Several possible lines of inquiry come to mind. We may be seeing a process of incumbents losing touch with their constituents over time, especially when incumbents or their parties have been in power for a long time. Some have suggested this is true especially of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Even democratically elected leaders may come to have an inflated sense of knowing better than the citizenry what is in the citizenry’s own best interest. And even democratically elected leaders may have a bias in favor of what is flashy or prestigious or symbolic rather than what affects most people’s daily lives. In Turkey’s case this includes Erdogan’s desire to hark back to Ottoman glories with the structure he wants to erect in place of the park that has been at the center of protests in Istanbul. In Brazil’s case this includes huge resources being spent on hosting the soccer World Cup and the Olympic Games—resources unavailable for many other programs that would affect the welfare of ordinary Brazilians…

One is that even relatively stable and well-established democracies are more fragile than we might like to think. And before we get too haughty in distinguishing our own democracy from those in Brazil and Turkey, recall that the United States has had its share of nasty disturbances in its streets in the not-distant past. The same question about why a democratically elected government should be the target of action in the street can be applied to the United States as well as to Brazil and Turkey.