Incumbency was once a powerful electoral advantage: A sitting leader could cement bonds with constituents and donors that translated into support at the ballot box. But last year, wielding power was evidently a drag on leaders’ popularity, for reasons apparently not rooted in the specifics of the politics of their countries. In 2024, incumbent parties and their candidates lost ground virtually everywhere, whether they were right-wing or left-wing, moderate or radical, competent or incompetent, rich or poor.
Voters all over the world felt that their ruling parties weren’t delivering for them in 2024. How could they all be wrong? But if their governments span the gamut of policies and values, how could they all be right?
The phenomenon seemingly coincided with the global rise of what I’ve elsewhere called the “three Ps”: populism, polarization, and post-truth. These trends offer a clue, but whether they are the cause or the effect of the turn on incumbents is not a simple question.
Something has happened either to voters’ expectations or to governments’ capacity to deliver on them, or both.
Evidence of the trend is inescapable. Just in the past year, Labour routed the ruling British Conservatives by a historic margin, and France’s centrist President Emmanuel Macron saw his authority weakened by the inconclusive result of a snap election. In Japan, the ruling conservative Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed almost continuously since 1955, lost its parliamentary majority in the powerful lower house. In South Africa, the African National Congress lost its absolute majority for the first time since the end of apartheid. In South Korea, President Yoon Suk Yeol’s party lost midterm elections by a landslide. The party of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi failed to gain a majority for the first time since 2014. In Argentina, in the fall of 2023, the ruling Peronist coalition lost to the libertarian outsider Javier Milei.
Incumbents lost ground in elections in Panama, Portugal, Belgium, Austria, Croatia, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, and Lithuania. Among democracies, one of very few countries to have bucked the trend is Mexico, where an overwhelmingly popular incumbent populist managed to hand the presidency to a handpicked successor. Everywhere else, incumbency seems to have become the electoral kiss of death.
We don’t know why the repudiation of incumbents has been so fierce and so pervasive. In some countries, unemployment, inflation, or both drove a backlash. In others, widespread corruption had produced mass protests. In India and Brazil, racial and religious strife have weighed heavily in electoral politics. In a globalized world, perhaps governments are not willing or able to nimbly meet demands to address domestic inequality, say, or to restructure their countries’ economies inside an electoral term. In an algorithm-fueled media environment with ever less editorial curation, perhaps conspiracy theories and demonization of one’s political opponents more easily catch fire.
Or maybe the expectations of the global public have ceased to track with any realistic idea of government capacity. Contemplating the recent anti-incumbent turn, I have found myself returning to a conversation I had a while back with Ricardo Lagos, who was the president of Chile from 2000 to 2006. He told me that while in office, he had wooed a dissatisfied constituency by channeling substantial resources to a poor neighborhood in the outskirts of Santiago, Chile’s capital. “We built a housing complex and made sure that public services like water, electricity, and health were available and reliable,” he told me. And yet, when election time rolled around, the voters of that neighborhood turned away from Lagos and supported the opposition.
“I was flabbergasted,” he told me, “and decided to find out for myself what had happened. I met with a group of community leaders and was expressing my surprise and singling out the hundreds of houses we built when one of the neighbors told me, ‘Yes, Mr. President, we know what you did, but this is all about parking spaces. The houses are nice, but we don’t have any parking.’”
Lagos was stunned. Public housing in Chile had never included such middle-class trappings as parking. But his constituents were getting wealthier, and as they did, their expectations ran ahead of his government’s ability to deliver. This problem is not Chile’s alone. In many countries, expectations rise faster than government capacity, governments look hapless, and the resulting public discontent makes the countries harder to govern.
We can call this cycle the “Lagos paradox.” It has a long history, but I suspect that the geographical scope, social potency, and political impact of the Lagos paradox may have now assumed dimensions incomparable to any time in the past. Perhaps a global expectations gap has opened, destabilizing politics and giving rise to its toxic offspring, anti-politics.
The idea—that political instability is inevitable when people’s expectations rise beyond their government’s capacity to meet them—is not new. Samuel Huntington explored it in his 1968 book, Political Order in Changing Societies. The developing countries of the era were unstable, he wrote, because emergent middle classes demanded improvements to material conditions and public services faster than the economies and institutions of these countries could deliver them. Waves of discontent pummeled political leaders who were powerless to quell them.
