Back in November 2018, on the eve of the 2018 US Midterm election, Radiolab did an episode on the many different ways people vote around the world. The whole episode is great, and it pairs nicely with our recent dueling electoral college posts—the People’s Veto Plan and the vastly inferior Blow It Up. What I found most interesting was the information at the top of the episode, about the worldwide shift away from democratic rule. They went over a long-running survey called The World Values Survey, which has been tracking how social and political values have shifted in many different countries over the course of the last nearly forty years. You can play around with the survey data on their website, which allows you to, say, compare how strongly Russia values a strong, authoritarian leader compared to the United States and the Netherlands, and then break down the data by age, employment, education, and a whole host of other categories.

Question: From Very Good to Very Bad, how desirable is having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections?

Or maybe you want to know which countries think it’s a good idea for the army to take over when the government proves itself incompetent:

Question: On a scale of 1-10, how essential a characteristic of a democracy is it for the army to take over when government is incompetent?

The episode goes over some of the key takeaways from the survey, and how they’ve changed over time—in short, the current trend-line is not good, if democratic rule is something you’re rooting for.

Anyway, that’s just a small portion of a very good hour of listening.