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*****
Now that the dust has settled after the election, congratulations to all the candidates, all 686 of them. Congratulations to everyone from Pearse Doherty who got 18,898 first preference votes in Donegal, all the way down to Seán O’Leary who stood for election in Wicklow and got nine votes.
Pearse Doherty got that massive vote despite having two Sinn Féin running mates, who got another 12,000 votes between them. If Sinn Féin had managed their vote a bit better, they might have distributed it among the three candidates more evenly and won three seats in Donegal, but that’s a story for a different day.
And Seán O’Leary, who got just nine votes in Wicklow, congratulations to him too, and let’s remember that he also ran in Carlow Kilkenny where he got 26 votes, and Cork South-West where he got 27, and he ran in a bunch of other constituencies including Cork North-West where he got a whopping 110 votes bringing his total to 324 between all the constituencies that he ran in, so I hope that cheered him up a bit.
Although, obviously, for him and the rest of the 512 candidates who were not elected, the election didn’t go the way they were hoping. And, by the way, let’s have a bit of humanity for them all. Standing for election is an unforgiving and brutally public way to expose yourself to the judgement of your peers.
A lot of the 512 will put on a brave face, and say that of course they weren’t expecting to win, but they are pleased with how well they did. Don’t believe a word of it. I have hung around with enough election candidates of various hue, and I can tell you one thing that they will never admit. There was not one of those candidates, not a single one of them, who didn’t secretly harbour a vision of being lifted shoulder-high as some imaginary excited journalist says into a microphone phrases like ‘extraordinary vote’ and ‘unexpected result’.
And I’ll tell you more. Of those 686 candidates, the victorious and the vanquished, not one of them, not a single one of them didn’t go to sleep with feet sore after endless hours of canvassing, imagining scenarios that would have them proclaimed Taoiseach for life within hours of the polls closing. One candidate who came close but not close enough in a previous election said to me ‘the despair is no bother, it’s the hope I can’t handle’.
All this brought to my mind something said by Luke Ming Flanagan years ago, that if you don’t like what is happening, then vote for someone who will change it. And if there is nobody on the ballot offering what you want, then run for election yourself. But as I say, that’s a difficult thing to do, and for the large majority of people who do it, it ends in humbling failure, but it’s necessary for our democracy, so that’s why I say congratulations to all of them, even the ones who I profoundly disagree with.
And that brought to my mind something else. I like to challenge ideas that are held unthinkingly, especially by myself. In the past, one of those truisms that was never disputed is that democracy is a Good Thing. You might think that’s obvious, but being accepted as obvious hasn’t always been the best determinant of truth.
And there are now people, some people, who are challenging this. Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal has written that he believes that democracy is not compatible with freedom, and that he prefers the latter. You might dismiss that as the view of just another eccentric billionaire, but Peter Thiel was the person who selected JD Vance to be the vice president for now president-elect Donald Trump.
There is a whole political subculture on the right that now feels emboldened to say the quiet bit out loud, particularly in the US, but not just. They don’t believe in democracy, they think things would be better with some sort of strongman ruler as a benevolent dictator. Exactly how they would keep the dictator benevolent isn’t quite clear, but that’s not the point. The point is that there are at least some people, and some of them quite close to power, who are openly saying they don’t believe in democracy.
That’s quite a turnaround. Previously people who didn’t believe in democracy at least had the decency to pretend that they did. You see that even in the names of countries at the bottom of the Economist’s list ranking the quality of democracies around the world. The Economist goes through dozens of questions, asking whether it is possible to form a political party, stand for election, get access to the media, and many other features necessary for democracy, and they give a score for each item, add it all up, and you can see where each country ranks.
Right at the bottom of the list you’ll find places the like Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo. These places are brutal dictatorships, but they at least acknowledge the supremacy of the democratic ideal, even if they don’t follow it.
In some cases, particularly in the West, I think the feeling against democracy is a bit of a pose, it’s the thing to say to seem edgy, a bit like the students who are Marxists one week and Maoists the next, but there can be no denying that there are now some prominent, serious people who are willing to say they are against democracy, and pay millions of dollars supporting that cause.
And they are not alone in the world. I’ve spoken in this podcast before about the ideological network behind Vladimir Putin, and they certainly are contemptuous of democracy – that might be a hint where others are getting ah let’s say ‘inspiration’.
The general argument is that progress is hindered by the need to waste time consulting with an ignorant fickle public, and that productive people in society are a minority who eventually will be outvoted by others who will seize and squander the wealth created by the elite. A strongman making all the decisions is a better model, empowering a privileged caste to run society which, they think, will be better for everyone. There is also a strain of fundamentalist Islam, which holds that Sharia law will produce better outcomes in this world, as well as the next, and the Catholic Church supported exporting of Mussolini’s version of this to any country where they had influence.
A common thread in them all is that the focus on individual rights is undermining the common good.
And that’s challenging. It’s not hard to find examples of where major projects are blocked by seemingly trivial special interests, or where people game the democratic system to their own benefit. If you were put up to it, are you able to argue in defence of democracy?
So that’s what I thought I’d do. And I made a spreadsheet. I downloaded that Economist list, ranking countries by quality of democracy. I’m sure people might quibble about details, but it’s accurate enough for our purposes. If you think that Norway and New Zealand, at the top of the list, are not more democratic than North Korea and Afghanistan at bottom, you’re not ready for this discussion.
Then I also downloaded the GDP per capita for each country in the world, that’s the size of the economy in each country. Again, this is not a perfect measure, particularly with Ireland, but it’s good enough.
