Do Democracies Always Deliver?

At this year’s G-7 summit in Hiroshima, Japan, U.S. President Joe Biden summed up his foreign-policy doctrine in two words: “democracies deliver.”

It is a sentiment shared by many other democratic leaders, such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who seek to showcase democratic success at a time of widespread democratic disillusionment.

But what does it mean for democracies to deliver? And how can they do it better?

Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, Charles Dunst, Hodder & Stoughton, 448 pp., £25, February 2023.

In a recent book, Defeating the Dictators: How Democracy Can Prevail in the Age of the Strongman, Charles Dunst explores these questions, arguing that, while democracies have delivered great things in the past, from the Marshall Plan to the moon landing, democratic systems are falling short today.

If democracies want to maintain their edge in the global competition against autocracies, he asserts, they will need to identify their own deficits and remedy them. Only when democracies are flourishing at home can they maximize their power and influence abroad—and convince the world that the democratic model is one to be admired and emulated.

Dunst notes that throughout history, democracies have delivered, thanks to their free, open, and stable systems. Indeed, as one of us argued in a recent book, democracies have consistently outcompeted autocracies for the past 2,500 years, from the Greeks against the Persians through the Cold War.

But Dunst warns that autocracies today are more capable and more attractive than in the past, threatening democracy’s long-standing dominance. He argues that small autocracies such as Singapore and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) demonstrate how illiberal regimes can provide their people with a high quality of life—even while denying them basic political rights. Singapore’s subsidized housing or the UAE’s free health care services are appealing to many.

Larger autocracies can sometimes deliver, too. China, he argues, despite its recent slowdown, has made significant strides in infrastructure, education, and economic growth over the last few decades. Meanwhile, according to Dunst, democracies have been struggling with fraying or nonexistent social safety nets, outdated infrastructure, and political polarization, among other challenges, while autocracies build new airports and high-speed rail connections. It is no surprise that some are starting to question whether autocracies might be just as effective—if not more so—at delivering the good life than democracies.

Dunst argues that democracies are not doomed, but they need redirection and better long-term strategies to foster good governance and better compete with China and other autocracies.

He provides a series of policy recommendations for rejuvenating democracy: investing in human capital and innovation, building robust 21st-century physical and digital infrastructure, expanding health care and workers’ rights, cleaning up corruption, and enacting smart immigration policies to attract the best and brightest to democratic shores.

Overall, Defeating the Dictators is a creative and thought-provoking book bolstered by well-researched statistics, potent anecdotes, and a slate of high-profile endorsements from defenders of democracy on both sides of the aisle in the United States and from around the world. It provides a welcome, mostly optimistic take on a subject characterized by too much recent pessimism.

Still, the book has some shortcomings.

First, the methodology is questionable. Dunst cherry-picks the world’s most successful dictatorships, like Singapore and the UAE, and identifies their policy successes that democracies should emulate.

But this focus on highly anomalous autocracies risks losing sight of the broader, more dismal picture for dictators around the world, which Dunst only briefly mentions. After all, dictatorships are much more likely to be abject failures than standout successes. There is a robust correlation, for example, between autocratic rule and low GDP per capita.

Furthermore, Singapore and the UAE are both small states. It is doubtful their model can travel to other, larger states—whether autocracies or democracies.

Many of Dunst’s sensible recommendations border on the unrealistic, as he himself acknowledges. Passing sweeping voting rights or immigration reform legislation in the United States and other major democracies will not be easy. Some of his solutions for overcoming gridlock—for politicians to be “braver” and have “courage”—are likely insufficient.

After all, the inability to force through massive change is a feature—not a bug—of democracy. Urging democracies, as Dunst does, to overcome their divisions and mass resources for investments in major priorities is like advising dictators to impose checks and balances on themselves to constrain rash decision-making. Neither set of recommendations meshes with the logic of the respective political system.

Second, with its strong and justified emphasis on domestic democratic renewal, the book mostly overlooks the important advantages that democracy provides in foreign policy. International relations scholars have shown that democracies build larger and more effective alliances, are more likely to sign and comply with international agreements, and are more likely to win the wars they fight.

In the strategic competition between democracies and autocracies, what democracies can achieve together may be more important than what they can achieve separately at home. Indeed, after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there has been remarkable free-world unity, with the United States, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Australia working together to sanction Russia and provide aid to Ukraine.

In many of the areas where Dunst advocates democratic investments, such as emerging technologies, democracies will be most successful if they combine efforts and work together. A democratic technology alliance, for example, could help the free world maintain its innovation edge and serve to embed democratic norms into 21st-century technologies. New democratic trade and economic partnerships could help “de-risk” and secure supply chains from autocratic coercion and overreliance on China and Russia.

To be sure, balancing domestic priorities with allied commitments will always be challenging, as evidenced by Europe’s recent frustration with Washington’s “Buy American” approach to clean energy innovation. Still, greater international coordination among like-minded democracies has vast potential.

In the end, democracies can defeat dictators by doing what they do best. They should continue to provide the stable economic institutions and freedoms that unleash radical economic innovation and high long-run rates of growth. They should use their combined economic heft to build the military power necessary to deter revisionist autocracies. They should expand and deepen their alliances and partnerships with like-minded states to advance shared goals and develop the free-world strategies of tomorrow.

They should also heed Dunst’s advice, to the extent possible, and strengthen their own societies and institutions to unlock democracy’s full potential at home.