None of this, though, means that democracy itself is some panacea. Democracy is a long-term solution to the problem of how to manage conflict peacefully. It’s about giving citizens at least the option (one they may choose not to take) of replacing their representatives and experimenting with different candidates, parties, and even ideologies. It’s also about that feeling that you, as a citizen, can actually alter the course of your own country, and that your nation, at least in theory, believes that you matter enough to have that power. There is a joy in knowing this. As the Malaysian novelist Tash Aw described the scene outside his polling station: “The camaraderie was palpable. Volunteers handed out free food and water; strangers helped the old and weak to find seats in the shade during the long wait. Someone offered my mother a wheelchair (she politely declined). People lining up to cast their ballot joked about the heat, and about next seeing one another again in five years.”

These sentiments are important, perhaps the most important, but they do not necessarily translate into higher levels of economic growth. It is altogether possible—some might even say likely—that a more authoritarian government might perform better in a strictly technocratic sense, at least in the short term. The Chinese “model” provides strong evidence for this. As the scholars Dingxin Zhao and Hongxing Yang write, “the Chinese economy has developed quickly under an authoritarian regime with a strong capacity in manipulating economic activities.” Turning the notion of democratic responsiveness on its head, the political scientist Wenfang Tang argues that “leaders in authoritarian China do not have the luxury of electoral cycles.”

But there is little about the Chinese model, with its unique history of a developed bureaucracy and strong “stateness,” that seems replicable elsewhere. For every China there are five more disasters (including in China’s own tragic past). Zhao and Yang note that “history has presented ample examples that when an authoritarian regime possesses great autonomy, it is more likely to use the autonomy in detrimental ways.” Good authoritarians are sometimes great (particularly if you’re not a pro-democracy activist). The problem is that there is no way to guarantee “good” authoritarian outcomes. If, as is more likely, autocrats damage the economy and by extension your own livelihood, then there is relatively little you can do about it.

Malaysia offers a reminder that there is no substitute for this most essential of democratic functions: the chance, even if it often resides on a theoretical plane, that political outcomes are not permanent. There is that natural push and pull of democratic competition, with all the messiness that entails. But that messiness and uncertainty can be a good thing. A 92-year-old former premier, one who was known for a budding authoritarian sensibility, can switch sides and lead the opposition, joining forces with the very man he imprisoned. Mistakes need not be intertwined with the state’s own identity. They can be undone. And in Malaysia, at the ballot box, one of those outcomes was.