The Game Theory of Democracy

Countries where democracy is in trouble share a common pattern, and it’s a worrying one for the United States.

New York Times Magazine

By Amanda Taub

Oct 29, 2024 

Adam Przeworski, a political scientist, left his native Poland a few months before the 1968 Prague Spring uprising and found he could not return home. To avoid being arrested as a dissident by the Communist government, he accepted a job abroad at a university in Santiago, Chile — only to watch his adopted country collapse into autocracy a few years later. In 1973, a violent coup installed a military dictatorship, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, wiping out Chilean democracy in one brutal stroke. “Nobody expected that it would be as bloody as it was,” Przeworski told me. “Or that it would last for 17 years.”

That shocking turn of events, in a country Przeworski thought he knew well, motivated him to find an answer to a seemingly simple question: Why do some democracies survive while others fall into autocracy? “That really was kind of an event that set my intellectual agenda for 50 years,” Przeworski, now an emeritus professor of politics at New York University, said recently.

For a long time, he and other experts believed that after a country had a few democratic handovers of power in a row and reached a certain level of wealth, then its democracy would be “consolidated” — safe from collapse. Once people could trust that free and fair elections would be held regularly, the theory went, other forms of politics would come to seem too costly and violent to consider.

The past decade has thrown that belief into question. The Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol marked the first time that America failed to peacefully transfer power from one president to the next. Last year, similar scenes played out in Brazil, as supporters of the outgoing president, Jair Bolsonaro, attacked federal buildings and called for a military coup. In Western Europe, far-right parties with policies and political styles similar to Donald Trump’s have gained in popularity, strengthening the sense that democracy could be vulnerable anywhere — even in places where it has long flourished.

Hungary has stood out as a particularly worrying example. The country was once considered a notable democratic success story. It was one of the first Soviet-bloc countries to transition to democracy, doing so before the Berlin Wall fell, and since then had managed two decades of free elections and peaceful handovers of power. But in 2010, Viktor Orban, the leader of the Fidesz Party, won a parliamentary supermajority and immediately set about using that power to dismantle democratic institutions. He altered the constitution, stacked the judiciary with compliant allies, changed electoral rules to give his party an advantage and cracked down on independent media. In 2022, the European Parliament passed a resolution stating that Hungary had ceased to be a democracy and had become an “electoral autocracy.”

Many Americans worry not only that their own country is vulnerable to democratic erosion but that other seemingly stable nations are also sliding into autocracy. This year, as more than half of the world’s population goes to the polls, election watchers have warned that democracy is “on the ballot” in countries as far-flung and diverse as India, Venezuela, Mexico, Indonesia — and the United States. Przeworski’s questions about which democracies survive, and why, have never felt more salient.

Over decades of research, Przeworski developed a theory that has become part of the bedrock of political science: that democracy is best understood as a game, one in which the players pursue power and resolve conflicts through elections rather than brute force. Democracies thrive when politicians believe they are better off playing by the rules of that game — even when they lose elections — because that’s the way to maximize their self-interest over time.

To create those conditions, Przeworski found, it is crucial for the stakes of power to remain relatively low, so that people don’t fear electoral defeat so much that they seek other methods — such as coups — of reversing it. That means winners of elections need to act with restraint: They can’t “grab too much” and make life miserable for the losers, or foreclose the possibility that future elections would allow the losers to win. “When these conditions are satisfied,” Przeworski told me, “then democracy works.”

But the events of recent years suggest that even “working” democracies can be far more fragile than was once believed. Przeworski, long a voice of optimism, once believed that it would be essentially impossible for a democracy like the United States to collapse. But today, not only does he see real reason for concern about the health of American democracy, he said in a recent interview, he does not see an obvious way to protect it from being weakened further.

The idea of democracy as a game is, of course, a very different model from the one that most people learn in school. Teachers tend to describe democracy as a value in and of itself, a system of government to be supported for moral reasons. But in fact, many experts say, the real value of democracy lies in its ability to resolve disagreements. Every society contains powerful people and groups who are bitterly opposed on important issues, about which they may never agree in substance. But if they can agree that the way to resolve their disagreements is at the ballot box, that’s enough to avoid violence.

Przeworski and others argue that if you understand democracy this way, rather than as a set of institutions or style of politics, it becomes easier to recognize which countries today are stable enough to withstand political turbulence — and which ones are at risk of becoming catastrophically fragile. There is a common pattern linkng the countries that are at serious risk of democratic backsliding and those that have already fallen victim to it. And it is a pattern that turns out to have dire implications for the democracy that once seemed to be the most “consolidated” of all: the United States.

