Demokrasinin Zayıflayan Toplumsal Zemini
Daron Acemoglu’s 2026 book What Happened to Liberal Democracy? offers a material explanation for part of the democratic malaise affecting many advanced economies. His argument does not reduce democratic decline to elections, populist leaders, or social media. Instead, it focuses on the weakening economic and institutional position of working-class citizens following deindustrialization, offshoring, technological change, declining worker organization, and widening income disparities. The central mechanism is political as much as economic. During much of the twentieth century, industrial employment provided large numbers of non-college workers with rising incomes, bargaining power, organizational capacity, and a tangible stake in democratic institutions. When that economic structure weakened, the coalition supporting liberal democracy also became less cohesive. Empirical research on trade exposure and political polarization in the United States provides evidence consistent with parts of this argument, although it does not establish a universal causal explanation for democratic decline. Acemoglu proposes what he calls “working-class liberalism”: a renewed democratic coalition built around shared prosperity, better jobs, public services, stronger communities, and greater worker voice while preserving pluralism and individual rights. The argument has limits. Democratic erosion is also driven by institutional attacks, authoritarian leadership, identity conflicts, media systems, migration, and geopolitical shocks. Economic inclusion therefore cannot substitute for constitutional safeguards. Acemoglu’s larger contribution is to reconnect the two: a democracy may retain its formal institutions while gradually losing the broad social coalition willing to defend them.