Is Democracy Still in Decline? Yana Gorokhovskaia on the Freedom in the World Report

Without an elected government, without a government that truly represents... a lot of things are imperiled - rights, democracy, freedom, certainly peace. I think that's another kind of challenge as we go into this year of widespread elections. It's not just about preserving democracy. It's also laying the foundation for peace.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Yana Gorokhovskaia is the Research Director at Freedom House and one of the lead authors of this year’s Freedom in the World report titled, The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:20
• Nagorno-Karabakh - 2:15
• Gaza and Israel - 7:46
• Freedom in Decline - 13:18
• Autocratic Elections - 35:43

Key Links

Freedom in the World 2024: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict

Freedom on the Net 2023: The Repressive Power of Artificial Intelligence

Follow Freedom House on X @freedomhouse

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Staffan Lindberg with a Report on Democracy in the World

Sarah Repucci from Freedom House with an Update on Freedom in the World

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Apes of the State created all Music

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Transcript

For the last four years I have tried to do an episode where we revisit the state of democracy in the world. So far, the prognosis has not been good. Whether I talk to Freedom House or the V-Dem Institute, the diagnosis is the same. Democracy remains in decline around the world. However, I still like these episodes because they give us a chance to catch events or trends that have flown under the radar.

This year I had the opportunity to talk to Yana Gorokhovskaia a few days before the release of the Freedom in the World Report. Yana is the Research Director at Freedom House and one of the lead authors of this year’s report titled, The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict.

Our conversation explores a few of the places where freedom saw its largest declines, but also a few where we saw positive improvements. We also discuss some of the ongoing trends as well as the ways they have evolved over the past few years.

The podcast is sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor or would like to discuss ways to partner with the podcast, please send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com.

But for now… This is my conversation with Yana Gorokhovskaia…

jmk

Yana Gorokhovskaia, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Thanks for having me.

jmk

Well, Yana, every year when Freedom House comes out with its new report, I usually think that it's just going to be an overview of what I already know, because I feel like I'm pretty dialed in to what's happening around the world. I feel like I'm paying pretty close attention to how it affects democracy. But every year, there's quite a bit within the report that actually catches me off guard and surprises me.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Oh, that's great.

jmk

Yeah, countries that declined a lot more than I would have expected them to, some countries had gains that I hadn't really been focused on, and this year the big surprise to me was Nagorno-Karabakh. I was familiar with what was happening there, but it didn't click in my mind how big of an impact that was in terms of human rights, in terms of civil liberties, in terms of democracy within that enclave. It just didn't register how big of a story that was and to be honest, I don't remember most of the news sources that I digest really focusing much at all on that. And yet, that's really the headline territory/country in this report because of such a dramatic decline in the territory. Can you talk a little bit about what happened there and why it was so significant?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

So, Nagorno-Karabakh, I think, gets overlooked a little bit because it is an enclave. It's been the subject of a dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia since the fall of the Soviet Union, but even going back in time before the formation of the Soviet Union. It's populated, or it was populated, by ethnic Armenians and it's been under pressure from Azerbaijan where the territory was officially part of Azerbaijan originally. It's been under pressure by Azerbaijan for a long time. It kind of escalated in the last year, first with the blockade of the only corridor that connected the enclave to the outside world and therefore was how people received food and medicine, all the necessary supplies. That was blockaded for nine months by activists, but not really. It was sort of government backed and really an effort to try and force people to leave.

Then that escalated into a very short, but significant military attack in the fall, which then resulted in all the population, which is about 120,000 people, leaving the territory en masse and they left mostly for Armenia. In Freedom House when we assess territories separately from countries, we use a criteria that isn't about taking sides in a conflict. It's not really about recognizing sovereignty or anything like that. This is really about assessing people's lived experience of rights and freedoms and if that's significantly different from any country that exercises control or hopes to exercise control. That's why we assess Nagorno Karabakh separately from Azerbaijan or Armenia.

