Democracy in the Digital Era

Abstract

Different studies on the state of democracy worldwide, each using different indices and related weights, all reach similar conclusions. Democracy is “backsliding” for the 16th year in a row. In this chapter, we take a very brief look at the history of democracy from fifth-century BC Athens to today as background to identifying the role and position of digital technologies and big tech platforms in particular among the main causes of its current decline. Possible actions to reverse this trend by empowering uses of digital technologies that entrance democratic practices while guarding against uses with negative impact via appropriate regulation are examined as well as the prevention of concentration of economic and political power.

1 Introduction

Studies by different organizations on the state of democracy worldwide, while using different methodologies, arrive at the conclusion that there has been a continuous quantitative and qualitative retreat of democratic practices, including participation in and integrity of elections, civil liberties, and the rule of law for the last 16 years.

Following its “invention” in fifth-century BC Athens, democracy floundered after the early years of the Roman empire and then went into a sort of deep hibernation for centuries to be reawakened in the wake of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. From the French revolution of 1789 to the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989, democracy followed a tortuous path replete with reversals characterized by dragging reform in Britain, France’s second empire, the compromise of the merchant class and the land-owners under Bismarck, non-ending civil war in Spain, and a prevalence of fascist regimes in Europe following World War I (WWI) and until World War II (WWII). After the end of WWII, a 45-year-long Cold War started between US and European (by now democratic) states and the Soviet Union that ended in 1989. Following this, there was a euphoric belief in the 1990s that democracy was a sort of natural state that would be inevitably preserved and spread by capitalism and globalization.

This was complemented and reinforced during the same decade by the “blossoming” of the Internet and the World Wide Web, which promised to usher in a cultural renaissance that would reinvent and strengthen democracy.

Both of these hopes turned out to be utopic as democracy today is seen to be facing threats, some of which are in fact generated by the spread of digital technologies themselves.

While economic inequalities, globalization effects, immigration, and internal degeneration are the most cited causes for the worldwide retreat of democracy, digital technologies and the big tech platforms in particular are closely intertwined.

Big tech has amassed immense economic as well as political power. The former stems from its dominating corporate value and its “buy or bury” acquisition practices and the latter from its capability not only to lobby but also be used to influence and manipulate public opinion via “nudging,” “herding,” and “polarizing.” Today, we are witnessing a dual increase of awareness, the first being that democracy is in danger and must be defended and the second that there is a need to carefully regulate the digital ecosystem. This does not surprise as in the history of humankind, technology always had potentially both “good” and “bad” users.

The actions envisaged concerning digital technology can be classified in two broad categories. The first consists of initiating and supporting uses that are beneficial to humans and to society. The second consists of reining in the power and role of big tech platforms via regulation.

The “empowering the good” category includes digital assemblies, deliberative democracy, and other related uses of digital technology to support and strengthen democratic processes.

The “guarding against the bad” category includes primarily regulation like the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Market Act (DMA), and the AI Act, which is now in preparation in the EU and antitrust lawsuits by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission in the USA (European commission DMA, European commission DSA, AI Act).

What needs to be done in addition to empowering the “good” and guarding against the “bad” in today’s digital ecosystem is to continuously and collectively provide the forethought that enables the anticipation of what is coming and to ensure that the prioritization of future direction of research and development in transformational technologies like AI is not left in the hands of a few large companies.

• The general public and political decision-makers must be kept informed and made aware of what is at stake regarding the future of democracy.

• The role of education in achieving this must be explored and novel approaches developed and tested with a sense of urgency.

• As has been wisely noted, the biggest danger to democracy is to be lulled into believing that there is no danger.

