I can see this in many of the top economies, but is this true is all cases? China for example, seems to be doing well, but I can't really see that it's becoming less authoritarian.
China's social/political system is heavily authoritarian, but economically, in practice, it's quite laissez faire. The problem is when anything reaches scale in China the vultures in local government come in and try to get protection money.
They have been doing a lot recently to reduce this corruption and apparently have made good process. I don't doubt that social/political liberties will not improve in China but it's possible the business environment could further improve. Especially with the next president.
The only problem is the government created a very unstable economy with their massive spending projects after the financial crisis. And a lot of the wealthy people are rushing to get their money out instead of reinvesting it there and they are still very unfriendly to foreign capital (both human and financial).
Everyone uses populism to their ends. See occupy Wall Street. It's no surprise that organized labor (a secure vote for the left) broke with tradition and went anti globalization.
It's interesting to see the lower middle class once dependable voters for the left break right and likewise, upper middle class, once dependable voters for the right, break left. I'm glad that parties can no longer take their bases for granted.
The book "The Forth Revolution" [1] has a really good history of how the size of the state has exploded globally since the 1950s. The push for greater and greater power has been a global phenomenon. It has continue almost unabated, the rhetoric of the right such as Reagan/Thatcher in the 1980s was merely a small blip in the hockey stick growth.
> The first revolution was the rise of the European nation-state after the Peace of Westphalia; the second was the late-18th- and 19th-century turn toward individual rights and accountable government; the third was the creation of the modern welfare state. Each revolution improved the state’s ability to provide order and deliver vital services while still fostering innovation. But as democratic publics demanded more and more, the state promised more and more, eventually overextending itself. In Revolution 3.5, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan tried, but failed, to shrink the state.
The second half of the book is less good where it predicts the eventual shrinking of the state towards an efficient Singapore-esque limited government (aka the fourth revolution). But they make very good observations about the current state where individual liberties are continually diminished, innovation is crippled, widespread government inefficiency is the norm ("94% of government IT projects failed in last decade"), budgets are bloated, and the economic growth needed to support social services stalls.
The cause may simply be that whenever a crisis happens everyone calls for something to be done, then laws get passed, regardless if they are effective or not (see: terrorism, drugs, etc) as well as the thousands of small regulations over business every time someone gets hurt or dies or were merely pushed through by incumbents protecting their market share. Combine that with constant crises over a couple decades and you have quite the large administrative state.
But I think it may be more simply the result of the "The Iron Law of Bureaucracy" [2]. As organizations mature, without push-back, administrators end up taking over every aspect of an organization (happened at universities too) and the administrators favourite thing to do is creating new rules requiring more administrators. Which is how you end up with so many government agencies that they don't even know how many exist in the US [3].
The growth of the modern state is hardly a partisan issue, at least not in practice.
Growth in administration won't be stopped by right-wing privatization, it's a consequence of trying to make an efficient organization. "Efficiency" means firing everyone who you can measure is doing a bad job, but the administrators either are the ones measuring, or have a job that nobody understands and so can't be measured.
"As the networking accelerates humanity into a spherically embracing, spontaneous union, yesterday's locally autonomous, self-preoccupied governments are left in the exclusive control of yesterday's most selfishly successful and entrenched minorities.
The present U.S.A. 1982 administration was elected by the votes of only one-seventh of the U.S. population and it spent $170 million — more than five times the money raised by their opponents — to buy their victory. The networks' people, aware that a U.S. presidency costs $50 million, a senatorship $10 million, and a representative's seat $5 million, observe that the TV era governments are corrupt, wherefore they spontaneously abhor and abstain from further voting.
Gradually discovering that the networking abandonment of the voting booth was the true cause of their claimed "overwhelming majority," the incumbent administration, fearful of a potential rejective voting tidal wave of the inter-networked world people, will probably try in vain to block networking. Because networking is apolitical and amorphous, it has no "cells" to be attacked, as did the communism of former decades. The fearful sovereign nation politicos will find that trying to arrest networking is like trying to arrest the waves of the ocean."
First I'll say that surveillance is a consensus among people in power no matter how you slice it. It is, depending on your perspective 1) about governments expanding government power, something the powerful in government always want or 2) about defending against terrorism, something everyone wants.
I'll give you my perspective on your question as someone fairly left of center, so take it with a grain of salt. Or take it as God's truth, whatever you fancy.
People, inevitably inexorably being strangled to death by the neoliberal free market capitalist economic system which has controlled nearly every western government since the 80s, are struggling and striking out for anything that will save them. People often turn to extremism and fascism of all stripes in situations like that. They become more extreme, because the status quo is a slow and painful death so anything that seems like it will bring change is good. When you are drowning you don't worry too much about the kind of boat that's offering to pull you up, you just climb onto it. Even if that boat is a slave ship.
Leftists have seen some success recently when they drop the ridiculous affectation of 'reasonable centrism and compromise' (centrism is only ever reasonable to people for whom the status quo is working, almost by definition), stop focusing on race/gender to the exclusion of class, and present real, radical, explicit and understandable changes to improve the lives of voters: Corbyn, Sanders, even Melenchon have all had encouraging and very high levels of success relative to expectations and the recent past, though they are mentioned in the order of their absolute success (Corbyn, topping the list, won a huge number of seats, the largest increase in labor vote share since 1945, caused a hung parliament which is pushing the Tories to make an uneasy alliance with an extremist group).
But these movements are still beginning and have a lot of work to do; they diametrically oppose the entrenched order explicitly (for the ultrawealthy, a Muslim ban is gauche and unbecoming of their senses of civility and properness; nationalizing private industry to take it from robber barons or providing healthcare for the poor is a very assault on their power/way of life), so they receive no support from above.
Yet, it's also true that many countries are moving far to the right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass
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