But Huntington was trying to account for the third-world basket cases of his time—poor countries whose restive masses kept their governments constantly off-balance. He took for granted that the most advanced, consolidated democracies wouldn’t have this problem because well-off voters could afford to be patient and understood what could be delivered. What if the expectations gap has now come for the rich countries that Huntington once presumed immune? The result would be that incumbents would lag, populists would surge, and democratic institutions would totter.
The global scope of this turn of events might provide an important clue as to its provenance. Normally, the paradox sets in under one of three conditions: People’s hopes start rising faster than before, governments lag behind in fulfilling expectations, or both things happen at once. It’s hard to think of a global reason governments should all be getting worse at delivering prosperity or better public services at the same time. Some analysts suggest that a spurt of pandemic-induced inflation did precisely that. But focusing on the growth of expectations seems more natural, simply because the information space in which expectations are formed and expressed has so obviously and visibly transformed in recent decades.
Social-media platforms allow people to see more readily than in the past how others—or idealized versions of others—live. The effects have been documented widely in the context of mental health, which can suffer from a constant barrage of images of people living glamorous, picture-perfect lives. But these images may also exact a political cost. Social media keeps us constantly informed of who has it better, and of the aspirations that elude us but that others have fulfilled. At the same time, the disappointed vent frustrations on these digital platforms, where they can easily see how many others have also had their expectations dashed. Whether or not people are becoming more upset about unfulfilled expectations, new communications technologies could be making their frustrations more visible and politically potent.
Martin Gurri argued essentially this in his influential 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. He observed that the political tensions that tend to result from social media don’t typically fall along a left-right axis but between center and periphery, setting previously marginal groups against established institutions. Writing around the time of the Arab Spring, Gurri emphasized how the new technologies allowed citizens to challenge traditional centers of authority.
What he did not foresee was that the accessibility of social media—its lowering of the barriers to entry and democratization of the information space—could also be exploited by power-hungry populists. These leaders have used the new technologies to sharpen discontent and turn it on an elite that they urge their followers to blame for everything. Disappointed by the rate at which their lives are improving, eyes newly opened to how many others share their disappointment, and flush with explanations that lay the blame on institutions of authority, people in rich and poor countries alike may experience the Lagos paradox.
Public sectors the world over may be structurally unable to fulfill voters’ expectations, not necessarily because government-service provision is bad (though in many cases it is bad) but because the growth of expectations could well have escaped the capacities of governments to keep up. In the United States, dissatisfaction with government, whether or not fueled by social media, has been a long and damaging trend, as documented in a 2024 national survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service.
Bureaucracies incubated in the 19th century and developed in the 20th move slowly—and adapt to new demands glacially—in the best of times. In many countries, rules and regulations have accrued in layers, stifling the administrative state’s ability to react swiftly to new conditions. And the demographic realities of falling birth rates and aging populations basically everywhere create new headwinds for public-service provision: Public sectors need to do more and more (and spend more and more) just to keep service provision at the levels of yesteryear.
Measuring expectations is difficult—they are amorphous, necessarily self-reported, and rarely surveyed. But if they were indeed skyrocketing, and service provision barely budging, the picture for incumbents would be as grim as the one we saw in 2024. Leaders of all stripes may be scrambling to provide services that their constituents will consider even adequate, let alone good. That the anti-incumbent mood will turn on the populists it helped get elected is reasonable to expect.
The world of gate-kept media that filters extreme views and moderates discontent is gone for good. Everybody-to-everybody communications are a permanent feature of modern societies. And although public-sector reforms could make some difference on the margin to help bureaucracies do their jobs better, governments will not likely overcome runaway expectations driven by the new information age.
For a glimpse of the future, consider Italy, which is now in its fourth decade of leadership by ever more extreme outsiders. The country followed the outlandish rule of the billionaire playboy Silvio Berlusconi—complete with “bunga bunga” parties and rampant self-dealing—with the even stranger anti-politicians of the uncategorizable, post-everything Five Star Movement, then kept looking farther to the fringe until it landed on Giorgia Meloni, a hyper-conservative populist with ideological roots in Italy’s fascist movement. These experiments, interspersed with short spells in power for the more conventional parties of the center-left, show an electorate drawn to stronger and stronger versions of outsider posturing and populist extremism. One thing it surely doesn’t want is an incumbent.
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