Unit 10 Women’s right to vote and the reduction in child mortality in the United States
10.5 The advance of democracy and its stalling
Democracy, as we have defined it, did not exist as a system of national government prior to the late nineteenth century, when New Zealand adopted universal voting rights (including the substantial non-European Māori population). A century later half of the countries of the world were governed democratically and roughly half of the population of the world lived under democratic rule. Early in the twenty-first century, however, the fraction of countries that were governed democratically levelled off and the fraction of people living under democratic rule began to fall.
India, which had been the largest democracy in the world, moved into what political scientists call ‘electoral autocracy’; elections were held, but they were not considered to be fair, and freedom of speech and the media were substantially limited. Later in this section Figure 10.6 shows that similar cases of what is termed democratic backsliding occurred in Hungary, Türkiye, and Indonesia (which, after India’s departure from the list of democracies, was the second most populous democracy in the world).
Limited government, social unrest, and universal suffrage
How did democracy emerge as such a successful form of government, replacing forms of undemocratic rule in which coalitions of wealthy males from a dominant ethnic group effectively determined who governed and how they used their resulting political power?
- capitalism
- An economic system in which the main form of economic organization is the firm, where the private owners of capital goods hire labour to produce goods and services to be sold in markets with the intent of making a profit. The main economic institutions in a capitalist economic system are private property, markets, and firms.
Perhaps curiously, capitalism is part of the answer. During the eighteenth century the expansion of this new economic system created two new classes of people: capitalists—owners of firms—whose power derived from their wealth, and their employees whose power derived from their numbers and their ability to unite in collective action on behalf of their interests.
The emerging capitalist class sought limits on the government’s ability to arbitrarily intervene in economic affairs. The working class sought a voice in determining the exercise of governmental powers. Paradoxically, over two centuries of conflict, these two opposing forces brought about what is now termed the liberal democratic form of government. Under this system the government was limited by the rule of law and the kinds of rights advanced in the American Bill of Rights (1791) and the French Revolution’s Rights of Man and Citizen (1789)—two of the three components of a democratic society.
The third component of democracy is a virtually universal right to vote in fair and decisive elections, where the winner determines who governs. How this became established can be traced to the fact that economic inequality grew following the introduction of the capitalist economic system, as shown in Figure 10.5 below. In response, workers and others who were excluded from power by the existing limited franchises demanded to be included in the process of governing and they threatened to disrupt the status quo if they were not granted democratic rights. This process was facilitated by urbanization: many of the less well-off had come to live in cities and to work together in factories, where their close proximity made cooperating in their demands for democratic rights much easier than it had been among farmers dispersed across the countryside. During this period, farmers, industrial workers, and the poor demanded greater political equality—and especially the right to vote—as a means of gaining a larger share of the output and wealth of the rapidly growing capitalist economies.
Figure 10.5 Share of total wealth held by the richest 1% (1740–2021).
Adapted from Figure 19 of Daniel Waldenström and Jesper Roine. 2014. ‘Long-Run Trends in the Distribution of Income and Wealth’. In Anthony Atkinson and Francois Bourguignon (eds) Handbook of Income Distribution: Volume 2a. North-Holland. Data; World Inequality Database. 2021.
In 1848 there were attempted revolutions against the monarchy in Sicily, France, Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. At the same time, Karl Marx was writing The Communist Manifesto. One of the leaders of the Chartists, a movement for democratic reform in Britain, James Bronterre O’Brien, told the people:
Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property. 1
Gaining political power according to O’Brien was the route to gaining a larger slice of the economic pie, not the other way around.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the wealthy in many countries concluded that to protect their interests, extending democracy might be prudent.
Figure 10.6 shows that democracy, as defined by all three of the characteristics (rule of law, civil liberties, and inclusive fair elections), is a recent arrival in human history. The first nation to become fully democratic was New Zealand, just before the turn of the twentieth century, although it remained a British colony until 1907. At that time elections were held in many countries but in contrast to New Zealand, women, those without property, or other disadvantaged groups were denied the right to vote.
Figure 10.6 Democracies: origins, shortcomings, interruptions, and retreats.
Note: Blank periods correspond to time periods when a country does not fulfil V-Dem’s coding period criteria. Four of these countries were electoral democracies with substantial voting restrictions prior to 1900: in two of them—Switzerland and France—almost all men (but not women) have had the right to vote since 1848. Either a light-green or dark-green bar indicates a date at which the country is designated by V-Dem as an electoral democracy. The dark-green bars represent CORE’s definition of democracy requiring that virtually all citizens have the right to vote (including, for example, women).
Michael Coppedge et al. 2025. ‘V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v15’ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
South Africa and Mexico, along with some of the countries once ruled by the Communist Party (Poland, for example) are relatively recent additions to the club of democratic nations. According to our definition of democracy, Switzerland is also a recent addition. By the time that Swiss women finally won the right to vote in 1971, the prime ministers of Sri Lanka, India, and Israel were all women. Universal male suffrage in Switzerland had been granted 90 years earlier. If universal male suffrage were considered sufficient for an ‘inclusive’ election, then Switzerland and France (1848) would have been the first democracies, but the exclusion of major population groups means that elections are not inclusive, and so they fail our test.
