Democracy in Unexpected Places: The Democratic Aspirations of the Afghan Public

By Russell Dalton

In 2001, virtually any nation in the world seemed a better candidate for democratization than Afghanistan. Lacking many of the socioeconomic factors identified with democratization, such as literacy, economic development, stability, and an active civil society, the country had, over the previous three decades, suffered through a series of often violent autocratic governments. This was followed by the rise to power of the Taliban, using the guise of religion to justify a brutal totalitarian state without moral or true religious values. And then came the terrorist attacks of September 11, and the international effort to force the Taliban from power.

Afghanistan is still in the midst of a war against the Taliban, but evidence from a national public opinion poll conducted by The Asia Foundation (TAF) in 2006 finds the unexpected: Most Afghans have strong democratic aspirations.

To assess public support for democracy, the survey asked respondents whether they agreed with the Churchillian statement that “Democracy may have its problems, but it is better than any other form of government.” A full 84 percent of Afghans agreed. The World Values Survey asked this same question in public opinion surveys in several other nations in the region (see Figure 1). Afghans were more supportive of democracy than Iranians, Iraqis, and Indonesians and at a level comparable with Jordanians, though less than Egyptians or Moroccans. Even in a nation such as Afghanistan, suffering from poverty and lacking a democratic history, such aspirations, it would seem, are part of the human condition.

This breadth of democratic aspirations in Afghanistan is surprising, and it raises questions about whether the average Afghan understands the term democracy, or whether their responses reflect nonpolitical or economic images. Since most Afghans have not had a single year of schooling, and most still lack access to mass media, exposure to the outside world is limited. Democracy is also an elastic term, with many different usages. After all, as a Soviet vassal state, the country was called “The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.”

To address this, the TAF survey asked about what democracy means to the individual, repeating a question that was asked of Afghans in the 2004 Voter Education Survey. The lead-up to the 2004 elections provided a good deal of evidence that many Afghans were still unfamiliar with the process of free and fair elections, because these were unknown to them. Yet already, almost half defined democracy in terms of some variant of liberal political rights—a fairly high percentage by the standards of other newly democratizing nations. This democratic awareness had grown substantially by 2006.

By then, with experience with democracy, two elections, and public education programs having increased the proportion expressing an opinion, 84 percent of Afghans defined democracy in terms of liberal political rights—freedom, rights and law, elections, and government by the people—a positive sign that citizen education efforts and experience were deepening public understanding of democracy. Moreover, as the number of political rights cited by individuals increased, so, too, did their belief that democracy is better than other forms of government. Among those who did not cite any political rights in defining it, only 39 percent strongly approved of democracy; but this increased to 62 percent among those who cited three or more political rights.