It's a monster election year. Don't get distracted by the horse race.

I have no idea how I got to my office this morning. I mean me Doing you know: I walked to the subway station near my house, got on the train, transferred to another a few stops later, got off near my office, and then walked inside, stopping very briefly at a coffee shop to pick up a breakfast sandwich on the go.

But that list of steps describes the limit of my knowledge. I have no idea who opened the subway station, or what it takes to make it function. (Or, for that matter, why one of the turnstiles was left half open, sounding a plaintive alarm about the situation to no one in particular.) I don't know how to drive a train, and certainly not how to maintain one . And I'm sure the people of London are very grateful that I never had to think about digging a tube tunnel or building a railway line.

And yet the city would close if those things had not happened in the right order, as designed by experts and executed by professionals. This week the closure almost came about due to a transport strike that was called off at the last minute.

This is the magical thing about institutions: they exist so that complex processes can become automatic, so that large groups of people can work together without having to create new systems, and so that people like me can rely on expertise without even having that expertise. a little.

But because institutions often operate unnoticed in the background, it can be difficult to pinpoint the moment when they begin to collapse. And, frustratingly for me, it's even harder to write about gradual decline without sounding repulsively boring.

This is on my mind because 2024 will be the biggest election year in world history, with about half the population going to the polls. The struggle is undoubtedly significant: from Taiwan, which will elect a new president on Saturday, to the outcome of the US elections in November, which will have enormous consequences for the entire international order.

Yet there is a tension in the media's coverage of this election battle: following the horse race, while exciting, may obscure the longer-running, incremental story of what is happening in institutions around the world, many of which are in a state, not to obscure it. of slow deterioration or accelerated rotting.

In the United States, for example, the re-election of Donald Trump would have enormous consequences for geopolitics, the country's allies and enemies, and for the United States itself. But at the same time, Joe Biden's re-election would not remove pressure on the international order, as the institutional deadlock in Congress would persist, as would the dysfunction of the Republican Party.

Both factors are already distorting U.S. foreign policy under the current administration, as evidenced by the struggle over continued financing of the war in Ukraine. This has enormous consequences for the many other countries that rely on the US as an ally: even if the money continues to flow for the time being, an uncertain commitment is less valuable than a certain one.

“We can no longer take for granted the promise of unquestioned U.S. engagement in the world,” Elizabeth Saunders, a political scientist at Columbia University who studies U.S. foreign policy, told me this week. “Whoever wins the presidential election will have to deal with that reality.”

Institutions work best when they are built on a strong foundation of trust and reliability, and are rooted in established systems. Going back to my analogy with the subway, a tube system that you can count on reliably every day expands the places where commuters can live, means they can buy fewer cars, and becomes a supporting part of daily schedules.

In contrast, a system that is often unavailable is a system that cannot support any of these things. The entire system works less well.

And countries around the world have seen political polarization, populist governments and years of political chaos undermined courts and other institutions, creating exactly those kinds of problems. They still function, they still largely fulfill their intended role, but they cannot be counted on to the same extent. In that world, uncertainty is increasingly becoming a factor. In that world you need more backup plans, more individual solutions and more redundant infrastructure layers. It is less efficient.

“The institution has become less and less reliable” is not exactly clickbait. But sometimes it's the most important story.