2 Democracy in the Digital Era

During the last few years, study after study on the state of democracy worldwide concludes with words like “precipitous decline” and “backsliding” to describe what is measured as a quantitative and qualitative retreat of democratic practices (including elections, rule of law, and human rights) globally. Geographically, democracy appears to be restricted to (most of) Europe, the English-speaking world (thus including Australia and New Zealand), Japan, and then a small number of oases in an otherwise non-democratic geographical context. Over half of the world live under authoritarian regimes (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1

The state of democracy as measured by the Economist Intelligence Unit (Visual Capitalist)

What is a common feature emanating from the aforementioned studies is that people feel frustrated, alienated, disenfranchised, and disempowered to express themselves through the “normal” democratic processes. The young, in particular, share a deep mistrust of politics and politicians, which discourages them from participating in the political processes that are accessible to them. This results in a rise in populism, extremism, APEPs (anti-political establishment parties), and a growing attraction to so-called “strong” leaders, where “strong” is often used as a euphemism for autocratic.

Statements that receive significant support in recent US, France, Germany, and Japan polls read like:

In a democracy nothing gets done, we need perhaps less democracy and more effectiveness.

or … even worse:

We need a strong leader who does not have to deal with parliaments and elections.

Different studies (e.g., by EIU, Freedom House, the European Parliament, the Cato Institute, and other organizations on both sides of the Atlantic) use different indices and related weights (e.g., integrity of elections, participation, civil liberties, and rule of law), and any particular one could be (and is) criticized as to the data and methodology used. But when they all reach basically the same conclusion, i.e., that democracy is backsliding for the 16th year in a row, it is time to heed the warning bells (EIU.com, 2022; Freedom House, 2022; Vásquez et al., 2021).

Democracy is in danger.

To address this danger, it is important to identify its underlying causes and, for the purposes of this paper, the particular role that digital technologies have played and could play in the creation of the problem as well as the quest for a solution.

To help us do this, a brief “parcourse,” hopping across “rooftops,” which constitute landmarks from the origins of democracy to the present, is in order. Without any intent to disrespect early manifestations of democratic processes in the Mesopotamian region, it is broadly accepted that democracy with codified procedures was “born” in fifth century BC in Athens. The direct participation in Athenian democracy was restricted to free, well-off men (as were all subsequent re-inventions of democracy well into the nineteenth century), and yet it was a revolutionary concept in its foundational belief that rule by the many and not by the few was inherently superior (Cartledge, 2018). It contained key elements of liberalism (to prevent it from becoming a tyranny of the majority) as emanates from (perhaps the best political speech ever written) the Epitaph of Pericles as written by Thucydides:

We are a free democracy, but we obey our laws, more especially those which protect the weak and the unwritten laws whose transgression brings shame.

It is worth noting that the “unwritten laws” theme was echoed by Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s, who said:

In civilized life law floats in a sea of ethics.

This is why ancient Athens is often referred to as the “cradle” of democracy. The word “cradle,” however, evokes the image of an infant who is then expected to grow, perhaps undergo some turbulence through adolescence, and then settle into adulthood. Alas, this was not meant to be. Already after the end of the Peloponnesian war, Athenian democracy went into a backslide (to use today’s often used term), from which it never recovered. There were brief manifestations of democracy through the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.

By the sixth-century AD early Byzantium, democracy, in any form, went into a deep hibernation for centuries, to show signs of waking up in seventeenth-century England after the 1688 revolution and then to truly re-invent itself as constitutional representative democracy during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The Declaration of Human Rights after the 1789 French revolution provided a foundation for both the French constitution and the American constitution, the two first “modern” democracies. This was no accident as a key founder of the American constitution, Thomas Jefferson (Britannica, 2022), was actually a coauthor of the French Declaration of Human Rights (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2

Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Le Barbier)

The first article of this declaration starts with:

Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.

(Les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et égaux en droits)

(For the entire text in French and in English translation, see Constitutional Council.)

This new form of democracy was “representative” and not “direct” as in ancient Athens and contained key elements of liberalism, protection of human rights, and the rule of law. Most importantly, it adhered to the principle of the “Separation of Power” as articulated by Montesquieu:

Power should be divided among three separate branches of government (legislative, executive, judiciary) to prevent one person or faction from becoming tyrannical (OLL).

