The latest Human Development Report from the UNDP raises some important questions about true democracy and voice, but does not go far enough in identifying the some of the major obstacles to democracy in the world today, or the means to achieve it.
 
The Human Development Reports annually published by the UNDP have, over the years, tended to provide at least some kind of counterbalancing analysis to the oppressively neoliberal and often misleading publications of the World Bank and IMF. They have also managed each year, to identify a theme, which is not just topical and relevant, but quite crucial to the interests of a significant majority of the world’s population.
 
This year’s Report, which is entitled "Deepening democracy in a fragmented world", deals with an issue that is ever more important, because while formal democracy has extended in many parts of the world over the recent period, substantive democracy - in terms of more equal opportunities and the power of the people’s will - currently seems under greater threat. The HDR makes a similar observation: "Economically, politically and technologically, the world has never seemed more free – or more unjust."
 
The HDR elucidates this statement at three levels. First, while there is more formal democracy than ever before, in terms of the majority of the world’s regimes now being electoral democracies, this is still a long way from comprehensive civil and political freedom for the citizens or accountability of the governments. Second, there are many more economic opportunities across the world, but a huge share of the world’ s population is still denied access to them. In fact, in the developing world, the seemingly intractable problems of persistent income poverty and high rates of child mortality point to the absence of international economic democracy. Third, while wars between nations are less frequent, civil conflicts of various kinds are on the increase.
 
The HDR also makes the point that the link between democracy and human development of the citizens is not automatic: in fact, when a small elite dominates economic and political decisions, the link between democracy can be broken. But most significant of all, the Report recognises what is probably the greatest symptom of "democratic deficit" in the world today: "Citizens often feel powerless to influence national policies … subject to international forces that they have little capacity to control".
 
This, indeed, is the real rub – the absence of genuine political voice and the inability to control especially economic policies on the part of the majority of the people, which has become such a standard feature of almost all democracies, old and new, across the world. But while the HDR identifies this problem, it does not take the further step of asking what has caused this, or really addressing the issue of what can be done about it.   
 
It must be accepted that the perception of lack of genuine people’s power is not new. Some would argue that the distinction between formal and substantive democracy itself indicates that we are living in more luxurious times, politically speaking, than before through most of history. Yet, there is an important sense in which people across the world feel – and actually are - less genuinely empowered than they were, say, at the middle of the last century, or even two decades ago.
 
This greater sense of powerlessness is not an accident. It is the result of a large process whereby it is truly the case that democratic processes have much less control over the policy decisions that are so critical in shaping people’s social and material lives. The most important shift that has taken place in practically all the countries of the world over the past two decades, is that the balance of social, political and economic power has shifted comprehensively in favour of large capital vis-à-vis all other groups.
 
This shift in power is both assisted by and reflected in the various forms of liberalisation and deregulation that have fed into the current process of globalisation. This has contributed greatly to the enhanced mobility of large capital and also to its bargaining power, and has been associated with the greater fragility and vulnerability that other sections of societies – and particularly workers – feel. And this process is not confined only to poor and developing countries; rather, it is widespread across the developed industrial world, where common people increasingly feel alienated from the governing political classes and unable to influence policies in ways that they desire.
 
More and more empirical studies (except for those blatantly funded by and subservient to the interests of large multinational capital) argue quite convincingly that global deregulation of trade and capital markets have increased inequality and reduced economic democracy. This is because they have reduced the power of national government to meet the social and economic needs to people in terms of basic physical and social infrastructure spending, limited serious efforts at poverty reduction and universal provision of basic services, and increased the vulnerability of ordinary people to sharp income shocks and other such fluctuations.