On the basis of this seizure of the enclave and then as a result, not only did the people leave, the government then announced that they would… They actually had an elected government and the government announced that they would totally cease to be on January 1st of this year. That seizure resulted in the biggest score decline that we registered last year, which is 40 points, and the territory moved from partly free to not free. It has a negative three score now.

jmk

Yeah, it went from being a country that was somewhat in the middle of the scale that Freedom House provides - it's a 100 point scale - to being the absolute worst of the worst this year. Which is why it’s really shocking that there hasn't been more attention and more focus on the region despite such a dramatic score decline when you look at it much more systematically.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Yeah, absolutely. I think that what else gets missed is the wider story here, too, which, first of all, there's kind of two sides. One is that people who live in territories are often subjected to a lot of rights violations in part because they don't have access to an elected form of government. This isn't the case in Nagorno-Karabakh, as I said, they actually had an elected government, but many territories don't. So, without a way to hold their leadership accountable, people's rights are just really vulnerable. That gets overlooked because we don't pay a lot of attention to territories. The second thing is that Nagorno-Karabakh, like a lot of other territories, is also at the whims of authoritarian powers.

In this case, you have Azerbaijan and what happened in the aftermath. As I said, the enclave has been under pressure from Azerbaijan for a long time. Azerbaijan is also an authoritarian country. It's been led for a long time by Ilham Aliyev, who's been the leader for over 20 years now. He subsequently really made a big show of the seizure and how this was the historic return of the land. Then he called a snap election that he won largely based on this anti-Armenian sentiment and the victory over Nagorno-Karabakh. So, territories are duly important because people's rights and freedoms are severely restricted in many territories and they are often subject to authoritarian pressure in a really substantial way that other countries or places in the world don't really feel.

jmk

Another example of that that's almost the reverse situation is what's happening over in Gaza right now where the people of Gaza are governed under an authoritarian government, but it's a democratic country that is really creating pressure on that region after the horrific terrorist attacks that happened on October 7th. Can you talk a little bit about how the lack of democracy and the lack of freedom within Gaza creates the situation that allows for the dynamics that we see happening there?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Yeah, absolutely. So, as I said, in many territories people don't have access to an elected form of government. That's certainly true of the Gaza Strip. There haven't been elections there for well over a decade now. People live under what is essentially an authoritarian government that is also a terrorist organization. That has impacted not only rights and freedoms inside the Gaza Strip, but also for Israel, because Hamas and other military groups have engaged in attacks on Israel, obviously on October 7th, but also well before October 7th as well.

One of the challenges that we face in assessing even big developments with the report is that once a place has reached a certain level that's very low on the scale as the Gaza Strip was and continues to be, it's actually very hard to register even large-scale kind of conflict. So, we did this year. The Gaza Strip - I should say the Gaza Strip and Israel both had a three-point decline in their scores, but in general, when you already don't have an elected form of government, when you already don't have freedom of expression, when you already don't have a lot of these rights and freedoms, each indicator is only on a zero to four scale, so there's very little that we can maneuver with.

Nonetheless, we did register a decline in Gaza Strip. It had to do with the destruction of property, of businesses, and also the almost complete stoppage of work by international NGOs. On the side for Israel, we've seen a long-term decline in Israel's democracy on various factors. But this year specifically, we registered a decline in physical security, which was directly related to the October 7th attack. We did something similar when the full-scale invasion of Ukraine started. There was a decline in physical security. But we also registered a decline on judicial independence and due process. Those two things have something to do with the Gaza Strip, but mostly have to do with what's happening in the West Bank and what's been happening in the West Bank for a really long time.