It should be noted here that eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the re-invention of democracy that it brought to the world, came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, as explained in O’Hara (2010). This was not the first time that new technologies bred not only economic but also sociopolitical changes, and it was not meant to be—as we shall see—the last (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3

Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment (Dutertre, Doerstling)

The newly re-invented democracy however, which survives in various forms to this day, was not destined to take the world by storm.

If we look at the period between 1789 and 1989 in Europe, the leitmotif during these two centuries is the slow, nonlinear quest for consensus on what should replace the “Ancient Regime” in Europe. Dragging reforms in Britain, France’s second empire, the compromise of the merchant class and the land-owning aristocrats under Bismark in Germany, and non-ending civil war in Spain are characteristic of the period. Then came the bloody World War I, following which “fascistoid” regimes prevailed in Europe in the 1930s with Nazism emerging as one of the most abhorrent manifestations thereof.

The perception of the USA as well as Britain as “beacons of democracy” during the 1930s—in spite of their many shortcomings—is not without some justification.

It took a second world war for the nation-states that had emerged after the dissolution of the empires in Europe to start adopting the various forms of the kind of liberal, representative democracy that we have today. The end of World War II also marked the beginning of a 45-year-long “Cold War” between the “West” or the “Free World” and the Soviet Union, officially “Union of Soviet, Socialist Republics,” or USSR. While the words democracy and republic are not synonyms, strictly speaking, as a democracy could have a (hereditary) monarch (e.g., Belgium) rather than an elected president (e.g., France), in practice, today’s purported “democracies,” as assessed by the various studies referred to earlier, include all “democratic republics.” The USSR however was not a democratic republic but rather a political system, which according to East Germany’s Walter Ulbricht “must look like a democracy but with everything under our control.” Similarly, not all of today’s republics (in name) are democratic.

During the Cold War, both sides engaged and invested in propaganda, including misinformation and argumentation aimed to “sell” their system as the preferred one to other countries and regions. This was complemented by fostering internal insurgencies as well as direct military interventions for the same purposes. The Cold War came to an end in 1989 as the Soviet Union imploded and collapsed. So after 45 years of Cold War, Western-type liberal representative democracy was no longer considered under threat, and it started being taken for granted. The theory was put forward that liberal democracy was a “natural state” to be nurtured, preserved, and spread by capitalism and globalization. This created a sense of euphoria as reflected by Fukuyama’s (in)famous characterization of that point in time as “the end of history” in his book with this phrase in its title, published in 1992 (Fukuyama, 1992). This theory, like most political and economic theories, suffered the only fate that, for a political theory, is worse than death; it was put into practice!

Concurrently, the World Wide Web was born and began to blossom, further strengthening the euphoria of the 1990s as it appeared to pave the way for a digital golden age of democracy, a cultural renaissance that would reinvent democracy as a digital Athenian agora where goods as well as ideas would be freely exchanged. This in turn, it was believed, with substantial preliminary evidence (e.g., the Arab Spring early hopes) would empower more direct and informed citizen participation in an open democratic society.

Alas, this vision of milk, honey, and digital democratic bliss turned out to be a utopia. The undeniable positive effects of the Web came in tandem with an increasing number of negative ones.

As democracy started backsliding, so started the growth of skepticism about the Web, leading eventually Tim Berners Lee to call for “global action to save the Web from political manipulation, fake news, privacy manipulation and other malign forces that threaten to plunge the world into a digital dystopia.” In fact, as we shall try to trace in the rest of this paper, democracy and digital technology have been living “parallel lives” from the 1990s to today. The euphoria of the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union caused a weakening of the defense and promotion of democracy via what Timothy Snyder of Yale called a “unilateral moral disarmament” (Snyder, 2017).

We argue that it was a very similar sense of euphoria that prevented the anticipation of some of the negative impacts of developments in digital technologies and the emergence of big tech in particular with their gigantic-scale monetization of personal data and the potential to be used to disrupt and corrupt democratic processes.

Before proceeding further, let us see what conclusions we can draw from our brief historical parcourse, which can help us the rest of the way.

