so far as to change Italian law in order to get acquitted of charges of false accounting. He was convicted for paying an under-aged woman for sex, and for abusing his powers to try to cover it up, but then got acquitted on appeal. Trump was perhaps Berlusconi’s apprentice.

In his recent speech to the UN General Assembly, Trump made the self-contradictory statement that, of all the seven wars that he claims to have “stopped”, the one in Ukraine has turned out to be much harder to stop than he’d thought, and so it’s still going on. He repeated the unverifiable assertion that it would never have started had he been in office, and added that this showed “what bad leadership can do to a country” – apparently referring to President Biden’s leadership, not to President Putin’s.

In fact, the war between Russia and Ukraine began in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, and the shooting was continuing around a frozen front line in the Donbas for the entire period of Trump’s first term in the White House from 2017 to 2021 – and he did nothing to stop it. The invasion in 2022 was a major intensification of an ongoing conflict. Consistency with facts isn’t Trump’s strong suit, although, as he said himself, he likes to speak his mind. His UN speech would have kept the fact-checkers busy. But he told the world he’s been “right about everything” – and enough people have believed in him to get him into office.

Such disruptive leaders breach norms of transparency, avoidance of conflicts of interests and respect for separation of powers, and they do so with a cavalier attitude. Nonetheless, they can be politically successful, if evaluated in terms of gaining and regaining office. Trump won two terms in the White House; Berlusconi served nine years in total as prime minister. The most prominent examples of this kind of leader are male, but some women leaders follow in Trump’s footsteps. And other authoritarian or “illiberal” leaders have emerged through systems of representative democracy, for example Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. They get support from many voters for their apparent toughness and their willingness to “shake things up” and to “get things done”.

If people (often realistically) regard their systems of representative government as “broken” or “rigged”, and hence as “democratic” in name only, then it’s hardly surprising that many will vote (wisely or not) for leaders who promise to shake the system up and challenge its norms. Populist leaders have appeal because they point out the elitism of representative government (with its oligarchic underbelly) and they purport to break through it by speaking directly to and for “ordinary” folk and by invoking “common sense”. The widespread “dissatisfaction with democracy” may in part arise from these systems of representation not being all that democratic in practice. One reaction has been to elect norm-breaking leaders who don’t care much for standards of democratic government and human rights. An alternative (and better) approach is to reinvigorate leadership styles and values that are democratic in practice, not just in name. That requires closer critical examination of how we do things.

Part 3 in this series on leading democracies will look at diversity. Hitting the Like button will encourage me to get it written up and posted.

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Notes

[1] Foa, R.S., Klassen, A., Slade, M., Rand, A. & R. Collins. 2020. “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy Report 2020.” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy. URL: https://www.cam.ac.uk/system/files/report2020_003.pdf (accessed 14 January 2025). See also, Wike, R. & J. Fetterolf, 2024. Satisfaction with democracy has declined in recent years in high-income nations. Pew Research Center, URL: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/06/18/satisfaction-with-democracy-has-declined-in-recent-years-in-high-income-nations/ (accessed 14 January 2025).

[2] Statista, 2024. Do you think the average person in your country trusts politicians to tell the truth more than they did 30 years ago? URL: https://www.statista.com/statistics/913835/trust-in-politicians-compared-to-30-years-ago-europe/ (accessed 14 January 2025).

[3] OECD, 2022. Building Trust to Reinforce Democracy. URL: https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/building-trust-to-reinforce-democracy_b407f99c-en.html (accessed 14 January 2025).

[4] Silver, L., Fagan, M., Huang, C. & L. Clancy, 2024. What Can Improve Democracy? Pew Research Center, URL: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/03/13/what-can-improve-democracy/ (accessed 14 January 2025).

[5] Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, 2025. ‘Disruptive Delivery: Meeting the Unmet Demand in Politics’. URL: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/disruptive-delivery-meeting-the-unmet-demand-in-politics (accessed 31 January 2025).