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A new book explores the workings of democracies
Summary
Erica Benner’s ‘Adventures in Democracy’ examines the course of democracy in various countries in the 20th centuryThe recent Lok Sabha election results threw up some surprises, with the National Democratic Alliance government’s majority being significantly reduced. The roster of unexpected losses included Uttar Pradesh’s Faizabad constituency, where the newly-built Ram Mandir in Ayodhya was expected to help usher in a landslide victory. In the aftermath of this performance, many political observers have said that elected governments need to listen to people’s grievances and act in a democratic manner—a point reiterated in Erica Benner’s latest book, Adventures in Democracy, which charts the trajectories of major world democracies in the second half of the 20th century. Some countries have fortified their democracies, introducing more stringent checks and balances on the power of the executive. Others have backslid, with the freedoms of the media and the judiciary being curtailed. Benner diagnoses each democracy’s specific “pressure points" and gives us the socio-historical context behind that nation's political choices.
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One of the aims of Adventures in Democracy is to provide a “clear, down-to-earth" understanding of democracy’s purposes. To that end, Benner’s book conducts a sort of field test for democracies, assessing them on various criteria—the state of minorities, the scope for dissent, the presence of an independent media and an independent judiciary et cetera.
For the most part, she follows a method— begin with a personal anecdote, deconstruct the lessons in democracy, and extrapolate said lessons in the context of a specific nation-state’s past and present policies. One of Benner’s major theses is that democracies tend to re-enact the circumstances of their beginnings. She demonstrates this idea using a mixture of personal stories and the writings of philosophers (Aristotle, Socrates, Machiavelli et al). Several chapters begin with experiences Benner or her family had in Japan, where they lived for a while, and how these experiences shaped her ideas of immigration, globalization, xenophobia, and more.
This is a sensible method for two reasons. One, while democracy is inextricably tied up with the needs of the collective, its most visible manifestations are individual, personal acts—like the act of voting. Therefore, Benner’s ‘politics via the personal’ approach makes sense. Two, most of the personal stories involve her parents. The ‘negotiations’ between a teenager and her parents are the former’s first instances of power-sharing, giving and receiving concessions, and listening to divergent opinions with a respectful ear—the hallmarks of a democratic set-up.
At its strongest, Benner’s book is a fast-paced, accessible primer to the origin and the future of democracy—plus the various ways in which core democratic ideals are being corrupted. Unlike some other well-intentioned books on the topic (David van Reybrouck’s Against Elections and Brett Hennig’s The End of Politicians), Adventures in Democracy knows how to talk to the lay reader. Benner never pummels us with too many citations, focusing instead on the “conflicts between ideals and reality" that democracies everywhere struggle with.
The purpose of Benner’s historical research is twofold: One is to show how age-old statecraft problems were tackled by governments of the past. The second is to show how people’s perception of politics and political processes has changed down the ages. “For philosophers like Plato and Aristotle and early modern writers like Machiavelli, ‘politics’ didn’t have the grubbier associations it’s come to acquire now," Benner writes. “It meant something like ‘the art of sharing power’ among people who don’t always want to. Living together was natural, but politics was not. It was an art that required hard work and lots of thinking, based on past experiences and considering the long term."
As someone who sees both Japan and America as home, Benner’s candor is admirable: she glorifies neither nation’s deficiencies and missteps while being warm and empathetic towards everyday American and Japanese people. For example, she notes that except for two relatively brief periods, Japan’s electoral politics has been dominated by one party (in the same segment she also correctly points out the stifling nature of America’s two-party system, which leaves dissenters on both sides of the aisle politically homeless). There are other areas of concern, like the still-small number of women in public life, discrimination against low-income immigrant workers and so on. But she also notes that compared to America, Japan scores brilliantly when it comes to affordable, accessible healthcare, job security, mental health statistics and so on.
Towards the end of the book, Benner provides some cautionary tales, warning readers against complacency. The strength of democratic processes can be depleted over time, as she shows with examples. This section, especially, should speak to Indian readers. In 2023, a study by the US-based Pew Research Centre showed that 85% of Indian respondents believed that military rule or rule by an authoritarian leader would be good for the country. Three years before this poll, in 2020, the government had been left red-faced after NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant said that India had “too much democracy" because of which economic reforms were not happening at the desired pace. Benner’s book shows us why “slow" reforms are infinitely preferable to “too little democracy".
Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based journalist.
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