Due process declined because Israel holds Palestinians in detention for a really long time and the court system is really backlogged people don't receive trial in a timely way, children are subjected to military prosecution in Israel, and judicial independence has gone down partly because of the Netanyahu administration's stated and then carried out efforts to diminish judicial independence. We heard a lot about the various laws that were passed, but also in practical ways by just not appointing judges, essentially slowing down the process of judicial appointments so that the whole system kind of grinds to a halt, which of course then escalates the problems with due process because you don't have judges to sit in court.

jmk

Gaza and the West bank, I think, pose a really difficult problem because Israel has made the case that they don't really have a negotiating partner in those territories. But part of the reason why they don't have a negotiating partner is because nobody really knows what the people in those territories really believe or really feel. We haven't had elections in those areas for more than a decade, particularly in the Gaza Strip. They did elect the leadership of Hamas into power in 2007, but that's been a really long time.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

And also, part of a coalition, right? Not as a single kind of governing party, too.

jmk

Yeah, so there's no sense of how people feel today. I've heard reports that there's polls that Hamas only has a 30 percent approval within Gaza today. If that's the case, elections would bring entirely new leadership to power. But even if they didn't, just knowing what the people actually want in those territories would give us a much clearer sense of what the negotiations should actually be like. It's difficult to negotiate when you're talking to people that are tyrannically governing the territory rather than actually representing the people.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

I think that that's such an important point and it kind of brings us to what's happening this year in 2024 with this giant year of elections, which we've heard so much commentary about. A lot of the commentaries are about what these elections will mean for democracy. Some of the biggest, most populous democracies in the world are going to the polls, whether that's the US or India or Indonesia.

But what does it also mean for peace. I think that the point with the Gaza Strip is really excellent because without an elected government, without a government that truly represents, or at least, maybe not perfectly represents, but represents in some way and is accountable to the people, a lot of things are imperiled - rights, democracy, freedom, certainly peace. I think that's another kind of challenge as we go into this year of widespread elections. It's not just about preserving democracy. It's also laying the foundation for peace essentially.

jmk

So, this was yet another year where we've seen freedom in the world continue to decline. It's the 18th consecutive year. I keep thinking that we're going to see a year where there's a small rebound just because there should be a regression to the mean, but it never happens. I mean, it's been 18 years. Why does freedom in the world continue to decline year over year?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, we came close last year. There were 35 countries that declined, 34 countries that improved. A lot of that was, I would say, the reversal of undue restrictions that had to do with COVID essentially. You know, we may be surprised this year if elections are administered well, if they're competitive. I'm not very optimistic given the election in Bangladesh, the election in El Salvador. These were not free and fair contests. These contests had a lot of problems.

So, there are different drivers of decline in freedom and they change from year to year. I would say a long-term decline, you know, last year was our 50th anniversary and we dug a little bit through the data to try to figure out which indicators seem to drive the decline or which types of countries seem to drive the decline.

We found two things. One is that freedom of expression has really driven the decline and I think that makes sense because we try and look at not only freedom of expression in the sense of media freedom, but also private expression, so private discussion. A lot of that has been repressed or constrained through what we see going on online with the spread of digital surveillance, spyware, hacking, things like that, that have really put people's private expression in danger. To put that in context a little bit, there used to be very few countries where our indicator on private discussion was at a zero in part, because you'd have to think about Stasi Germany or something like that where you had dense widespread networks of informants who were sitting in cafes and listening to people.

But that's not the same in the era of the internet. If you look at a place like Russia, which just hit zero on the private discussion indicator, this is about restricting people's digital speech largely, which is how a lot of people have conversations whether that's public or private conversations. So, the proliferation of digital tools to control speech has really had a serious impact on freedoms and it's been one of the drivers, I would say.

So that's all I'm looking at in the trends. In terms of countries, I would say that when we break apart the free, partly free, and not free categories of countries, the biggest decline has been in not free countries. When we give you the statistic of 18 years of decline, that's true, but most of the decline has been contained in not free countries. Essentially, it's poorly performing countries becoming worse over time and significantly worse over time. That's where the issue lies. Just on the elections indicator, we measure how competitive free and fair executive and legislative elections are. The numbers there have increased just in the last 20 years of countries that hit absolute zero on that. That means that they don't have free and fair elections.

