Short of “a foreign power or going bankrupt.” Germany was forced to pay for all damages that occurred during WW1. They were pretty bankrupt as countries go. And then the great depression happened. So I think Germany counts as democratic backsliding on account of “going bankrupt.” And it doesn’t claim all democracies. Just democracies that reach a large enough numbers of keys.
I don’t have a source for this claim off the top of my head, but I’ve previously read that Germany was actually a net beneficiary of international financial transactions in the 1920s. Essentially, the flow of funds went like this:
Germany paid war reparations to the UK and France.
The UK and France paid off their war debts to the United States.
The United States made loans to Germany, and Germany defaulted on a good fraction of them.
It would be nice if someone could check whether this is true or not, but the impression I got from reading the history here is that the role of war reparations in causing fiscal problems for Germany was inflated by propaganda, especially by German politicians who tried to blackmail the Allies into lowering the amount of reparations to be paid by raising the specter of economic collapse in Germany.
Oh yeah, good point about Germany. I’m still pretty skeptical about the claim. Even if the claim ended up being true, I’d be worried its just because democracy is a pretty new concept, so we just don’t have as much data as we’d like. But far less worried it’d be non predictive as I am now.
The particular argument why democracies are so stable does not seem robust to the population wrongly believing a dictatorship would be better in their interests than the current situation. Voters can be arbitrarily wrong when they aren’t able to see the effects of their actions and then re-vote.
Short of “a foreign power or going bankrupt.” Germany was forced to pay for all damages that occurred during WW1. They were pretty bankrupt as countries go. And then the great depression happened. So I think Germany counts as democratic backsliding on account of “going bankrupt.” And it doesn’t claim all democracies. Just democracies that reach a large enough numbers of keys.
I don’t have a source for this claim off the top of my head, but I’ve previously read that Germany was actually a net beneficiary of international financial transactions in the 1920s. Essentially, the flow of funds went like this:
Germany paid war reparations to the UK and France.
The UK and France paid off their war debts to the United States.
The United States made loans to Germany, and Germany defaulted on a good fraction of them.
It would be nice if someone could check whether this is true or not, but the impression I got from reading the history here is that the role of war reparations in causing fiscal problems for Germany was inflated by propaganda, especially by German politicians who tried to blackmail the Allies into lowering the amount of reparations to be paid by raising the specter of economic collapse in Germany.
Oh yeah, good point about Germany. I’m still pretty skeptical about the claim. Even if the claim ended up being true, I’d be worried its just because democracy is a pretty new concept, so we just don’t have as much data as we’d like. But far less worried it’d be non predictive as I am now.
The particular argument why democracies are so stable does not seem robust to the population wrongly believing a dictatorship would be better in their interests than the current situation. Voters can be arbitrarily wrong when they aren’t able to see the effects of their actions and then re-vote.