Elections
Elections are obviously essential to preserving freedom around the world. It offers the most direct check on power available to any individual, and a robust election system ensures the government serves its people instead of oligarchs.
It’s more than just having an election though. There need to be multiple parties competing. Political outsiders need to be able to win the election. We need a system where the candidate winning a majority of the votes is always elected. The best system for a single-winner election is instant runoff voting. You can choose between the Condorcet or mutual majority criterion, but you must use ranked voting for your head of government to protect against the spoiler effect.
Parliamentary systems have a weakness in how you can end up with a government without winning a majority of the votes inherent in the system. They are susceptible to unreasonable coalitions forming governments most people do not support. Presidential systems where the president is elected by instant runoff voting do not have this weakness of parliamentary systems. Examples of Parliamentary failures:
I believe the Irish election system without a Prime Minister is the most robust electoral system.
Courts
A robust court system is necessary to ensure that laws are applied equally. It is correct that those who write laws should not be the ones to interpret laws, and it is also important that the people who decide on guilt be not political appointees but the peers of the people on trial. The jury trial is a direct way to mitigate corruption.
Education
Education is paramount to the maintenance of a robust democratic society. People must understand history, how their government works, science, and many other fields. The more educated people are, the less likely people are to vote for populist candidates. https://www.cnn.com/election/2020/exit-polls/president/national-results
It is just self-evident to me, but not enough by itself.
Travel
So with the three above systems in place, a just election system, a fair jury system, and a robust education system, this will eliminate most cases where extreme politicians will be elected. But sometimes they all fail. What then? What if people get so incensed, vote in a far-right politician, courts get packed with authoritarian demagogues, and society starts to crumble?
That’s where free travel comes in as the final defense against democratic backsliding. When society starts to fall apart people must be able to move away from their home country to seek employment and a life in another country, if only temporarily.
Free travel increases communication between countries fostering people-to-people relationships. It is one thing when we are attacked by Saudi Arabia, but it is a whole other thing when the President is attacking Canada. Most Americans will never know a Saudi nor travel there, but Canada and America are best friends. We visit each other all the time, marry each other, and have the most crossed border in the world. It’s not some far-away theocratic sponsor of terrorism, it is a thriving democracy which we have a deep friendship with. We love each other.
Increasing travel between democracies strengthens our bonds. It makes attacks against our allies less politically palatable.
Voters can be stupid. Courts can be corrupted.
Free travel forces governments in the free travel bloc to adopt best practices or suffer depopulation. It is the only check on the government that works in one direction. The bigger the bloc, the better the protection.
This is also why learning a foreign language is not just a good idea, but should be mandatory starting in grade school. It means that after joining the free movement area, people in your country will already speak a foreign language making it so that the free travel area will be more effective, allowing your citizens to then easily live and work in a country speaking their second language with no barriers. It further increases the effectiveness of free travel areas in enforcing best practices.
I do not believe that Fico, Orban, Starmer, Nehammer, or Johnson are less corrupt than Ivanishvili. But while Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia are part of the European Union and the United Kingdom used to be a member, Georgia is not and has never been a member of the European Union or the Schengen Area. The United Kingdom still has an open border with Ireland. British citizens still have the right to live in Ireland for as long as they want.
Georgia is not protected by free travel, so the Georgian government can do actions that are impossible to get away with in Hungary. This explains why we have seen more democratic backsliding in Georgia compared to countries that are members of open-border treaties with similar leaders. They are all parliamentary democracies, but only Georgia lacks the protection free travel areas provide. The consequence is stark.
So the solution must be to expand free travel areas to include all democracies. Even within the United States, it is easy to see the impact of free travel. African Americans were able to move from the Old Confederacy to the North in the early 1900s to escape Jim Crow Laws in the Great Migration. We still see the consequences of southern policies in poverty maps, with the Deep South having the highest poverty rate in the country, outside of Puerto Rico.
We need to expand this right to a higher level. When demagogues like Nehammer, Trump, and Ivanishvili are threatened by having their most productive workers able to leave the country they are constrained. They have to think twice about whether their actions will cause emigration. But when good policies like free college are proposed those politicians have more leverage to enforce their policy. Enforce the superior policy, or people will move to countries with superior policies. This leads to a convergence towards best practices, but only in open-border systems.
The real trick in political science is not to constrain the government from doing anything but to devise clever mechanisms that consistently encourage best practices while discouraging foolish policies, like firing thousands of federal workers without cause.
This is why aspects of free travel were listed five times in my 10-point key to peace list. It truly is the most important policy for expanding freedom in the world.