You can see the reasons behind some of this. Some of the drivers are just rigged elections, like the election in Azerbaijan, the upcoming election in Russia. Some of these things are coups, which we've also seen a huge spread of in the Sahel. Niger was the largest decline this year after Nagorno-Karabakh, so there's a few drivers here. One is freedom of expression declining. One is not free countries becoming worse over time and really democratic institutions being stripped of their substance.

jmk

Another trend I noticed in this year's report was that the past two years we've seen fewer countries with declines, but we've also seen fewer countries with gains. We only had 21 countries with gains. We had about 52 with declines. That's not that much farther off from past years, but other than last year, that's less than every year going back to 2010. So, does that say anything to you that maybe things are stabilizing somewhat?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Well, there's a couple of things going on. One is that our lived experience, especially with so much news and consumption, feels like things are changing all the time everywhere. But in reality, when you sit back and you think about how things have changed, the vast majority of countries, prohibiting things like war or coups or things like that, the vast majority of countries don't swing from end to end rapidly over time. There's this other factor that I was talking about with the not free countries getting worse over time. Our scale ends at zero on indicators, so when countries come to the zero on a given indicator, there's nothing else we can register. Obviously, our narrative reports for the countries include recent changes and we try and illustrate those.

But in terms of the absolute score, the bottom is zero. We deliberate really hard about making those changes, but once a country reaches zero… Afghanistan, for instance, on the freedom of the media score this year reached zero. That's it. If journalists in Afghanistan are further repressed, which they may be… There's very few left. They're extremely censored. It's very hard to work from the country for all intents and purposes. We've decided that there is no media freedom in Afghanistan, but that doesn't stop something worse happening later. But it's very hard to indicate that in a score.

So, I think that's also part of the issue. The fact that most countries stay stable over time. The vast majority of countries stay stable over time even though we spend a lot of our time talking about these large movers. That's one thing. Another one is that if you accept that it's the not free countries that are driving a lot of the decline and that those countries are slowly zeroing out on scores, then you'll see less and less movement going forward in time.

jmk

At the same time, I would have thought that would mean that we would have seen a year of gains by now. That we would have gotten to a point that a lot of countries couldn't go any lower and so the number of countries in decline was so minimal that the number of countries that were improving could finally outnumber the countries that had declined. But we haven't seen that. It's been 18 years. We still haven't seen the bottom completely drop out yet.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Yeah, that's true. The challenge in writing this report is often looking for bright spots and I want to be clear that there definitely are. Even this year, which has been, by objective measures, pretty bad for freedom, we had unlikely gains for the rights of LGBT people in Africa and the Baltics, we had, speaking of elections, a great election in Liberia that was competitive and well administered and showed a country's recovery from war, essentially. We had gains in Fiji. These are positive signs, and it's easy to overlook them. But the trend over time has illustrated a long-term decline, but I remain optimistic. Again, the countries that are in the free category tend to move the least and tend to have the fewest declines.

The other thing that we see is that the category is fairly sticky. There's a possibility that countries move out. So, this year Ecuador moved from free to partly free. But that's sort of an outlier. Most countries remain in the free category and that's not true for partly free and not free countries. Those countries are really volatile in their scores and move up and down quite a bit. For instance, Thailand has the most status changes of any country in our data set. If you think about the history of Thailand, it's pretty clear why that is. It has rapid swings from elected government to coups, back to elected government, back to coups. But that's not the norm. That's not the norm for countries around the world.

jmk

Ecuador is an interesting one because it was last year - maybe it was the year before - that that it moved from being partly free to free. Now it's moved back down to partly free. It's kind of the exception that proves the rule because it's right in that gray zone where a one- or two-point change means that it has a complete status change.

