The world has become less democratic recently, latest studies suggest. There is growing concern that while many more people have democratic rights today than in the past, the progress is slowly being eroded, by extractive institutions and politicians.
Leading approaches to measuring democracy support this conclusion: the world has become less democratic in recent years. “Democracy is in decline, regardless of how we measure it — whether we look at big changes in the number of democracies and the people living in them; at small changes in the extent of democratic rights; or at medium-sized changes in the number of, and people living in, countries that are autocratizing,” political scientist Bastian Herre observes.
The extent of this decline is substantial, however, it is also uncertain and limited. It is clearly across democracy metrics: the world has fallen from all-time democratic highs to a level similar to earlier decades. But the extent of this decline depends on which democracy measure one uses. Moreover, it is limited in the sense that the world remains much more democratic than it was even half a century ago.
Bastian Herre, who is also a senior researcher at Our World in Data, goes ahead to argue that: “The recent democratic decline is precedented, and past declines were reversed. The world underwent phases of autocratization in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people fought to turn the tide, and pushed democratic rights to unprecedented heights. We can do the same again.”
But how do researchers identify which countries are democracies? Identifying which countries are democracies comes with many challenges. People disagree about what characterizes a democracy, and whether actual political systems can even come close to such an ideal. If they agree on what democracy is and that countries can come meaningfully close to it, its characteristics — such as whether an election is free and fair — still are difficult to assess.
If knowledgeable researchers can be found, their assessments are still to some degree subjective, and they may disagree with others. Even if researchers align in their assessment of specific characteristics of a political system, they may disagree about how to reduce the complexity of these many characteristics into a single variable: a binary measure that says whether a country is a ‘democracy’ or not.
On account of these difficulties, classifying political systems is unavoidably controversial. Researchers such as Herre rely on sources that work hard to address these many challenges, and are transparent, so that they can be interrogated and criticized by those who disagree. They also use multiple sources to see how the assessments of different researchers compare.
One measure that most researchers rely on is the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification, which measures political systems with data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project.
The RoW classification by political scientists Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan Lindberg1 distinguishes between four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.
The classification builds on data from the V-Dem project which identifies the characteristics of political systems based on expert assessments. In these assessments, thousands of country experts answer surveys for V-Dem every year. If these experts consider a country’s elections to have been both multi-party and free and fair, and the country as having had minimal features of an electoral democracy in general.
A regime of the World classifies it as a democracy. “A country is classified as a liberal democracy if the experts also consider the country’s laws to have been transparent; the men and women there as having had access to the justice system; and the country as having had broad features of a liberal democracy overall. If it does not meet one of these conditions, the country is classified as an electoral democracy,” Herre submits.
On the other hand, a country is classified as an autocracy if it does not meet the above criteria of meaningful, free and fair, multi-party elections. In addition, it is classified as an electoral autocracy if the experts consider the elections for the legislature and chief executive — the most powerful politician, in most cases the president — to have been multi-party.
Similarly, a country is classified as a closed autocracy if either the legislature or chief executive has not been chosen in multi-party elections. The simplest way to explore whether the world has recently become less democratic is by looking at how many countries are democracies.
Using the RoW data, one is able to establish that the world has become less democratic in recent years. The number of democracies in the world reached an all-time high in 2012, with 97 electoral democracies. A decade on, their number has fallen to 89 countries. The same is true of liberal democracies. Their number has fallen from 42 countries in 2012 to 34 in 2021.
The number of democracies does not tell us how many people enjoy democratic rights. But when one looks at the date closely, the findings are the same. The number of people that have democratic rights has recently plummeted: between 2017 and 2021, falling from 3.9 billion to 2.3 billion people. During the same years, the number of people living in liberal democracies fell from 1.2 billion to 1 billion.
Examples of people losing democratic rights — according to data from RoW — are the 1.4 billion people in India the 84 million people in Turkey, and the 28 million people in Venezuela.
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Instead of the absolute number of democracies and people living in them, one may be interested in looking at the share of democratic countries and the share of the world population living in them. The world is also becoming less democratic based on these metrics.
Similarly, looking at the number of democracies and the people living in them tells us about big changes worldwide: when countries become democracies, or stop being liberal or electoral democracies altogether. But, as Herre notes, countries and their citizens may experience smaller changes in their democratic rights that fall short of changing the overall regime type. This is because the extent of democratic rights differs across democracies and non-democracies, but also within them.
