Voters in more than 60 countries are heading to the polls to elect new leaders in this record-breaking “super election” year. In many of those countries, democracy itself is on the ballot. 

Global Cornell is contributing to Interim President Michael I. Kotlikoff’s campuswide Freedom and Responsibility project by hosting a year of events and discussions exploring global democratic trends. Up next is the annual Bartels World Affairs Lecture from the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.

On Oct. 23 at 5:00, author and activist Naomi Klein will speak on the “mirror world” of Doppelganger Politics, where the populist right has adopted causes and language associated with the left. After her talk, Klein joins past secretary general of the Community of Democracies Thomas E. Garrett and political scientists Kenneth Roberts and Suzanne Mettler (both College of Arts and Sciences) for a conversation on the U.S. election. A free ticket is required.

Global Cornell has invited Garrett, Roberts, Mettler and other area studies and government specialists to weigh in on elections in the countries and regions they study. Their responses can be found on a new Global Democracy webpage. 

While this year’s global electoral record is mixed, the experts found some points of convergence. Perhaps the most heartening is their observation that well-organized citizens can – sometimes – stand up to autocrats and win.

“Some global observers of democracy feared 2024 might deliver a shift through the ballot box toward more authoritarianism,” wrote Garrett, who is visiting campus this fall as the Einaudi Center Lund Practitioner in Residence and Distinguished Global Democracy Lecturer (Cornell Brooks School of Public Policy). “The reality has been different—at least in cases when elections have been transparent.”

Garrett cited India, where voters reelected the increasingly iron-fisted prime minister Narendra Modi but denied him an outright legislative majority, and Senegal, where the Constitutional Council rejected incumbent Macky Sall’s bid to hold on to power and the people elected an opposition candidate in an open and peaceful process. 

Credit: Element5 Digital/Unsplash

Rachel Beatty Riedl (A&S/Brooks), Peggy Koenig ’78 Director of the Center on Global Democracy, is especially impressed by the Senegal example. “Democracy is alive in Senegal because of citizens’ demand for compliance with the rules of the electoral game,” she wrote.

Senegal is one of 13 African countries holding elections this year. Constitutional law scholar Muna Ndulo (Cornell Law School) reported that the democratic landscape is changing on the continent, in some ways for the better and in other ways for the worse. He cited misinformation in social media and the influence of money as particularly vexing. “Although elections are a necessity, they are insufficient for the consolidation of democracy,” Ndulo wrote.

Elsewhere in Africa, Vice Provost for International Affairs Wendy Wolford sees parallels between the U.S. and Mozambique, where the governing FRELIMO party “supports the democratic process only if it wins.”

“Mozambique and the United States both show how political parties can give lip service to democracy while deploying coercive means to retain control,” Wolford wrote. “And they demonstrate the importance of on-the-ground organizing by ordinary people.”

Daniel Bass, an anthropologist and manager of the Einaudi Center’s South Asia Program, cites Sri Lanka as a country where grassroots organizing led to the orderly transfer of power after many years of fractiousness and violence. In September, a third-party candidate defeated the incumbent in a largely peaceful process. 

“This election shows that democracy can still work, bringing people hope for the future,” Bass wrote.

The election in Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous nation, was “free and fair,” according to political scientist Thomas Pepinsky (A&S). But he noted that voters ultimately chose “a disgraced former general with a violent past” to be president. The result, he wrote, “reminds us that even democracies can choose highly divisive and problematic politicians as their leaders.”

With elections in the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela and Guatemala, Latin America has been “a microcosm of the broader international patterns seen around the world,” wrote Einaudi Center Democratic Threats and Resilience faculty fellow Kenneth Roberts. 

“In Venezuela and El Salvador, autocratic rulers manipulated elections to entrench their authority and marginalize opposition forces,” he wrote. “In Guatemala, however, elections produced a democratic recovery.” 

For Roberts, the Guatemalan case “shows how social mobilization from below and effective coalition building can help to rebuild democracy even when institutions have been gravely weakened by incumbent autocrats.” The lesson, he concluded, “is that the best response to those who challenge democracy is usually more democracy.”

In Mexico and El Salvador, other considerations outweighed democracy on voters’ priority lists. Political scientist Gustavo Flores-Macías (A&S) noted that both countries elected ruling-party candidates despite those parties having “leveraged their broad popularity to undermine civil liberties in the name of public safety.” 

Mexico’s election was notable because it made Claudia Sheinbaum the country’s first female president, something that has yet to occur in the 248-year history of the United States.

“Western Europe is having a moment,” wrote sociologist Mabel Berezin (A&S). The director of the Einaudi Center’s Institute for European Studies noted that the right dominated June’s European Parliament elections, Italy elected a president from a party with neofascist roots and right-wing movements grew stronger in France, Germany and elsewhere. But overall, the picture is muddy. 

Europe’s populist parties won’t shape U.S. election outcomes, Berezin predicted, but after the election, “their positions on Ukraine and Middle East politics will matter in global politics where the United States is a key actor.”

This U.S. election is the most important in memory for many young and older voters on campus.

“The American presidential election presents a choice between a candidate who has threatened basic pillars of democracy … versus a candidate who, like other candidates of either party reaching back for decades, upholds those pillars,” wrote Suzanne Mettler, the John L. Senior Professor of American Institutions (A&S). “It is reminiscent of other periods in U.S. history when democracy – in whatever form had developed at that time – was in the balance.”

Polls show the election to be a toss-up. What is certain is that its consequences will be felt far beyond America’s borders.

Jonathan Miller is a freelance writer for Global Cornell.