I was more interested in the countries that were some of the biggest gainers and the fact that, most of the time, those large gains that we see, those largest gains from countries, tend to be much smaller than the large declines. For instance, the big gains were in countries like Fiji that had a seven-point increase. Thailand had a six-point increase. Nepal and Liberia had a four-point increase. Those are dwarfed by the declines in Niger, which was an 18-point decrease, and Nagorno-Karabakh that was a 40-point decrease. Why is it so much easier to see big declines in countries rather than big gains?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Well, I think my blanket answer to that is once freedom and democracy is seriously imperiled, it is actually very hard work to recover and to rebuild. Positive progress is very slow. The more simplified answer is that wars and coups are immeasurably devastating to a country. The other thing that we've seen is that they are devastating in the short term, which you see in the one-year decline, but they're devastating in the long term too. So, the other countries that we saw some decline in, although not a huge decline, but continuing decline, were Burkina Faso, which had in the year before two coups in a single year as part of that Sahel belt of coups. We saw a continuing decline in Sudan, which had a coup and now has a civil war between military and paramilitary forces, which has displaced something like 9 million people.

We had further decline in Myanmar, which had a coup followed by what is now essentially a civil war, as the military tries to repress the armed opposition. So, in the short term, when you just look year to year, these events cause huge declines because if you think about the way we measure freedom, it's a scale of political rights and then civil liberties. Once a coup comes into place and they suspend the government or they disband the government, then they ban all opposition parties, then they restrict all media, and then they restrict all protest. It just hits across so many indicators that it creates this numerically huge decline, which I think reflects what's actually happening on the ground.

But then it has these longer-term ramifications that continue those rights get repressed further or associated rights get repressed even more. Things where maybe they restrict movement because they don't want people to shift around or institute a curfew or something like that. On the other hand, when you have improvements, it's a slow process. The other thing that we try to do is measure people's actual lived experience and not just the legal changes or the promise of laws. We really wait for the experience on the ground to change. That means that when a new government comes into office and promises a slate of huge changes, we don't immediately say that's a positive improvement. We wait for the actions to take place.

Fiji is actually a really good example of this because the positive election was in 2022. It wasn't in 2023. But we needed the year to see if the government would actually do what they said they would do. There was some question that the government actually wouldn't be allowed to take office. There were questions about how effective they would be. There are all these issues. There's a gap in time between the start of the process and positive improvement and the actual positive improvement that you see in scores. You're right that often numerically, it's much harder to improve in a large way than it is to decline.

jmk

It also makes a philosophical point that it's a lot easier to break down institutions of the state than it is to rebuild them. It's not just tyrannical states that are the ones that are creating threats to freedom. Oftentimes, it's the absence of the state to be able to protect those rights and freedoms that's the bigger problem in a lot of ways. In the countries that are doing the worst, it’s a lack of state capacity that they have rather than a state that's so powerful that it's threatening rights and liberties.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

I think both are true. Another example of sort of nonstate actors that are really threatening state institutions and democracy is what's happening in Ecuador. Ecuador had a well administered election. It was a snap election. It was competitive, well-run, but it was incredibly violent. You had a presidential candidate who's assassinated 11 days before the vote. The rest of the candidates had to wear body armor. They limited their campaigning. People were afraid to go to the polls, so the effect of nonstate violence on democracy and democratic institutions is huge.

Another example of this is that Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, had an election last year. It was a competitive election. It was administered, I mean, there were problems, but relatively okay. But, the threat of insurgent violence did keep some people away from the polls and it did hinder the administration of the election. It was supposed to be the most voters ever to participate in this election, the most young voters, and in the end it had very low turnout. That can imperil the long-term legitimacy of the elected government, because they're elected by a very small proportion of the population in this hugely populous country that is also facing a lot of different problems.