Note that the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) research team that is the source of Figure 10.6 considers universal male suffrage to be sufficient to classify a country as an electoral democracy. The CORE Econ team does not use this definition, which is why we use light-green bars in the figure to signal the presence of substantial restrictions on voting. We know from the case of women’s suffrage in the US described in the introduction to this unit that women getting the vote had an important impact on politics.
The US enfranchised women in 1920 but denied the vote to African American people in many states before 1965. In Figure 10.6 this exclusion in the US is indicated with a light-green bar. Likewise indigenous Australians were denied the right to vote before 1962, and Canada restricted the voting rights of Native Americans for a lengthy period.
Figure 10.7 The advance of democracy in the world and its recent halt.
The three categories of political system are based on V-Dem’s classification, so the electoral democracies include some in which substantial fractions of the population (for example, women) are excluded from voting.
Michael Coppedge et al. 2025. ‘V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v15’ Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
The bottom (green) portion in Figure 10.7 charts the advance of democratic governance over most of the twentieth century. Notice that there have been three waves of increasing democracy.
The first wave occurred at the time of and just following the First World War and the Russian Revolution, tripling the number of democracies in the world in less than 10 years. The First World War provided much of the impetus for the spread of democracy during this first wave, particularly in Northern Europe. In those countries, the rule of law and civil liberties—the other two criteria for a democratic political system—had been in force long before the introduction of universal suffrage.
During the war, demands for extending the vote to all men became harder to resist. When the US entered the war in 1917, US President Woodrow Wilson called it a war ‘to make the world safe for democracy’, a claim that rang hollow given that in none of the major countries allied against Germany (UK, France, and Russia prior to the Russian Revolution) did people without property or women have the right to vote. In Britain, voting was initially restricted to men who owned property; at the end of the war the franchise was extended to all adult men, and to women over 30, then finally to all adult women in 1928.
A second wave of democracies emerged after the Second World War. Many former colonies, including India, became democratic at this time.
The third wave of democracies came after the end of communist rule in the former Soviet Union and its allies, beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The reversal in the advance of democracy between 1924 and the end of the Second World War is in part due to the rise of fascism in Europe and other political fallouts from the Great Depression.
The blue patches in the bars in Figure 10.6 show that there have been some interruptions in democracy, including the period of dictatorship in Chile following the military overthrow of the democratic government (discussed in Section 10.12), and the period of fascist rule in Germany between 1933 and 1945, but until recently most countries that have become democratic have remained so.
Democracy’s advance and the end of ‘the end of history’
The Second World War, like the first, was supported as a battle of democracy against the authoritarian political systems of Germany, Italy, and Japan. After their defeat and with the gradual decolonization of most of Asia and Africa, democracy became a rallying cry if not a reality throughout the world. Virtually all countries held elections of some sort; but in many cases elections were not fair, and because of the absence of the rule of law, there was widespread violation of individual rights.
- autocracy
- A form of government in which a single ruler (or body of rulers) monopolizes governmental powers.
To take account of these undemocratic societies with some of the appearances of democracy, political scientists distinguish between two forms of autocracy. In closed autocracies there are no elections. In electoral autocracies elections are held but the requisites for democratic governance are absent. ‘Sham democracies’ might be a more transparent term.
Figure 10.7 shows how closed autocracies, having constituted roughly two thirds of all political systems in the world prior to the end of the Second World War, were replaced over the rest of the twentieth century, for the most part by democracies and also by electoral autocracies. In 2010 closed autocracies were just 13% of the 178 political systems in the world, examples being China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. According to V-Dem, there were far more electoral autocracies (34%), examples being Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, Russia, Tanzania, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe.
Since 2010 however, a number of democratic countries have eliminated or compromised the democratic features of their system of government sufficiently to be reclassified as electoral autocracies—including some of the most populous in the world: India, Indonesia, and Türkiye. And some electoral autocracies have given up even sham democracy and become closed autocracy, including Afghanistan, Haiti, Iran, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.
For a short explainer, watch this video on the fall of the Soviet Union.
In 1992, just after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama wrote that we were witnessing what he termed the ‘end of history’, including prominently the triumph of democratic over authoritarian rule. Fukuyama termed this ‘the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’.2
By this he meant that the main ideological debates and conflicts of actual social systems (as in the Cold War) that had provided the storylines of the history of the past centuries were now over. Liberal democracy had won. Up until a decade or so after Fukuyama wrote these lines, there was some support for his idea, as illustrated in Figure 10.7. But the rest of the figure seems to suggest instead, the end of ‘the end of history’.
Exercise 10.6 How democracy helps protect the governed
In 1943 there was a famine in West Bengal, India, while the country was under colonial rule by the UK. At least 2 million people died as a result. Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel Prize, said that: ‘No famine has taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.’
- What defining features of a democracy might account for this?
- How would colonial rule by a foreign power differ from democracy?
- How might these differences help explain why the 1943 famine occurred, and why no famine has occurred in India since the transition from colonial to democratic rule?
- Read this article, and the introduction to The Economy 1.0 Unit 2 about the Irish famine. Explain how economic thinking at the time may have contributed to the limited response of the British colonial government to famine during that period.
