here’s a general consensus that democracy is in crisis, but there’s no consensus on what that means. What are the threats to democracy? How dangerous are they? Where are they rising? The world has changed a great deal in recent years, between polycrisis pressures and changes to the strategies and tools behind how nations compete geopolitically. We need to step back and reconsider how we think about democracy and the various challenges to democracy today if we are to have a realistic, holistic assessment of how to build resilience into our democratic institutions. It’s also a great time to be thinking about the future of democracy. September 15 was the International Day of Democracy, while the UN General Assembly will be meeting in New York City over the next two weeks. You can find the report here.
Helping the future of democracy arrive well
Our conversations about how to address the crisis in democracy often ignore our own assumptions and those of others, and that’s a big blind spot. One purpose of the Future of Democracy Forum (FOD), hosted by Community of Democracies and Diplomatic Courier, was to unpack those assumptions as part of a collective intelligence exercise.
Attendees worked in groups carefully curated to ensure maximum diversity of experience and perspective. Groups included youth, ambassadors, former government officials, private sector leaders, entrepreneurs, military veterans—all united by their desire to see the future of democracy flourish. This created a welcoming space for attendees to unpack and discuss their assumptions about challenges to democracy and get truly unique feedback and alternate perspectives.
After FOD, World in 2050 staff collated those findings to pull out more connections and trends. While we are still producing a report on those findings, we’ve already identified some interesting takeaways. The report itself will be highly visual, because the process was as well. Furthering that theme, the report will also include a mini–digital exhibition—curated with International Arts & Artists—reflecting on democracy at a crossroads, with artist commentary.
Re–examining challenges to democracy, today and beyond
FOD attendees mapped what they considered to be challenges to democracy on a four–quadrant grid, where the x–axis was a scale of how likely a challenge was to disrupt democracy and the y–axis was a scale of how great an impact that challenge could have on our democratic institutions. Participants also indicated whether they considered this an internal challenge, one within our societies and democratic institutions, or whether it arises externally, one outside of our societies and institutions, for example a bad actor. Here are some of the initial takeaways from the report.
Economic wellbeing was a less acute challenge than we expected. Challenges related to inequality and poverty figured in group conversations. Yet groups tended to cluster these challenges as either being not critically likely to erode our democratic institutions, or as likely to have low–to–moderate impacts.
‘Internal threats’ to democracy largely seem to arise from the citizenry lacking certain ‘competencies of citizenry.’ There were wide–ranging conversations among the groups about failures in education and the need for alternative literacies like civic literacy, societal literacy, and digital literacy to remedy our internal societal ills.
Groups identified more internal challenges than external, but were more worried about external. Nearly a third of external threats were clustered in the highest ranking threat category. More than double the number of internal threats were identified, but fewer than a quarter of them were mapped to the highest ranking threat category.
The internal–external divide is complicated. Some challenges can be both—consider misinformation. A lot of misinformation is produced by domestic interests pursuing their own ends. A lot also comes from external actors hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet our vulnerability in both cases comes from the same, internal, challenges.
Tech–based challenges were on people’s minds, but not a major source of anxiety. When mapped out, groups largely placed these challenges in the low–to–moderate end of the spectrum in both likelihood and potential impact. This seems to indicate at least guarded optimism that we’re on the right path to solving these challenges.
Editor’s Note: The Future of Democracy Forum was hosted by Community of Democracies and Diplomatic Courier. Convening partners included the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, International Art & Artists, and William & Mary's Whole of Government Center of Excellence. Tidal Strategies consulted on collective intelligence design.
The report was under production at the time of this writing and takeaways are preliminary. You can find the full, final proceedings report online here.
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Toward a new taxonomy on threats to democracy
September 16, 2024
We may agree that democracy is in crisis, but there’s no consensus on what that means. A new report from World in 2050 reexamines challenges to democracy in the context of polycrisis, relying on collective intelligence insights from our expert network at July’s Future of Democracy Forum.
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here’s a general consensus that democracy is in crisis, but there’s no consensus on what that means. What are the threats to democracy? How dangerous are they? Where are they rising? The world has changed a great deal in recent years, between polycrisis pressures and changes to the strategies and tools behind how nations compete geopolitically. We need to step back and reconsider how we think about democracy and the various challenges to democracy today if we are to have a realistic, holistic assessment of how to build resilience into our democratic institutions. It’s also a great time to be thinking about the future of democracy. September 15 was the International Day of Democracy, while the UN General Assembly will be meeting in New York City over the next two weeks. You can find the report here.
Helping the future of democracy arrive well
Our conversations about how to address the crisis in democracy often ignore our own assumptions and those of others, and that’s a big blind spot. One purpose of the Future of Democracy Forum (FOD), hosted by Community of Democracies and Diplomatic Courier, was to unpack those assumptions as part of a collective intelligence exercise.
Attendees worked in groups carefully curated to ensure maximum diversity of experience and perspective. Groups included youth, ambassadors, former government officials, private sector leaders, entrepreneurs, military veterans—all united by their desire to see the future of democracy flourish. This created a welcoming space for attendees to unpack and discuss their assumptions about challenges to democracy and get truly unique feedback and alternate perspectives.
After FOD, World in 2050 staff collated those findings to pull out more connections and trends. While we are still producing a report on those findings, we’ve already identified some interesting takeaways. The report itself will be highly visual, because the process was as well. Furthering that theme, the report will also include a mini–digital exhibition—curated with International Arts & Artists—reflecting on democracy at a crossroads, with artist commentary.
Re–examining challenges to democracy, today and beyond
FOD attendees mapped what they considered to be challenges to democracy on a four–quadrant grid, where the x–axis was a scale of how likely a challenge was to disrupt democracy and the y–axis was a scale of how great an impact that challenge could have on our democratic institutions. Participants also indicated whether they considered this an internal challenge, one within our societies and democratic institutions, or whether it arises externally, one outside of our societies and institutions, for example a bad actor. Here are some of the initial takeaways from the report.
Economic wellbeing was a less acute challenge than we expected. Challenges related to inequality and poverty figured in group conversations. Yet groups tended to cluster these challenges as either being not critically likely to erode our democratic institutions, or as likely to have low–to–moderate impacts.
‘Internal threats’ to democracy largely seem to arise from the citizenry lacking certain ‘competencies of citizenry.’ There were wide–ranging conversations among the groups about failures in education and the need for alternative literacies like civic literacy, societal literacy, and digital literacy to remedy our internal societal ills.
Groups identified more internal challenges than external, but were more worried about external. Nearly a third of external threats were clustered in the highest ranking threat category. More than double the number of internal threats were identified, but fewer than a quarter of them were mapped to the highest ranking threat category.
The internal–external divide is complicated. Some challenges can be both—consider misinformation. A lot of misinformation is produced by domestic interests pursuing their own ends. A lot also comes from external actors hostile to our democratic institutions. Yet our vulnerability in both cases comes from the same, internal, challenges.
Tech–based challenges were on people’s minds, but not a major source of anxiety. When mapped out, groups largely placed these challenges in the low–to–moderate end of the spectrum in both likelihood and potential impact. This seems to indicate at least guarded optimism that we’re on the right path to solving these challenges.
Editor’s Note: The Future of Democracy Forum was hosted by Community of Democracies and Diplomatic Courier. Convening partners included the Center for International Private Enterprise, the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, International Art & Artists, and William & Mary's Whole of Government Center of Excellence. Tidal Strategies consulted on collective intelligence design.
The report was under production at the time of this writing and takeaways are preliminary. You can find the full, final proceedings report online here.