So, I think criminal violence, sort of armed violence, is something that we don't talk a lot about because it's not a classic democracy problem, but it's a really serious challenge to almost all democratic institutions and especially democratic institutions in countries with low state capacity. But it's a problem that builds on itself, because violence degrades state capacity and then countries become less able to deal with the violence and their democratic institutions suffer as a result. Then it becomes a cascade of these problems, essentially.

jmk

Yeah, and sometimes the solutions end up degrading democracy even further, like what we've seen happen in El Salvador with Bukele.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Absolutely, that's an excellent example. Bukele was reelected just in February. He is undeniably very, very popular. He's very popular because El Salvador was facing a crisis in terms of violence when he took power and he solved that crisis by instituting a state of emergency that essentially eliminated due process and the rule of law in the country. You can be detained anywhere, at any time, for any reason, for an arbitrary amount of time as long as the government decides that that's appropriate. As a result, you have 70,000 people in detention in El Salvador. No huge surprise, violence has gone down. Mobility has improved for people. Businesses are able to operate. All those things are true and it's made Bekele incredibly popular.

Nevertheless, another major theme in this report is electoral manipulation and Bukele engaged in quite a bit of electoral manipulation to win this election. Just to participate in this election, you know, El Salvador has a constitutional prohibition against consecutive presidential terms. If you've been paying attention, Bukele has now begun his second consecutive presidential term, in part, because in 2021 he fired all the judges off the constitutional court and appointed judges that then reinterpreted the constitution to allow him a second consecutive term. But more than that his party also used their control of the national legislature to change the rules governing elections the same year the election was being held to reduce the number of seats, thereby making districts much bigger and actually making it much harder for opposition parties to win.

So, despite the fact that he came in, he used these restrictions on freedoms to get control of the problem of violence, which made him incredibly popular, he didn't stop at those rights violations. He went on to change the rules around elections to keep himself in power essentially. So definitely this is an example of dangerous leaders coming to power through elections and then manipulating the rules once they're in power.

jmk

Yeah, I think Bukele really demonstrates one of the paradoxes of authoritarianism, which is that he's found ways to increase state capacity while at the same time weakening state institutions.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Right, because he's centralized power and in some ways that's incredibly effective sometimes for some policies. Being able to make decisions in a really centralized way can be effective in solving problems. Institutional paralysis of the kind that we see in the US, but also that we see in places like Peru is devastating. It can really hinder any kind of problem solving, any kind of policy advances. In Peru it pitted the president against the legislature, which has now resulted in the attempted autogolpe two years ago and then the subsequent power struggle between supporters of the president and supporters of the legislature. But you see this dysfunction really hinder policy and democratic process.

On the other hand, when elected officials, elected executives, and it's mostly the executive that you see this in, presidents especially, try to solve that problem by concentrating all the decision-making power in their own hands, that has a lot of different effects, including the weakening of all other check and balance institutions, including the legislature, but also significantly in lots of countries, courts. That creates these ripple effects that weaken democracy going forward, because once this person leaves office, someone else takes office, but they take office in this newly empowered pyramid of the executive. Then they get to decide on whatever policies they want to decide and maybe they weaken elections to allow themselves to continue in that office. So, I think both sides of the coin are really problematic for democracy.

jmk

I want to step back to a theme that you were discussing just a moment ago. We were talking about how there's a lot of violence in a lot of these countries, a lot of things happening, and you were discussing quite a bit about the different coups that have happened, particularly in Africa, but we've also seen them in places like Myanmar. Why is it that we're seeing so many coups in recent years? Because for a long time, it felt like there was sort of an anti-coup norm and that the declines in democracy were coming from executive takeovers, declines in checks and balances, but we weren't seeing militaries actually physically seize power like we saw during the Cold War. Why is it that we're seeing more of those once again?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

So, Niger was the sixth country since 2020 in the Sahel to experience a coup. Other countries include Mali, Guinea, Chad, and Sudan. It actually also was not the only country last year to have a coup in that region of Africa more broadly. Gabon also saw a coup and I think you heard less about Gabon's coup because, well, there are a lot of other things happening, but also because Gabon was a deeply authoritarian country in which an authoritarian president who was the head of a family dynasty that's been in charge of the country for something like three decades was replaced by his own presidential guard, but interestingly enough, immediately following an election that he won. Basically, the military said, ‘No, that election doesn't count. We're now in charge.’