The Rules of the Game Become the Game

Over the past half-century, many democracies around the world have become more egalitarian, as women and ethnic and religious minorities won more power and status. The 1960s “rights revolution” in the United States, caste-based affirmative action and gender quotas in India and decades of immigration to Europe, particularly from former colonies, have all ushered in new norms of multiculturalism and religious pluralism. In many places, those changes have helped trigger a realignment: Whereas the main political divide used to be over economic issues, now cultural issues are gaining new prominence.

The realignment has created opportunities for politicians on the far right to win votes and power by catering to voters who are upset or frightened by shifting gender roles, racial and religious diversity and immigration. In Europe, for example, it has fueled the growth of far-right parties who claim that immigrants, particularly those from Muslim countries, are a threat to safety and national identity. In the United States, it gave rise to Donald Trump, and in South America, it led to the elections of right-wing politicians like Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Javier Milei in Argentina.

Noting that many of these leaders share a worldview, some observers have tried to equate far-right politics and disrespect for democratic norms, but the relationship between the two is not so simple. Left-wing populists have also eroded democracy, as happened in Venezuela, for example, and may be happening in Mexico today. The key is that some countries are especially vulnerable to political polarization, and clashes over immigration, gender or other culture-war topics are a potent polarizing force. Polarization raises the stakes of politics, giving cover to any politician inclined to flout democratic norms, because almost nothing could persuade members of their party to vote for the other side. That makes it easier for leaders to maintain their popularity even as they dismantle democracy from within.

There was a moment when it seemed like the United Kingdom, where I’ve lived for the last six years, might be heading in that direction. In July 2019, Boris Johnson, who rose to fame as the wisecracking, tousle-haired mayor of London, became prime minister. Johnson took a sharp turn toward right-wing populism during the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he was one of the most prominent faces of the “Vote Leave” campaign. Brexit polarized the country, and within weeks of assuming the premiership, Johnson began to test the limits of his authority. In August, he suspended Parliament to prevent it from opposing his strategy for taking the U.K. out of the European Union. Days later, after 21 moderate members of Johnson’s own Conservative Party voted for an opposition bill that would have put restrictions on the E.U. exit plan, Johnson retaliated by expelling them from the party.

Almost immediately, though, the system pushed back. The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, after an emergency session, found the suspension of Parliament unlawful and reversed it. Johnson’s purge didn’t give him any lasting control over his party: A few years later, after a string of scandals, the Conservatives in Parliament rebelled and forced Johnson out of office. And the country did not remain polarized between “leavers” and “remainers.” Because the U.K. has a multiparty system, voters were not forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between left and right. In the most recent election, support for the Conservatives cratered: Some disaffected voters moved to the centrist Liberal Democrats, some to the far-right Reform Party and some to the left-wing Labour Party. Democratic norms, though dented, remained intact.

Politicians are an ambitious bunch, so it’s not difficult to understand why they might be tempted to engage in democratic backsliding to protect their own power. But when such leaders exist in a broader ecosystem that constrains individual ambition, that helps keep the democratic equilibrium in place. Strong institutions like courts, political parties and the media can block and reverse a slide toward autocracy even if movements like far-right populism or ethnic nationalism trigger political realignments.

In the British system, the strongest check on prime ministers’ power comes from within their own parties. Johnson, by forcing out an entire moderate wing, tested the strength of those constraints before the nation’s eyes, but the system was strong enough to resist. “Parties are so important for democracy because they have longer time horizons,” said Dorothy Kronick, a political scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. They exist to win multiple elections over a long period, and so have an incentive to ensure that the democratic game stays in place. In Western Europe, where parliamentary systems grant parties considerable power, the rise of the far right has scrambled longstanding political coalitions, but has not threatened democracy itself.

Democratic erosion happens when political leaders gain enough control over parties and other institutions to neuter their restraining force, but leave them intact enough, at least for a while, to keep the opposition playing by the rules. Unlike coups, which are sudden and obvious, this sort of backsliding is more insidious. Leaders who hollow out democracy from within often do so while claiming to be saving it. Measures that end up weakening checks and balances often come cloaked in the guise of necessary reforms. Would-be autocrats pretend to act democratically while using their power to change the rules in their favor, until eventually it becomes impossible for their opponents to win. “The rules of the game become the game,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Princeton University who has studied democratic breakdowns in Eastern Europe.

These leaders tend to run a similar playbook, as outlined in “How to Save a Constitutional Democracy,” by Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, both law professors at the University of Chicago. They use constitutional amendments to grant more power to the executive while retaining a veneer of fidelity to the rule of law. They purge courts and bureaucracies and then pack them with loyalists, restricting the system’s ability to check the executive, while still maintaining enough of its function to bolster his legitimacy. They nominally allow free expression but crack down on independent media, controlling the flow of information while still giving citizens the impression of a free or mostly free press. And they continue to hold elections as a sign of a public mandate to rule — but use gerrymandering and other forms of manipulation to ensure their victory.

