The Paradox Of Democracy's Success: Behavioural Science Helps Explain Why We Miss Autocratic Red Flags

(MENAFN- The Conversation) The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 paved the way for the democratisation of many eastern European countries and triumphantly ushered in the era of global liberal democracy that some scholars celebrated as“the end of history”. The idea was that human political history followed a steady path and that western liberal democracy was the end point of the evolution of human government. Unfortunately, events unfolded a little differently.

The last 20 years did not follow a linear arc of progress, let alone marked the end of history. The growing electoral success of extreme rightwing parties in many western countries, from France to Finland and from the Netherlands to Germany, has turned the end of history into the possible end of democracy.

What is prompting so many Europeans to turn away from a political system that has successfully rebuilt the continent after the second world war and transformed it into the world's most prosperous single market?

The reasons are manifold, ranging from economic crises and rising inequality to the negative impact of social media on political behaviour and breaches of democratic norms by elites. But there is another driver that is rarely discussed: the power of personal experience.

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Over the past two decades, behavioural scientists have extensively explored how our actions are driven by our experiences. The pain, pleasure, rewards, losses, information and knowledge that arise from living through events help us evaluate our past actions and inform future ones .

A positive experience that is associated with a particular option increases the likelihood of that option being chosen again; a negative experience has the opposite effect. Mapping people's experiences – especially in response to life's risks – can illuminate otherwise perplexing risky behaviour such as people building homes on flood plains, in regions with high seismic risk or at the foot of an active volcano.

The last violent eruption of Vesuvius, Europe's“ticking time bomb”, occurred 81 years ago. Vesuvius is considered one of the highest-risk volcanoes in the world. Nonetheless, some 700,000 residents live in the“red zone” at its foot, apparently disregarding the dire warnings from volcanologists.

To comprehend this complacency in the face of possible Armageddon, one must analyse individual and collective experience with the risk in question. Most residents in the red zone have never personally experienced Mount Vesuvius erupting. Their personal experience, day in and day out, probably reassures them with a sense of“all clear”.

Numerous psychological experiments have confirmed how this everyday behaviour can emerge. Our experience tends to underweight and underestimate the likelihood and impact of rare events for the very reason that they are rare.

Extremely rare and catastrophic events, especially in the financial market, have been called black swan events. Neglecting their possibility has contributed to insufficient banking regulation and catastrophic financial meltdowns such as the global financial crisis in 2008.

People in western Europe have experienced democracy and growing posterity for more than 70 years. They have been spared, up to now, the experience of autocratic takeovers and therefore may underestimate the risk of democratic collapse.

Paradoxically, the very success of democratic systems may thus also sow the seeds of their potential undoing. This is a phenomenon akin to the paradox of disease prevention, where the success of preventive measures such as childhood vaccinations may undermine their perceived need, thus increasing complacency and vaccine hesitancy.

A further ominous connection exists between the erosion of a democratic system and the experiences of its citizens. As history has shown, democracies do not suddenly go up in flames. Democracies tend to die slowly, one stab at a time, until a tipping point is reached .

The public is unlikely to perceive a risk to democracy when a political leader breaks with a convention. But when repeated breaches of democratic norms by political elites are tolerated, when rhetorical transgressions escalate, and when a deluge of lies and manipulative claims becomes“normal”, then the public's failure to punish the early signs of such behaviour at the ballot box may have drastic consequences.

In the same way that a nuclear power plant may appear to be operating safely until the last safety valve is broken, democracies can appear stable right up until they flip into autocracy.

The more we tolerate, the more we will have to tolerate. Alamy/DACameron

One way to counter these problems may be to simulate experience of the risks, even if only through proxies. For instance, disaster training centres in Japan simulate the experience of the visceral dimensions of an earthquake and its swift temporal dynamic in a way that even the most graphic warnings cannot.

We argue that we can, equally, simulate how life feels in an authoritarian regime. Europe is home to hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have lived in autocracies and who can be invited to classrooms to share their personal experiences.

Vicarious detailed experiences can be highly persuasive. Similarly, people can gain insight into what it meant to be a political prisoner by visiting places like the former Stasi prison Hohenschönhausen in Berlin , especially when the guide is a former inmate. There are numerous other ways to emulate the experience of oppression and authoritarianism, thereby informing those who have been fortunate enough never to endure it.

The seemingly persistent non-occurrences of risky events can be seductive and misleading. But we are not enslaved by what we haven't yet experienced. We can also use the positive power of experience to protect and appreciate our democratic systems.

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