I also downloaded the Human Development Index, that’s a basket of measurements, mostly focussing on education levels and standard of living, which might be a better indicator than the actual cash figures of GDP. And I got the Quality of Life index, also prepared by the Economist. I recognise that both of those are a bit subjective, though only around the edges.
So I also got some hard and fast figures, the life expectancy of each country in the world, the rate of maternal mortality – how many women die around birth – and the infant mortality rate, how many children die before their fifth birthday, and also the average height of people in each country.
By then I was on a roll, so I went and got the PISA scores, a standardised test of maths, science, and reading skills of schoolchildren, I got the air quality index, the average height of adults, the press freedom index, and something called the economic freedom index, which a bit ideologically driven, it’s basically a measure of free market policies, so I threw in the Good Country index too, which attempts to measure how much each country contributes to humanity, taking a bunch of things like scientific research, donations to charity, patents filed, and international aid into account.
I plotted where countries ranked on each of these indices against where they ranked in the democracy index, and as a control, I plotted the indices against where these countries rank alphabetically, and by population.
Statisticians have a standardised way to calculate correlation, which basically tells you how much two different lists of statistics track each other. They do this to counter people saying, ‘My granny smoked 80 cigarettes a day and she lived to be 105’. It takes the data as a whole, rather than focusing on some unrepresentative outlier.
You take two lists of numbers, and the correlation is expressed as a number between zero and one,. Zero means that there is no correlation, one means that the two lists are identical. In the real world, a correlation of exactly zero would almost never happen because chance would mean that some figures will come close to lining up, so it is considered that correlation below 0.1 is not statistically significant. A figure between 0.1 and 0.3 is considered weak correlation, and 0.3 to 0.5 is moderate correlation. Anything over 0.5 is strong correlation.
Now, correlation is not causation, but it is a good reason to suspect causation and, at least, investigate further. So how does democracy correlate with those other indices. Well, first of all I looked at the controls. Alphabetical order has a 0.03 negative correlation with a country’s rank on the democracy index. That’s as close to zero as you’re going to get in a data set this size.
Population size has a 0.14 per cent negative correlation with democracy. That’s just about statistically significant, the smaller your population, a country is very slightly more likely to be democratic. I don’t know if that’s a real effect, or just a fluke, because small European countries are more democratic, than some large Asian countries, but there you go.
But what about the real stats that I was measuring? The first one I went for was GDP, and the effect is very clear. Across the 159 countries I could get data for, GDP correlates with democracy at a rate of 0.66, that’s well above the threshold of 0.5 to consider them strongly correlated. But, as we know in Ireland, that isn’t a perfect measurement. What about HDI, the human development index that looks at things like education levels and standard of living? It correlates with GDP at 0.65, almost exactly the same. With the Quality of Life index, it’s even stronger, 0.74.
Now I have heard criticisms that these are all a bit subjective, and they are measuring things that the West thinks are important, so I went for some stats that are of universal human value, and much less open to manipulation. For maternal mortality, infant mortality, and life expectancy, and I had data for more than 160 countries each, and they correlate with democracy at a rate of 0.55, 0.62 and 0.61 – all of them well above the threshold of being considered strongly correlated.
PISA is the Programme for International Student Assessment, it’s a very well-respected way of measuring educational in about 80 countries around the world. They test on maths, science and reading. Maths scores correlate with democracy at a rate of over 0.49, just a shade below the level considered strongly correlated, so officially that comes out as moderately correlated. Science and reading are both strongly correlated, so the overall score for PISA is strongly correlated at 0.54.
You might think that industry in the more economically developed democracies would not have a good impact on air quality, but actually the reverse is true, air quality correlates moderately with democracy at 0.44.
It’s no surprise that Press freedom is powerfully correlated with democracy, at 0.77, the same score as economic freedom. As I said that last one is quite ideologically-driven, but even the Good Country Index, which measures a basket of 35 things like patents filed, international aid, and other contributions to science and humanity, they are mostly measured relative to the country’s GDP, so that the bar is much higher for rich countries, and still a country’s place on the Good Country index correlates strongly with their place on the democracy index, at 0.62.
And finally, democracy makes you taller. I’m not kidding. I got the average adult height for 122 countries and the rankings moderately correlate with democracy at a rate of 0.44. Every international ranking that I could find, every single one correlates with the ranking on democracy. And every one except that last one, height, is well above the threshold to be considered strongly correlated. There is just no arguing with the data. It’s not just better to live in a democracy, it’s much, much better to live in a democracy.
Whatever the cost of delays caused by the need to get democratic approval, whatever the costs caused by special interest groups voting for their narrow agenda, there is simply no question about it. Those costs are absolutely dwarfed by the benefits of democratic accountability.
And how does Ireland fare on all those indices. For air quality, the top of the index is dominated by Kiribati, Micronesia and about 25 other island microstates; of ‘real’ countries we’re number eight. Out of more than 160 countries for maternal and infant mortality, we come in at number 22 and number 17. We’re at number 11 on Pisa science and maths, but we’re number two in the world on reading, so overall score is ninth best in the world. We’re at number 10 for life expectancy, number eight for press freedom, number six for HDI, three for economic freedom, and number two for GDP per person. And we’re number eight on the Good Country index.
Even if those last few statistics are a bit dodgy, there is absolutely no question. The broad mass of the data is clear. If you are alive today in Ireland you are, compared to people living any place on earth, in any era since the dawn of humanity, by a wide margin, one of the luckiest people to ever draw a breath of this planet’s air.
And by the way, in case you are keeping score, Ireland beats the UK on all one of those indices, every single one.
https://hereshow.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Democracy.xlsx