The coup in Niger received a lot more attention because it deposed a democratically elected government and one that was widely popular. President Bazoum was in close contact with the US and Europe. From his detention he managed to write an op ed talking about how bad things were and what was happening. So, there's definitely an increase in coups and I think it's worrying that it is geographically concentrated, in part because we're seeing a simultaneous weakening of the regional institutions. ECOWAS is the one I'm thinking of here, which tried to pressure the coup leaders in Niger to reverse their action.

The problem though was that ECOWAS was openly opposed by the leaders of Burkina Faso and Mali who are themselves coup leaders and who openly said that if ECOWAS mustered a military force to try and depose the military junta in Niger that they would send their own troops. So, then you have a regional organization that has to balance whether or not they want to risk a war, essentially, or a conflict in the region. I think that might go some way to answering the question of why this norm is degrading.

In part it’s because the cascade of coups has its own self-reinforcing effects. You have more leaders who have taken the step to replace the elected government, then they offer support to each other, and both Mali and Burkina Faso also postponed promised elections that they said they were going to have. They start to support each other. I think in part this goes back to something that Freedom House has been concerned about for a long time, which is the unified force of undemocratic governments banding together and opposing democratic norms. There is something to be said about how dangerous that is and how dangerous it is when it's geographically concentrated, when it's close in time, and when it openly challenges regional or international organizations as well.

jmk

So, I was reading about the upcoming election in Belarus and it's obviously not in this year's report because it hasn't happened yet. But I found it fascinating that it's a multi-party election that does not have a genuine opposition party. All of the parties support Lukashenko, who is nominally an independent. He rises above political parties apparently. How do you think about those type of elections? Because in the past, what we've been demanding were for multiparty elections where people would have a choice, but people are being given choices like genuine choices, except for they're not meaningful choices at the same time. It seems to be really an evolution of what autocratic elections really are.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

That still contributes to upholding the norm of elections. The fact that it's not a one-party state, even though for all intents and purposes, it is a one-party state or I should say Belarus is a no party state. There are no legitimate political parties in Belarus that are competing in elections. There is whatever Lukashenko and his corrupt structure and however they want to exercise that power. The political parties are mere labels. But these things still matter. I'm thinking about one of the elections that was in the report, the Cambodian election You know Hun Sen who's been in power for 30 years won that election with the Cambodian Communist Party. It was not a genuinely competitive election, even though there were, I think, 16 other parties on the ballot.

So, people had a choice except for the fact that the most popular opposition party, the Candlelight Party, was not allowed to compete. It was not allowed to compete based on the fact that they couldn't produce their original registration paperwork and they couldn't produce the original registration paperwork for the Electoral Commission because it had been seized by the police in a raid five or six years ago and never returned to them. Obviously, a completely manufactured reason but they were excluded from the election. But that didn't make the election uncompetitive. It made it effectively uncompetitive but not on paper uncompetitive.

Still, the fact that Hun Sen has been in power for 30 years and went through the trouble of finding a legal mechanism, and let's be frank, Cambodia imprisons political opponents left and right, so he didn't need this kind of reason. But he went through the trouble of finding a legal loophole to exclude the Candlelight Party so that he could win and then appoint his son as his successor. That tells you something too. He's still committed to some form of at least faux or facade democracy. I think that regular multiparty but noncompetitive elections tell me that free and fair elections are a norm that is still universal and that authoritarians still hold on to.

jmk

The report paints a very bleak picture overall. I think we've discussed that a few times. But you did mention that there are signs of optimism and you mentioned a few of those. Can you go more in depth in one of them that really stood out to you, one of them that meant a lot to you personally?

Yana Gorokhovskaia

In making this report and doing our assessment, we spent a lot of time talking about the election in Thailand this year. As you mentioned, it's one of the countries that had one of the biggest point improvements and that was the result of a competitive election process. Now, we have to be realistic. The party that eventually formed government, Pheu Tai, was not the winner of the election. It had the second most votes, which is still significant. The Move Forward Party did not form a government, was not allowed to form a government, despite the fact that it won the largest plurality of votes and therefore plurality of seats.

