Eavesdrop On Experts

“We’re facing what has been called this global democratic recession,” says Associate Professor Tom Daly, Deputy Director of the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne and Associate Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law at the University of Edinburgh. “What we had for decades was – especially from the mid-1970s, was an overwhelming trend – it wasn’t the universal trend, but an overwhelming trend towards democracy becoming more widespread, globally,” he says. “But if you look at every major democracy assessment organisation, they all started to register declines from about 2005 onwards. We’re not dealing with the old fashioned sort of issues like military coup d’état, we’re looking at a deterioration of democracy that happens step by step, some people call it death by a thousand cuts.” Associate Professor Daly explains that the trend in recent years is a narrative that democracies are inefficient, that they’re incapable of producing public goods like prosperity, stabilit