Democracies have had a remarkably short life both in concept and in practice since the fifth century BC and have always been vulnerable as, by their open nature, they contain and nurture the seeds of their own degeneration. This openness can be and has been exploited by demagogues from Julius Caesar to Mussolini and to Trump. Misinformation and people manipulation may not be new. A great eighteenth-century Enlightenment personality, Jonathan Swift, had written “falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it; so, when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect.” They are, however, exacerbated and reach new levels when empowered by digital technologies and AI in particular and become much harder to identify, let alone contain. What is new is a resilient false sense of security and an underestimation of the lurking dangers in what regards the evolution of democracy as it interacts with the evolution of the digital ecosystem.

As in the rest of this chapter, we will concentrate on trying to identify the threats to democracy emanating from developments in the digital ecosystem; it is important to point out, clearly and in advance, that these are certainly not the only and perhaps not even the greater threats.

Most analyses of the continuing backsliding of democracy identify as major causes and continuing threats the following:

• Rising economic inequalities especially after the 2008 crisis, which are compounded by related globalization effects

• Immigration, especially after the 2015 crisis and its subsequent and continued exploitation by demagogues

• Internal degeneration of democratic processes such as the exploitation of constitutional defects (e.g., gerrymandering and the politicization of the Supreme Court in the USA, “de-liberalization” of democracy in Hungary, and corruption almost everywhere)

These threats are intertwined with and reinforced by the ones emanating from the evolution of the digital ecosystem. It should also be added here that democracies, even during their rather short existence, have never been static but frequently readjusted themselves to socioeconomic but also technological change from the first industrial revolution to the current digital one. To take the first two modern democracies as examples, France is now in its “Fifth Republic” and the US constitution has been amended 27 times. The first ten of these amendments constitute the “Bill of Rights,” offering protection of personal liberty and curtailing government power (National Archives, 2021).

Today, we are witnessing a double “correction” (of both democracy and the digital landscape) being attempted. Democracies have started on the one hand, to react to the new threats emanating from the evolution of digital technologies and, on the other, to find innovative ways of harnessing the very same technologies for “good,” so as to strengthen and enrich themselves by greater citizen participation. Simply put, this constitutes a “guard against the bad, empower the good” approach.

Let us start by looking at the second, innovative beneficial uses of digital technologies.

3 Empowering the Good

As the polls and studies referred to earlier demonstrate, there is a growing disillusionment among young people (and not only) with the democratic processes. The prevailing feeling is that they are called every 4 years or so to vote and are then forgotten until the next election while laws that affect them are passed, including obscure(d) amendments, without their having any say.

“Decisions are made about us without us” is one of the slogans that best captures their malaise. This feeling of alienation is aggravated by the fact that their elected “representatives” have split loyalties, where loyalty to voters comes second to party or donor loyalties.

To address and remedy this alienation and lack of trust, the innovative concept of “citizen assemblies” was developed and applied—in a yet rather limited scale—successfully as a complement to the established democratic processes of elections and referendums.

It is worth noting that a very similar concept was used in fifth-century BC Athens. Having arrived at the cynical but realistic conclusion that professional politicians could “be bought,” Athenians introduced a system whereby a group of citizens was chosen by lot to assemble and debate a topic so that they could then formulate a related proposal, which was subsequently voted up or down by the “ekklesia of the demos,” where all citizens participated.

A modern version of this process was used successfully in Ireland in 2018 prior to the referendum that had been called on whether or not abortions should be allowed (Citizens Assembly, 2016).

Before the referendum, a citizens’ assembly was formed consisting of 99 members, 33 of which were appointed by the political parties and 66 randomly chosen citizens while assuring age, gender, education, and socioeconomic status balance. They assembled, were provided with information about the issue by supporters of all sides, discussed among themselves, and then made their recommendation, which was in favor of allowing legal abortion. This recommendation was made public, and the referendum which followed endorsed it, which constituted a historical outcome for Ireland.

