Societal unhappiness and the uncertain future of democracy

by Andrew Oswald

Dissatisfaction among sections of society can lead to a disintegration of democracies. Research shows that stability is not to be taken for granted.

In 2010, a man called Peter Turchin, a distinguished mathematical zoologist, stated in the famous journal Nature that he believed American democracy would come under severe threat of violent upheaval in the year 2020. Turchin based his prediction on a form of statistical modelling of human society that he had adapted from his empirical research into cycles of conflict in the animal kingdom. Key influences in the empirical model used by Turchin included the following societal stressors: rising inequality, a large recent bulge in the youth population, and, perhaps most interestingly for anyone who teaches in one of the world’s universities, ‘elite overproduction’ as Turchin called it.

The concept of elite overproduction boils down to a simple idea. If a society sends more and more people to university, and there are not jobs for them of a kind that will match their then-high aspirations, that elite educational conveyor belt becomes threatening for the stability of the society. Frustrated elites can be dangerous.

The good news is that Turchin’s prediction turned out to be wrong. Unfortunately, he was wrong only by a few days. As is now known, on 6 January 2021 a mob of hundreds of Americans, a few carrying Confederate flags, broke into the US Capitol Hill building in Washington DC. There were deaths and injuries.

For anyone of my age, what happened would, years ago, have been inconceivable. I first went to the USA in 1983. It seemed then to me to be one of the most reliable nations and democracies in the world.

Today I do not think the USA is a reliable democracy. It seems possible that fair-minded democratic government there will soon disintegrate - at least in the form we have known it since the end of the second world war. The United Kingdom, and to some degree Europe as a whole, often follows the USA in many social trends. That is a concern. There are some facts that make me worry about democracy.

• Donald Trump is clear favourite at the time of writing, according to the bookmakers William Hill, to win the US Presidential election in November 2024. Yet he has been viewed by many as attempting to subvert the last election and has promised revenge against many of those involved in the previous election.
• The latest survey of Americans’ fears, which is conducted annually by Chapman University, reveals that ‘corrupt government officials’ is the single greatest current concern of American people. Two-thirds of randomly sampled American citizens in their survey gave that answer. It is hard see how that can be sustainable in a US society as it is currently organised.
• An article in the American Journal of Public Health in 2020, in which I had a hand, showed that white low-education Americans have experienced an enormous increase, in a secular way since 1993 up until just before COVID, in extreme mental distress. I suspect that kind of group of men and women were involved in the attack on Capitol Hill and remain hostile to democracy.
• It is illuminating to examine wealth levels among the poorest people in the United States of America, as calculated by the St Louis Federal Reserve in 2019. The least wealthy 50% (ie. the ‘bottom half’) of US citizens now own just 1% of America’s total wealth. That tiny figure, when I lecture on the topic, sometimes leaves an audience openmouthed. Half of the people in the USA own just one-hundredth of the wealth. Does that sound like something, we might ask ourselves, that could be a feature of a sustainable society in a democracy in which the bottom half also have a vote?
• Mass shooting incidents continue to grow through the years in the USA (Pew Research). Moreover, according to the BBC, the US ratio of 120.5 firearms per 100 residents, up from 88 per 100 in 2011, far surpasses that of other countries around the world.
• Pew Research has also found that trust in politicians in Washington DC has moved from a figure of approximately 75% of American citizens to approximately 20%. • Similarly a large drop in confidence in politicians has occurred in Great Britain (IPPR 2021). At the end of World War II, one-third of British citizens answered yes to the survey question ‘Do you think that British politicians are out merely for themselves?’ Yet in the year 2021 that number had turned into two-thirds of the population

Feelings lead to actions. Unhappiness and dissatisfied feelings can be expected to do that. Important research papers by George Ward et al. and Adam Nowakowski show that unhappy citizens tend to vote for extreme right-wing anti-establishment political parties.

Other facts to consider:

• Climate change continues. It is likely to lead to increased immigration from poor nations to rich nations, and yet there are already signs of fierce push-back from (especially low-skill) individuals who live in those well-off countries.
• Infectious diseases that spread around the world have been trending steadily up through the decades (Smith 2014) and of course worsened in a dramatic way in the years of the COVID pandemic. These diseases lead to stress on societies in various financial, and other more complicated ways.
• Inflation has spiked around the globe in the last five years. This has contributed to declines in real income levels – and we know, as economists and behavioural scientists, that so-called ‘loss aversion’ then makes human beings extremely discontented.
• Artificial intelligence today is able to create persuasive moving and speaking images of human beings. In my view, this will act in part to destabilise democracies, because television and other images will be increasingly unlikely to be true, and then truth and falsehood may become worryingly entwined in a way hostile to a democracy and trusted voting systems.

To end on a more positive note. Despite these threats to our way of life, and particularly to the American democratic system that has acted as a bulwark for democracy since the defeat of Adolf Hitler, human beings often manage to draw back from disaster. Democracy has given us prosperity and high levels of health and education. Especially continental Europe continues, in my judgement, largely to stick up for democratic values. There is a chance that our traditional modern form of government can survive. But it may prove a close-run thing.

About the author

• Andrew Oswald is Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at The University of Warwick and a Senior CAGE Research Fellow.

References

• BBC.co.uk, (2023), How many US mass shootings have there been in 2023? BBC News Website US & Canada.
• Blanchflower, D., and Oswald, A., (2020), Trends in Extreme Distress in the United States 1992-2009. American Journal of Public Health, 110, 1538-1544
• Kent, A., Ricketts, L., (2020), Has Wealth Inequality in America Changed over Time? Here Are Key Statistics [online]. Federal Reserve Bank of St Louis.
• Nowakowski, A., (2021), Do Unhappy Citizens Vote for Populism? European Journal of Political Economy, 68, article 101985
• Obikili, N. (2016). The Trans‐ Atlantic Slave Trade and Local Political Fragmentation in Africa. The Economic History Review, 69(4), 1157-1177
• Quilter-Pinner, H et al (2021), Trust Issues: Dealing with Distrust in Politics. IPPR Smith et al., (2014), Global Rise in Human Infectious Disease Outbreaks. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 11, article 0950 Turchin, P., (2010), Political instability may be a contributor in the coming decade. Nature, 463, 608
• Ward, G., De Neve, J., Ungar, L., Eichstaedt J., (2021), (Un)happiness and Voting in US Presidential Elections. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120, 370-38

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