Winston Churchill famously quipped that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” It is a messy, inefficient, and deeply frustrating system. Yet, history has shown it is the “least worst” option we have for ensuring peaceful transitions of power, protecting civil liberties, and holding leaders accountable.But there is a glaring blind spot in the Western promotion of this ideal: we treat democracy as a universal, plug-and-play system that simply requires setting up ballot boxes. The philosopher-poet Allama Iqbal famously critiqued this mechanical approach to governance, observing:Jamhooriat ik tarz-e-hukoomat hai ke jis mein Bandon ko gina karte hain, tola nahi karte

(Democracy is a certain form of government in which / Men are counted, but they are not weighed.)When we examine the struggles of democracy in the developing nations, the profound truth of Iqbal’s words emerges. Merely counting heads does not create a functioning state. For a democracy to take root and flourish, it requires a basic threshold of development. A harsh reality persists: democracy cannot feed a starving family. Abstract political rights mean little when basic survival is on the line, paving the way for systemic corruption, compromised elites, and a fractured moral compass.

The Developmental ThresholdDemocracies do not exist in a vacuum. To function, they require an ecosystem of stability. Political scientists have long noted that a functioning democracy usually requires a robust middle class, widespread literacy, and a baseline of economic security.Critics often counter this by pointing to early Western democracies, asking how the United States or the United Kingdom achieved democracy before modern economic development existed. The answer is simple: they didn’t. Early Western “democracies” were highly restricted oligarchies where voting was limited exclusively to wealthy, property-owning men. To be clear, acknowledging this history is not an argument for restricting voting rights in the developing world today. Universal suffrage is a non-negotiable human right. Rather, it exposes a profound double standard. The West artificially created a “stable” electorate by silencing the poor, and spent centuries building strong states before gradually expanding the vote. Today, developing nations are expected to run flawless, universal mass democracies while their populations are still fighting for basic survival.When a........

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