This concept of a citizens’ assembly as a deliberative body of citizens selected “randomly” has also been used successfully in the adoption of a new constitution in Iceland and elsewhere (the interested reader can find more about citizen assemblies and the concepts of sortition and deliberative democracy at Helbing, D. (2019), Wikipedia, “Citizens’ assembly” and “Sortition” (March 2023)). All of these, and other such innovative approaches, could eventually help “empower the good” by harnessing digital power, to entrance their effectiveness and help spread their use worldwide.

The pandemic offers a particularly interesting case study of the use of digital technologies for “empowering the good.” There is a range of such case studies from virtual Town Hall meetings to the Taiwan Digital Democracy experiment, which, using the slogan “Fast, fair and fun,” provides a successful mix of direct and representative democracy empowered by digital technologies (National Development Council, 2020, How to Citizen, 2021).

A pivotal role in all these ongoing efforts to harness as much of the power of digital in support of democracy will be played, undoubtedly, by using this power in education. As the scope of this chapter does not allow for addressing this key digital humanism issue or even for surveying the existing studies on this subject, suffice it for now to quote Nelson Mandela:

An educated, enlightened and informed population is one of the surest ways of promoting the health of democracy.

Returning to the leitmotif of the parallel lives of democracy and digital, we believe that we are actually witnessing an attempt to effect a double “correction.”

An attempted correction of the perceived decline of democracy via increased awareness of the dangers involved resulting in efforts such as the digital assemblies and digital deliberation and at the same time an attempted correction of the role and impact of big tech via new regulatory policies and approaches aimed to “guard against the bad.”

4 Guarding Against the Bad

Interestingly enough, the correction we are witnessing includes post-pandemic tremors in the digital landscape.

There are tremors in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) business models, which may or may not prove ephemeral as their digital advertisement model comes under closer scrutiny by regulators and the crypto world convulsions following the collapse of FTX cryptocurrency company have shaken confidence in it.

It is in this context that the new regulatory initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic are coming to guard against the negative impact of digital technologies on democracy by regulation, which reshapes the rules of the game in the digital ecosystem.

There are two major regulatory policies that have been adopted in the EU, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and the Digital Services Act (DSA). The AI Act, which aims to provide protection from the potential harm by AI applications, is currently in the last stages of deliberation, which precedes adoption and which tries to take into account recent advances in generative AI (European commission DMA; European commission DSA; AI Act).

The DMA, which becomes applicable in May 2023, targets the GAFAM companies and comes to enhance the prior ex post anti-trust approach with ex ante checks, which have a more realistic chance of preventing the concentration of enormous economic as well as political power by big tech (or GAFAM plus if you prefer). Their political power, besides lobbying, stems from the novel capabilities to nudge, herd, condition, and polarize public opinion as has been amply documented by now. The DSA establishes a transparency and accountability framework so as to protect consumers and their fundamental rights online.

These capabilities have been and are being used by both internal and external perpetrators of threats to democracy.

In the past, EU regulatory legislation, e.g., General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), was subsequently adopted by most countries in the world leveraging the so-called Brussels effect (Bradford, 2020; Intersoft Consulting, 2016). The USA maintained a skeptical position toward regulation until now, arguing that regulation potentially stifles innovation. The US position has been slowly but steadily shifting on this as evidenced by recent anti-trust lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) against members of GAFAM.

This does not mean that the EU and US approaches to regulation are anywhere near convergence yet, but there is now the political will to seek common ground so as to avoid the risk of a balkanization of the regulation of the digital ecosystem. The EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) has been set up for this purpose: “to strengthen global co-operation on technology, digital issues and supply chains and to facilitate regulatory policy and enforcement cooperation and, when possible, convergence.”

It is worth making the historical note that the origins of anti-trust policy in the USA had not only economic but also democratic motivations (Robertson, 2022). The cornerstone of this policy, the Sherman Act of 1890, which eventually led to the breakup of Standard Oil and ATT, had as its goal “the prevention of the extension of economic power to political power.”