The Autocrat’s Playbook

In Hungary, the problem started with a quirk of the constitution. In 1989, its drafters believed that the most serious risk to the nascent democracy was that too many small parties would win seats in Parliament, and that they would be unable to work together to form a government. So the authors created a system that would grant extra seats to the parties that did best in elections, in the hope that boosting their numbers would help avoid deadlock.

For a time, that seemed to be working very well, Scheppele, the Princeton professor, told me. Hungary tended to support around six major parties, and the electoral law smoothed the process by which they governed. But by the early 2000s, two much larger parties had developed — the Socialists on the center left, and Fidesz on the center right. In 2010, support for the Socialists collapsed in the wake of a scandal, and Fidesz, led by Orban, won 53 percent of the vote in the parliamentary election. Hungary’s electoral system boosted that figure to 67 percent of the seats in Parliament — a supermajority that gave Fidesz the numbers to amend the constitution.

Fidesz was not even the most right-wing party on the ballot that year. (Jobbik, a small far-right party, won 16.5 percent of the vote.) But once in office, Orban moved to the right, embracing ethnonationalism as a justification for his actions. His government, he claimed, was an “illiberal democracy,” in which crackdowns on the media and the university system were necessary to protect Hungary against threats from immigration, feminism and George Soros. If Fidesz, as a party, had been a stronger institution, then its other members might have limited Orban’s ability to take advantage of his power. But he had already spent years purging the party of anyone who challenged his agenda. A result was that “Orban was a kind of ready-to-go autocrat by 2010,” said Zsuzsanna Szelenyi, one of the early Fidesz members Orban sidelined.

Orban, armed with the power to wipe out Hungary’s democratic immune system, set about doing so almost immediately. He changed electoral laws multiple times, redrawing district boundaries in order to protect his majority. In more recent years, when that seemed as if it might not be enough, he turned to increasingly baroque methods. In 2014, Hungarians in neighboring countries were granted the right to vote by mail, and the electoral rolls were kept secret — ostensibly to prevent them from running afoul of dual-citizenship laws. In 2022, Hungarians were allowed to choose any district to vote in, enabling the government, which has access to voter databases that the opposition does not, to move its supporters into districts where their votes could prove decisive. Hungary still holds elections regularly, but their ability to provide real accountability has been neutralized.

Hungary’s failure has been particularly extreme. In other places, leaders have been able to avoid or neutralize only some forms of accountability, but they remained checked by others. When would-be autocrats get through only some of the steps of the playbook, the country can pause in a liminal state between democracy and autocracy, ready for an election to tip things in one direction or the other.

India’s election this year seems to have served as at least a partial check on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as his Bharatiya Janata Party failed to win a majority. Modi had cracked down on the free press, undermined the independence of the judiciary and used various strategies to tilt the election in favor of the B.J.P. He will remain prime minister, but now as the head of a coalition government that is expected to curb some of his most extreme tendencies.

Pavithra Suryanarayan, a political scientist at the London School of Economics who studies democratic institutions, told me she was pleased by how competitive the election turned out to be. She had been worried that Indian voters, seeing that Modi was not playing the game fairly, might decide to just stop playing and stay home. Though the result doesn’t mean Indian democracy is safe, she said, “the fact that people take their vote so seriously, and they used it as an opportunity to express their frustrations, and that there are still thriving, strong parties across India in the Indian state, reinforced faith in at least the electoral aspects of Indian democracy.”

Last year, in Przeworski’s native Poland, voters delivered a more decisive defeat to a government that had spent years dismantling democracy. From 2015 to 2023, the Law and Justice Party, headed by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, a right-wing ideologue who openly modeled himself after Hungary’s Orban, eviscerated the independence of the judiciary and other checks on the government’s power. Most controversial, Law and Justice used the courts to push through a near-total ban on abortions in 2020, prompting the country to erupt in the largest protests since the fall of communism.

But Kaczynski was not able to change Poland’s electoral laws the way that Orban had in Hungary. The drafters of Poland’s 1997 constitution had learned from the struggles of other post-Soviet countries, Scheppele said, which meant that “their election system was much more robust and harder to game than the Hungarian system was.”

Poland’s opposition parties also remained strong, which proved crucial in the general election held in October of last year. Multiple left and center parties set aside their differences and formed a coalition, working together to oust the government and halt its project of creating Hungarian-style “illiberal democracy.” Law and Justice won the most votes of any single party, but the opposition coalition had more than 50 percent between them — enough to form a new government that has promised to put the country back on a democratic path. Yet, “it’s very difficult to restore the democratic status quo,” Przeworski told me.

