The Institute of Political and Social Sciences (ICPS), a consortium of the UAB and the Barcelona Provincial Council, has presented a new monograph entitled "L'Erosió democràtica. Entre l'exclusió social i el trencament generacional"[Democratic Erosion. Between social exclusion and generational gap]. The notebook contains comparative data from 2008 to 2024 that confirms a decline in the preference for democracy among the Catalan population, with a slight growth in favour of authoritarian solutions and a strong increase in disinterest in this type of government system.
This short periodical monograph analyses various aspects of the political attitudes and behaviour of citizens, and contains data from the Catalan Opinion Poll survey, published continuously since 1989. The study now presented has been prepared by researchers Lucía Medina and Oriol Bartomeus, the latter an associate lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Public Law.
The data shows that in 2008 an overwhelming majority chose democracy as their preferred system of government (93%), while a minority favoured a dictatorship, depending on the circumstances (3%), or were indifferent to the type of regime (2.4%). Sixteen years later, in 2024, support for democracy is 11 percentage points lower (82%), preference for an authoritarian regime is slightly higher (5%), and indifference to the type of government system has grown significantly (11%).
According to Oriol Bartomeus, younger people, particularly men, and the most socially disadvantaged are the segments of the population that feel furthest away from democracy, since they believe the system is not capable of solving their shortcomings. The democratic erosion therefore seems to have a generational origin, insofar as it is concentrated in the youngest sections of the population, especially among young men. This process is attributed to the breaking, in the imaginary of these more recent generations, of the link between democracy and social and economic progress. In this sense, Bartomeus states that "there has been an unsuccessful generational transmission of democratic values", and this explains the current disaffection of some young people in relation to democracy.
Regarding the fact that the degree of democratic erosion is higher in 2024 than during the 2008 economic crisis, Oriol Bartomeus explains that "we are dragging a bad legacy from the 2008 crisis, which had a strong impact on the political system, and that fracture has not been healed".
The drop in support for democracy, however, represents a smaller proportion compared to the entire population of Catalonia, and those who opt for a dictatorship do not exceed 280,000 people out of an electoral census of 5.7 million. In this sense, the number of people who declare that they do not care about one regime or another is more worrying, and they represent around 620,000 individuals in 2024. Adding both amounts, nearly a million people are open, whether by conviction, opportunism or indifference, to a regime other than democracy. For Lucía Medina, "the danger is not the increase in authoritarian forms, the danger is indifference towards democracy".
Moreover, democratic erosion is also at the centre of the most disadvantaged strata of society, both in terms of academic level and social class. In other words, democracy acquires utilitarian overtones and maintains its appeal among the "beneficiaries" of the system, while its value is lost among those layers that do not feel as benefited from it. The idea of ¿¿democracy as a guarantee for social progress "for everyone" is in doubt and what is being seen is the confirmation of this among the sectors that have lost hope of improvement. For them, there is a strengthening of the idea that which political system exists does not matter, because there is none that can guarantee progress for them.
The ICPS monograph ends with a reflection on the need to find formulas to re-engage those social segments that seem to be drifting away, to reconnect them to the system. This can only happen if institutions act in such a way that these people once again perceive that democracy is useful to them, that is, that values ¿¿such as freedom, equality and justice do not remain simple statements, but become tangible realities for everyone.
The Institute of Political and Social Sciences (ICPS), a consortium of the UAB and the Barcelona Provincial Council, has presented a new monograph entitled "L'Erosió democràtica. Entre l'exclusió social i el trencament generacional"[Democratic Erosion. Between social exclusion and generational gap]. The notebook contains comparative data from 2008 to 2024 that confirms a decline in the preference for democracy among the Catalan population, with a slight growth in favour of authoritarian solutions and a strong increase in disinterest in this type of government system.