The words used by Senator John Sherman himself at the time illustrate this clearly:

If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

It is left to the reader to identify, among the present fauna of the digital ecosystem, such “autocrats of trade,” which, if left unregulated, will accelerate the accumulation of power with artificial intelligence advancing as its driving force. Such a centralization and concentration of economic and political power would constitute a clear threat to democracy and our humanistic values.

Policies aimed at addressing these threats need all our support in order to succeed.

This chapter provides an introduction to the other two in the section as well as to G. Parker’s chapter on platforms. One, by G. Zarkadakis, looks at digital technology practices that “empower the good” by facilitating citizen deliberation at scale, and the other, by A. Stranger, explores whether and how cryptocurrencies and decentralized finance could be “guided” so as to be beneficial rather than detrimental to democracy.

5 Conclusions

Democracies have had a rather short life compared with autocracies and have always been vulnerable.

Their very openness allows for the nurturing of seeds of their degeneration.

Today, democracy is in decline worldwide, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Digital technologies carry the potential for being used to the benefit or to the detriment of democracy.

Action is needed to encourage and empower the beneficial uses but also to guard against the detrimental ones.

Beneficial uses include building on experiences such as with digital assemblies and deliberative democracy approaches.

Detrimental uses include those that result in the concentration of immense economic and political power in the hands of a few companies that control the “public sphere.”

Anticipatory, dynamic regulation is key to guarding against the detrimental uses.

The biggest threat to democracy is for people to believe that there is no threat.

Discussion Questions for Students and Their Teachers

• 1. How did democracy evolve from ancient Athens to today?

• 2. What are the major threats to democracy today?

• 3. What are some digital technology uses that are beneficial to democracy?

• 4. Why do current big tech platforms pose potential threats to democracy?

• 5. What sort of regulation is or can be provided to counter these threats?

Learning Resources for Students

Reading these books helped me greatly to understand much of what I tried to present in this chapter. Some (e.g., Cortledge and Runciman) are primarily historical, while others (e.g., Applebaum, Rachmann, Teachout) analyze how democracy should not be taken for granted and what actions can be taken to protect and sustain it.

• 1. Allison, G. (2017) Destined for war: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s trap?, Mariner Books.

  A concise survey of current geopolitics whose developments may well affect global democracy profoundly

• 2. Applebaum, A. (2020) Twilight of democracy: The seductive lure of authoritarianism, Doubleday.

  This book provides concrete evidence of how and why the threat of authoritarianism is rising globally.

• 3. Bartlett, J. (2018) The people vs tech: How the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it), Ebury Press.

  Bartlett identifies the key pillars of liberal democracy and describes how each pillar could be threatened by technology and what could be done about it.

• 4. Berman, S. (2019) Democracy and dictatorship in Europe: From the ancient régime to the present day, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

  This book provides a historical perspective on how and why democracies as well as dictatorships prevailed at different times in Europe since the development of nation-states.

• 5. Cartledge, P. (2018) Democracy: a life citation, United Kingdom, Oxford University Press.

  The author provides an authoritative “biography” of democracy from its birth to its eclipse and eventual rebirth.

• 6. Pappas, T. (2019) Populism and liberal democracy: A comparative and theoretical analysis, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

  This book looks at concrete cases of populism in various parts of the world as a basis of developing a comprehensive definition of populism.

• 7. Rachman, G. (2022) The age of the strongman: How the cult of the leader threatens democracy around the World, Bodley Head.

  This is a most timely work examining the global rise of authoritarian, nationalist/populist leaders, and its corrosive impact on democracy.

• 8. Runciman, D. (2015) The confidence trap: A history of democracy in crisis from World War I to the present, Princeton University Press.

  Runciman provides a lucid history of modern democracy from World War I onward, stressing how dangerous it is to believe that democracies can survive any crisis.

• 9. Teachout, Z. (2020) Break ‘em up, St Martin’s Publishing Group.

  The author makes an impassioned plea for breaking up big tech and prides documentation of how the prevailing strong antitrust movement waned after the 1980s and why it should be revived urgently.