Reversing backsliding is not just a matter of voting for a particular candidate or ideology. As Poland’s new government has discovered, repairing the damage requires a long series of events and decisions, and many difficult compromises. The coalition has used some of Law and Justice’s illiberal methods to try to reverse its lingering influence — for example, by firing partisan Law and Justice journalists from state media. “In other words, the Polish government has had to use these autocratic powers to restore democracy,” Scheppele said. But what looks like restoring democracy from one angle looks like a further ratcheting up of the stakes of power from another. Time will tell whether that strategy will ultimately restore Poland’s democratic equilibrium, but for now the rules of the game are still the game.

The Strange Case of the United States

The United States seems, at first blush, to bear little resemblance to Hungary, India or Poland. One of the most prosperous countries in the world, it has never been a Soviet satellite state or been ruled by a single-party authoritarian regime. The U.S. Constitution has been in continuous effect since it was ratified in 1788. Ruled by elected leaders for hundreds of years, the U.S. seems like it ought to be the paradigmatic example of a consolidated democracy. So how, after all that time, could the American democratic project be coming apart?

Begin, perhaps, with the fact that the United States was not a full democracy until after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This and other civil rights laws eventually transformed American politics, leading Republicans and Democrats to polarize around sharply different ideological identities, write Paul Pierson and Eric Schickler, two leading scholars of American politics, in their new book “Partisan Nation.” At the same time, the expansion of the federal government, which included the growing regulatory state as well as federal enforcement of civil and women’s rights, raised the stakes of winning control in national politics. Over the next 60 years, increasingly extreme partisanship warped American politics in ways that created many of the effects of the autocrat’s playbook, paving the way for Trump long before he tried to run the plays.

For structural reasons, Pierson and Schickler write, the effects of that polarization have been especially pronounced for Republicans. Because Republicans don’t need to win in heavily Democratic-leaning states like New York or California in order to control the Senate or the presidency, they have less of an incentive to tack to the center in order to appeal to swing voters. Instead, Republican primary contests have often become battles to move furthest to the right. Right-wing media has become so partisan that it has a similar impact on viewers that government-controlled media does in countries without meaningful press freedom. Extreme politicians and commentators are rewarded with attention, airtime and an improved national profile, while those who advocate moderate policies or bipartisan cooperation can be iced out of media coverage — and perhaps also donors’ and voters’ good graces.

One result is that many of the institutions that keep the democratic game running no longer fully function on the right. The United States still has a free press, but Republican voters primarily get their news from the right-wing ecosystem, where they won’t hear criticism of Republican politicians. Courts still uphold the rule of law, but when judges have been selected and promoted on the basis of their conservative beliefs and partisan loyalty, that inevitably affects how the rule of law is interpreted and implemented. Republican politicians win elections, but the Republican Party is too weak, as an institution, to discipline candidates or politicians who undermine democracy. Sanctions such as presidential impeachment exist on paper, but in practice are now tools for protecting partisan advantage, not democratic norms.

As president, Donald Trump didn’t run the standard playbook of democratic backsliding, because he couldn’t. The U.S. Constitution is effectively impossible to amend; lifetime tenure for federal judges makes it hard to purge and pack the courts; elections are run by hundreds of local-level officials rather than a national agency that can be easily captured; and First Amendment protections make it difficult to muzzle the media.

But because he stepped into a system that was deteriorating before he ever took office, he didn’t have to. “He was capitalizing on more than 20 years of things that have happened before him,” Schickler said. Polarization was already high, checks and balances were already weakened, issue groups were already made up of party loyalists and the media environment was already set up as an echo chamber that praised him and treated any critique as a partisan attack.

Trump’s actions in office, and after leaving it, have pushed America further down the path of democratic backsliding. His refusal to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election, in particular, helped make the delegitimation of election results a mainstream position within the Republican Party. A Supreme Court decision arising out of that crisis granted presidents sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for anything related to their official use of power, making it more likely that Trump or another future leader could act with impunity. In testing the limits on his power, Trump demonstrated just how weak they are, Schickler said. “He showed that in this new context, you can actually get away with something that Richard Nixon could never have dreamed of.”

Przeworski has lived in the United States for decades, and has watched the 2024 presidential campaign warily. For months, the Republican Party and its allies have been laying the groundwork for legal challenges to prevent election officials from certifying a Kamala Harris victory and to contest the legitimacy of a Trump defeat. They are preparing for the rules of the game to become the game, and even if those particular efforts fizzle or fail, the danger will remain.

“I used to do statistical models in which I would calculate the probability that democracy would break down,” Przeworski said. “And my prediction for a country like the United States was that it would occur only once within 1.6 million years.”

But these days, he said dryly, “I’m not optimistic.”

Amanda Taub writes the Interpreter, an explanatory column and newsletter about world events. She is based in London. More about Amanda Taub