Costs of Democracy: A Systematic Overview of Trade-off Arguments

Winston Churchill famously stated: ‘democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ A plethora of studies have investigated whether there is an actual trade-off between democratic rights and social, economic, environmental, and security outcomes. Updated reviews of this literature tend to corroborate Churchill’s dictum, or they do at least not identify a significant, negative impact of democracy for most normatively desirable outcomes. Nonetheless, arguments against the instrumental value of democracy are continuously voiced in various form and intensity. Shattered hopes have breathed new life into critiques of democracy. The performance of liberal “western” democracy is nowadays openly criticized by the presidents of Russia and China, while recent military coups in the Sahel region have been celebrated with affirmative dancing in the streets, and many voters have repeatedly backed illiberal populists at the ballot boxes in several countries, including the US, Hungary, Brazil, Turkey, and the Philippines. However, we only have rudimentary knowledge about trade-off statements. This paper identifies the main arguments concerning the relative performance of democracies and their alternatives found in empirical democratic theory and in the works of historical and contemporary political theorists and public intellectuals. The arguments focusing on the instrumental value of regime types are sorted into different categories based on a) the outcome in question (e.g., public order, economic growth, social equality, efficient warfare, environmental protection), b) the democratic institution in question (i.e., competitive elections, civil liberties, or checks and balances), and c) the mechanisms linking regime type to variation in outcomes. The overview presented in this paper is a first step in a broader project seeking to identify the content and spread of trade-off arguments among political elites and ordinary citizens.