A Deterioration of Democracy?: Corruption, Transparency, and Apathy in the Western World

Arch Puddington, in his interview with the SAIS Review of International Affairs, expresses a firm belief in the power of interpretation. “An overemphasis on data,” he says, “can distort an analyst’s efforts to understand the true quality of freedom as thoroughly as can outright bias.” Freedom House’s annual reports on freedom have made data on democracy accessible for millions of people in the diplomatic, academic, and wider communities. These analyses have criticized governments throughout the Middle East, Africa, and Asia for anti-democratic and autocratic methods. However, Freedom House’s important work researching authoritarianism and democracy throughout the world should start to focus once again on its birthplace—the Western world.

Freedom House, based in the United States (and largely funded by government agencies such as the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development), could be—and has been—accused of having Western biases. A quick look at Freedom in the World 2014 shows that the United States and Canada, as well as the majority of European nations, are classified as “free” right up to the Ukrainian border.¹ However, several countries in Europe—as Freedom House rightly notes—have suffered democratic backsliding. France, Switzerland, and Hungary have all passed laws or gone through social movements seeking to limit the rights of migrants and ethnic minorities. These occurrences, though noted in Freedom House’s analysis, do not seriously affect the calculations within.

Hungary itself is an excellent example of where this analysis has masked the more sinister undertones within an open democracy. Hungary’s recent re-election of Viktor Orban—in an election widely seen as free and fair—can be seen as a backwards turn for Hungarian democracy. As a member of the right-wing, nationalist Fidesz party, Orban will likely have to make concessions to the far-right, anti-Semitic, and anti-Roma Jobbik party, which is gaining power and influence in Hungary. Orban has also courted the governments of the authoritarian states of Russia, Azerbaijan, and China, much to the consternation of other European states.² While Freedom House notes these events with concern, these movements do not seem to affect the calculations for Hungary, and it remains classified as a “free” state in Freedom in the World 2013. In a more objective, side-by-side analysis of migrant rights and media access, countries like Hungary may match more closely with China than their governments—or Freedom House—would care to admit.

Despite investigations by the BBC and Al-Jazeera showing that corruption is an issue in the European Union, Puddington pushes back against those allegations, and the wider implications for the deteriorating quality of electoral democracies in the established democratic world. “Every society based on money transactions suffers from corruption to one degree or another,” he says, arguing that corruption within the political class is the clearest sign that a society is undemocratic, and that such corruption is rare within Western democratic societies.

Giovanni Sartori’s “conceptual stretching” theory would imply that corruption cannot be the same everywhere. Dynastic authoritarian regimes are considered inherently corrupt by Western scholars; however, the stability they allow in some states (particularly those in a post-conflict state) ensures their popularity on a domestic level. In the United States, the recent Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, enshrining money as speech—and thus allowing unlimited amounts of private spending in political campaigns—could be viewed as corrupt in countries where politics remain clan- or kinship-based.³ The effects that the McCutcheon ruling will have on American democracy remain to be seen, but a likely outcome will be the continued disenfranchisement of low-income and minority voters as special interests pay their way into office.

Puddington notes that the American political system has “growing problems,” specifically pinpointing gerrymandering and voter ID laws as obstacles to continued democracy in the United States.⁴ He argues, however, that the United States still has a dynamic political system that prevents the emergence of xenophobic or racist parties. Puddington is correct in asserting that the United States is still...