It should have been allowed to form a government, but because Thailand has this unelected Senate and it has a mechanism from the previous coup due to the fact that the military was able to write the constitution where the Senate approves whoever the nomination for prime minister is. So, it's the combined vote of the two houses that is needed and without the Senate's approval, it's impossible to become Prime Minister, even if you win the majority of elected seats. That's what happened to the Move Forward Party and then subsequently, their leader has a lot of legal limitations and ways to prevent him from taking power. He's now no longer the leader of that political party.

So, when you step back and you think there was a competitive election, but in the end, the party that was the choice of the people did not form government. That seems pretty undemocratic. But I think if you take the longer view there's actually a lot of positive movement, because the party that did form government, Pheu Tai, was the party that was kept out of forming government in the previous election and it's still not a military party. It's in the opposition wing.

The fact that the people of Thailand participated in this election, they debated the issues, they had choice, they had genuine choice, that both these parties were able to compete, that there were a lot of young people who were involved, that the Move Forward Party campaigned openly on reforming the constitution on lessening the power of the military, which is a huge taboo subject in the country - all of these things were able to happen and yes, in the end, the result was controlled through these undemocratic constitutional provisions. Nevertheless, this is movement forward. This really is progress. This is competition, competitiveness. This is pluralism. This is really important stuff, especially in the context of Thailand, which is a unique country and has a unique history. I'm really happy to see that I think that is genuinely a positive development.

jmk

So, every time I see a report like this come out, whether it's from yourself or from varieties of democracy or polity, there's a lot of criticism. Sometimes the criticism is just about the very idea of trying to compare how democratic or how free countries are. Just the very idea that you can't really put a number on how democratic a country is. But then there are also other criticisms out there about the specifics of the report, such as if India has a major decline, people from India are oftentimes ones to complain. If a country in Western Europe has a decline, sometimes people who live there might complain. Sometimes if you don't have a decline and you actually have an improvement, people will complain that democracy is still being held back and that there aren’t really meaningful gains.

Your report is different than some of the other measures of democracy and freedom out there because I feel like it's very public facing. You do an amazing job with all of your reports in terms of making them understandable to the general public and a wider audience. Can you explain what the purpose of a report like this is, not just for people who are really dialed into democracy, but also in trying to communicate these ideas?

 Yana Gorokhovskaia

Well, as I said, we're now in our 51st year for Freedom in the World. The first report was issued in 1973 and the benchmark that was being used, how we created the methodology that we still use today, is actually based on the universal declaration of human rights. The yardstick that we're using is an international mechanism that countries around the world have agreed to and committed to. It's not one about measuring the performance of a government. It's not about parsing whether right-wing policies are better or liberal policies. It's not about parsing policy outcomes. It's really about fundamental freedoms and whether or not people get to experience those. All of that is also geared to trying to explain to people in the general public what's happening around the world and putting people's experience really in the context of this kind of global picture.

So, we started this conversation by saying that there's this shocking thing that happened in Nagorno-Karabakh, but I would bet that a lot of people don't know where Nagorno Karabakh is. Part of this report, at least for me, is about talking about places like Nagorno Karabakh or Fiji or Bhutan and putting that in context to what's happening in places you have heard of like the Gaza Strip or Thailand or Niger or Sweden or the UK. It's all of that. It's providing that global comparative picture and putting it in the perspective of people's lived experience so that people understand when they read the news and when they absorb the news, what's happening and giving them that broader picture.

jmk

Well, Yana, thank you so much for joining me today. The report once again is Freedom in the World: The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict. That's the title of the executive summary. Again, it's always an impressive report. Thank you so much for being one of those to author and spearhead the project. It's again, incredibly impressive. Thank you so much for joining me in this conversation.

Yana Gorokhovskaia

Thanks so much for having me.