What the ‘year of democracy’ taught us, in 6 charts

It was heralded as the year of democracy. With more than one and a half billion ballots cast in 73 countries, 2024 provided a rare opportunity to take the social and political temperature of nearly half the world’s population.

The results are now in, and they have passed a judgment of condemnation on public office holders.

An incumbent president in each of the 12 developed Western nations that held national elections in 2024 lost vote share at the polls for the first time in nearly 120 years of modern democracy. In Asia, even the hegemonic governments of India and Japan have not been spared the tailwind.

Acting or otherwise, centrists were often defeated as voters threw their lot behind radical parties on both sides.

The results paint a picture of an angry electorate stung by record inflation, fed up with economic stagnation, worried about rising immigration and increasingly disillusioned with the system as a whole.

In a sense, the year of democracy screamed that democracy no longer works, as the younger generation, many voting for the first time, voiced the strongest objections to the government.

On average across the developed worldThe vote share of incumbent presidents fell by seven percentage points in 2024, an all-time record and more than double the decline, as voters punished elected officials in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The string of countries producing similar results points to a general undercurrent, with inflation as the obvious culprit.

In 2024, high and rising prices were the top concern among the vast majority of countries going to the polls. Although recessions are deeply unpopular, their effects are unevenly distributed.

But if the cost-of-living crisis acted as a handicap for incumbents, a closer look across countries and regions shows that it was far from the only driver of discontent.

The biggest backlash against the incumbent government came in Britain, where the Conservatives’ charge sheet included not only high prices but also a corruption scandal, a crisis in public health provision, a self-inflicted economic shock and a sharp rise in immigration.

Across France, President Emmanuel Macron’s attempt to protect the populist right by calling snap legislative elections has backfired, with the resulting political chaos yet to be fully resolved months later.

In India, Narendra Modi’s formidable Bharatiya Janata party machine secured a narrow victory but lost its parliamentary majority as it struggled to contain a tide of discontent over a growing disconnect between strong economic growth and weak job creation.

This has been particularly pronounced among young people, with the unemployment rate reaching nearly 50 percent before the election, according to data from the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy.

Even the exceptions to the anti-establishment wave are less anomalous when viewed in the context of other central themes in the year’s political shifts.

In Mexico and Indonesia respectively, Claudia Sheinbaum and Prabowo Subianto each improved on the incumbent’s advantage. In both cases, they ran broad campaigns promising continuity with their anti-elitist predecessors, showing near-universal success for the populists over the past twelve months to the supremacy of the new social media landscape, another common theme.

Looking around the world, the lackluster performance of centrist parties and the march of populists, especially on the right, was as strong a theme as the anti-establishment tide, perhaps stronger.

The victory of the Labor Party in Britain is no exception, as it won by fewer votes this year than in either of the previous two elections, and just months after the landslide victory, opinion has turned sharply against both the party and the leader.

Meanwhile, the French public’s distaste for Macron and his centrist party reflects a broader global mood of disillusionment with the political establishment and a sense that: elected officials either don’t know or don’t care what ordinary people think.

Although it ultimately fell short of its expected victory, the 15-point swing in the French National Assembly was the largest by any party in any developed country this year. The second, third and fourth biggest gains of the year were all by right-wing populists representative of the Austrian Freedom Party, the British Reform UK and the Portuguese Chega.

This suggests that immigration has become a growing concern in the developed world in recent years and has been one of the main issues on voters’ minds when they go to the polls.

Where the Conservatives lost ground, the main beneficiaries were parties on the right.The success of Nigel Farage’s “British Reform” in driving away Conservative voters in the UK is widely attributed to his failure to deliver on his promise to reduce immigration.

But the anti-establishment successes were not limited to the right. Britain’s Greens were one of the radical left parties that also gained ground as voters disillusioned with the outdated center broke in two directions.

While the timing and magnitude of the anti-government wave mostly points to a short-term shock to high prices, the populist surge looks more like a continuation, or perhaps an acceleration; trend this has been happening in an increasing number of countries for at least two decades.

A prominent theory about why we see this was laid out in an influential theory paper It was published earlier this year by a team of Harvard economists who found that people who grow up with weaker economic growth and less intergenerational progress are more likely to see the world as zero-sum, where one person’s interest must come to someone else’s benefit.

Steady decline in upward economic mobility in Armenia rich countries may thus explain much of the growth of these views which tend to be related with the support of both left-wing and right-wing parties and politicians who promise to dismantle the existing system or defend against external threats.

One more chance is that dramatic changes in the media landscape over the past two decades have played a role in eroding long-standing norms against populist rhetoric and conversation. The emergence of social media has made it easier for political outsiders to speak directly to the public, leveling the playing field had previously leaned towards established figures and parties.

Beneath the surface Among the headline results, one of the most striking patterns seen country by country is the rise in support for the populist right among young men.

In Britain, support for Reform is now greater among men in their late teens and twenties than among men in their thirties, and a significant gender gap has opened up among the youngest voters , and the same pattern is seen in most of Europe.

It is noteworthy that there is a lot of room for this trend to continue. the proportion who say they would consider voting for the radical right is even higher than those who already have.

Such a marked shift is striking, but without a plausible explanation. steady decline throughout the west.

But it’s not just young people who are going to extremes: Young women in the US have also turned to Trump, while in the UK they’ve moved heavily to the Greens.

This fits research Earlier this year, polling firm FocalData found that young people were much more likely than their elders to support a hypothetical national populist party, and 2020 which found satisfaction in democracy in the developed West has declined more rapidly among young adults than any other group.

All indications are that The two defining trends of 2024 are set to continue next year, with the latest polls showing that incumbent governments in Australia, Canada, Germany and Norway will lose power in the coming months.

And in most of these countries it is again the populist right that appears to be able to achieve the greatest gains.Norway’s populist right Progressive party is currently leading, taking fourth place in 2021, with Germany’s AfD currently in second place.

The acute inflationary crisis may be over, but with persistently weak economic growth, expanding generational wealth, and a fragmented media, 2024 may be less of an anomaly than one particular hard point in a downtrend.