The Colonialist Roots of Democratic Decay: Collective Action, Experimental Psychology, and Spatial Discourse

Abstract

Democracy and dictatorship both depend on collective action, which humans avoid because it takes more effort than it is worth. Experimental psychology reveals that positive spatial discourse, explicit or implicit, reduces the effort that humans project a task to require. If so, dictatorships arise because explicit positive spatial cues, capable of retaining coherence only if assigning only to relatively few members of any population, generate the collective repression by a minority that establishes any dictatorship. Conversely the implicit cue to group size in a color metaphor, capable of assigning throughout a population, generates the universal franchise establishing a democracy. By supplementing spatial cues dividing Europeans with a metaphor of whiteness unifying Europeans and their settlers, colonialism made democracy possible once European withdrawal ended white dictatorship over colonial territories. But by erasing the condition that once secured the universal franchise among Europeans and their settlers, loss of colonies invigorates whites’ fears that hard won political rights have reverted to insecurity. That insecurity is responsible for the democratic decay now evident across Europe and its settler territories.