Where do governments derive their power from?

That should be an easy question to answer for most democratic nations... Or is it?

The Issue

Democracies are founded on the basis that the people should have a say in the governance of their nation, and that the will of the people should be the deciding factor for issues within the nation. Except, many nations have caveats to this, there are other organizations, moral systems, cultural standards, and ideological goals that have their own will and desire that is implemented into the government, and arguably not through the democratic process. These institutions can publicly support a certain candidate or idea, they can pressure lawmakers through lobbying efforts and joining various public boards, organizations, and local governmental institutions. In some more prominent cases, they can control media representation, they can control the topics of debate during elections, and even determine which candidate has the ability to become a political figure.

In this sense, all democracies at the governmental level derive some power from these institutions, whether they be ideological and political institutions, religious and moral institutions, or popular and powerful institutions. But to what extent does this seriously impact the democracies of nations?

Examples

First we look at Venezuela, a nation which in the recent past had been a stable democracy, and public support for democracy was some of the highest in South America. However, due to the intrusion and influence an individual and his ideological group gained, led to the decline of democracy in Venezuela.

This article describes Hugo Chavez’s process of using non-institutional power. Chavez used the justification of legitimacy of his regime using the bolivarian revolution, ideological reasoning, and non-governmental party support. Once gaining power within the institutions of Venezuela, Chavez instituted anti-democratic policies and pro-revolutionary policies, installing ideological loyalists within governmental positions who would be more loyal to the cause than democracy, and using this legitimacy to form a new system of government by relying on the aforementioned non-institutional power inside governmental institutions.

This article elaborates on the methods non-state actors can employ to restrict governmental actors, and as a result restrict democracy within Europe by forcing the hand of state actors.

The Hypothesis

I propose that these non-institutional sources present within the power structures of governments will impact the democracies of nations negatively, as these non-institutional sources of power are competing with the democratic process for control over government institutions and because these non-institutional sources are usually organized and have clear goals, they are successful in impacting the democracy of a nation. The more the government draws on non-institutional sources of power, the greater the drop in democracy.

The Methods

Unfortunately, non-institutional power sources are extremely difficult to study and measure as a data set. Non-institutional sources typically do not have formal power within governmental institutions. This is dependent on the organization, some for mundane reasons such as the catholic church within Italy has a significant impact on the moral norms of Italy being that the nation is catholic, but there is no formal catholic representative present during legislative meetings, and some such as ideological groups may want to obscure who is and isn't a member of their group to be able to control institutions practically, but not appear as if they are doing so formally and maintaining the illusion of legitimacy and power democracy provides.

There is one exception to this, being political parties. While political parties are only one aspect of what I am trying to look at, many political parties represent the interest of non-institutional powers within their goals and outlook. Fortunately, there is a measurable way to examine the goals of political parties, the Manifesto Data set which looks at the written document produced by a political party outlining their goals and positions, which allows me to assign values to certain concepts I believe display a source of non-institutional power within these manifestos.

I selected 6 variables which I thought best represented the views of political power coming from non-democratic sources, and compared it against the change in a measure of democracy worldwide between the years 2015 to 2019 (Due to this period being before the COVID upheaval, having the most data, and being the most recent to fulfill the last two criteria), the V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index. I used 30 European nations as my source, looking at the change in democracy and non-institutional power within these nations ruling political parties and their manifestos within the time period of 2015 to 2019. I also controlled for the V-Dem scores of the nations measured during 2015, as there might be an impact of democracy status on change in democracy, and GDP per Capita in USD in 2015, as GDP may impact the change in democracy.

Results

Looking at the data, we can first conclude that there is sufficient variation in the change in democracy means between low non-institutional values and high non-institutional values that there is a high likelihood that there is a relationship between the non-institutional values and the change in democracy. We can then conclude, due to the size of the measured data set and the slope this data set creates when ran through regression, that the correlation in the data is not due to random error, and has a negative relationship between non-institutional values and change in democracy. With these two conclusions, it is possible to say that non-institutional values negatively impact change in democracy, and that this effect of non-institutional values accounts for 18% of the variation in the data.

Graphs and Statistics

Concluding Thoughts

As good as the results are in proving the existence of such a relationship, this research was heavily limited in scope due to the nature of non-institutional power and the difficulty in measuring its impact. The true extent to which non-institutional power effects governmental action may be far beyond what is measured.

The difficulty lies in the fact that many nations in the modern world wish to appear as democratic as reasonably possible, but many factors, including the desires of the members of the government itself, works against democratic principles. Democracy, as it is observed today, in many ways lacks core aspects of what should be fundamental aspects of democracy if its definition were to be taken literally. Due to this, ancient practices, customs, faiths, ideologies, morals, interests of elites, and various other factors, many nations do not strictly adhere to rule of the people, in many ways relying on outside sources of power and legitimacy other than the people to justify actions and policies.

There is to an extent where I question whether the dogmatic (or better defined as adherence to the global trends in democracy) proclamation that this or that nation is a democracy is actively hurting democracy as a concept. When democracy means a lot of different things to different people, who can decide what is and isn't a democracy besides self-proclamation. Some nations, such as the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, also known as North Korea, have a similar claim to democracy as other nations if the definition of democracy includes these non-institutional legitimacy and power as aspects of functioning democracies. Optically, I understand why nations proclaim themselves to be democracies. It looks and sounds good. But practically, terms like 'democracy' and 'republic' do not reflect what governments value within a nation accurately, and through obstruction can give the illusion of a world more free and subject to the will of the people than is functionally true.

At what point would it be better for some nations to proclaim themselves a state or empire with representational voting as a function of legitimacy, among other legitimizing factors, without democracy being a defining aspect of the state? Trying to remove the influence of the church, for instance, on governance of a catholic population would, without methods of extreme restriction of religious views, would be futile. If there is a higher power who has proclamations for people to follow, shouldn't that higher power's most devote adherents be able to speak to and influence not only the people, but the government itself? Isn't that the purpose of a higher power? In the same vein would be ideological governmental change. If an ideology, environmentalism for instance, would want to impose restrictions for some greater goal for the benefit of humanity, would it be wrong for this ideology to influence the government as well as the people even though it would go against some of the will of the people?

Of course, this aspect of the shallowness of democracy I believe also has an impact on the data, such as the V-Dem Democracy Index obviously favoring a certain category or system of democracy over another in its definition of democracy even though they may have similar democratic institutions but dissimilar importance of the will of the people on governance. But the data I have found shows more than that bias, but rather where these non-institutional powers have more influence in defining the goals and policies of ruling political parties, nations become less democratic. I see this as these non-institutional powers trying to strengthen and centralize their power in an effort to maintain dominance over the democratic institutions of a government and ensure that their will is represented.

Is this malicious or even intentional in some cases? I don't believe it often is, rather people deferring to experts, or similar sources of legitimization, on how a government should be run and what policies need to be enacted. Of course, because we are dealing with organized groups, there are definite cases where non-institutional powers actively leverage their legitimacy to gain control and make sweeping reform, such as the case was in Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, but I believe these cases are not what is causing the decline in democracy measured in my data. I believe rather democracy is slowly losing its popularity and meaning, along with the democratic fervor of the people, and due to these non-institutional constants (Which in some cases have survived for decades, centuries, or even multiple ages over different administrations and governments) that the state is reverting to the simplest methods of government, oligarchy, and without people having the desire to push for democracy, there are less and less reasons for governmental decisions to be decides by the people.