Therefore another way of looking at whether the world has recently become less democratic is to look at how democratic countries are, treating democracy as a spectrum.
Most reliable research identifies how democratic countries are with the electoral democracy index from the project. It captures the extent to which political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed.
Countries, on average, have become less democratic: in 2021, countries received an electoral-democracy score of 0.51 on the scale from 0 to 1. This score is slightly lower than the highest ever average of electoral democracy (0.53) in 2012.
To understand how many democratic rights people we must weigh a country’s democracy score by its population. Calculated this way, one establishes that peoples’ democratic rights have decreased as well: countries received a population-weighted average score of 0.41 for electoral democracy in 2021. This is down from an all-time high of 0.5 in 2012.
Global averages in the extent to which countries are democratic and people enjoy democratic rights tell us about smaller changes in democracy that fall short of regime change. But they do not tell us which countries are becoming more or less democratic.
One more way of studying global changes in democracy is therefore identifying how the number of countries that are autocratizing or democratizing is changing. Data from Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT)-project identifies which countries are becoming less or more democratic. From this data we can establish which countries are autocratizing, democratizing, and which countries are not clearly moving in either direction.
As Herre puts it, what does it mean for a country to be autocratizing or democratizing? ERT seeks to strike a balance between large and small changes in how democratic countries are operating. It captures smaller changes in democracy that fall short of regime change. At the same time, it only codes a country as autocratizing when there is a substantial decrease in its democracy score. This is because, “very small decreases may be fleeting and not indicate broader shifts towards less democracy, or overstate changes altogether because the measurement is uncertain.” ERT also allows for temporary stagnation because autocratization may not happen abruptly in one year, but slowly over several years.
The number of countries that are autocratizing has been increasing: in 2021, 30 countries were autocratizing, remaining close to the all-time high of 31 countries in 2019. For a long time, the number of autocratizing countries was offset by a larger number of democratizing countries. But since 2011, the number of countries that are becoming less democratic has been higher.
Instructively, the number of people living in autocratizing countries is increasing as well: in 2021, 2.9 billion people lived in countries that were becoming less democratic. This is an all-time high. The number has been trending upward since the late 1980s, with a large jump in 2000 when India is reclassified as becoming less democratic.
Other examples of people living in autocratizing countries according to the ERT data are the 214 million people in Brazil, the 274 million people in Indonesia, and the 38 million people in Poland. So far, we have looked at data that interrogates how the world has recently become less democratic. But how much less democratic has the world become?
According to the ERT data, the democratic decline has been substantial. The world has fallen from all-time democratic highs to now — depending on the specific metrics — look more like the 2000s, the 1990s, or even the late 1980s. But the extent of the democratic decline is also more uncertain; its precise degree depends on the approach of measuring democracy.
The clearest example of this is India. Since India is home to 1.4 billion people, its classification has a big impact on some global trends. RoW and ERT classify India as an electoral autocracy and as substantially autocratizing in recent years. The Boix-Miller-Rosato data, however, disagrees, and continues to classify the country as a democracy. This means that using Boix-Miller-Rosato data, the number of people in the world living in democracies has not declined, but stagnated.
However, it is not safe to overstate the differences between the approaches either. All other approaches still identify a democratic decline in India. The approaches also tend to agree that metrics which look at people instead of countries see larger declines — because countries with large populations have tended to lose more democratic rights. Even the Boix-Miller-Rosato data sees an increase in the number of people living in non-democracies. The choice of approach therefore does not matter so much that it would question all characteristics of the recent global democratic decline.
And while the democratic decline has been substantial, it so far has been limited. The world is still much closer to all-time democratic highs than to historical levels: this clearly is the case for the 19th and early 20th centuries, when democratic rights and democracies were nearly absent. But it also holds for large parts of the later 20th century, when democratic rights were heavily concentrated in some parts of the world.
A decline in democratic rights might seem like an unprecedented step backwards. But it is not. It has happened before: the world underwent prolonged phases of autocratization in the 1930s and again in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1930s, a similar number of democracies as recently broke down — though back then that meant more than half of the world’s previously democratic countries. And the decline in the global democratic average was much larger than it has been recently.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many countries were becoming less democratic, with as many as 20 countries autocratizing at any given time. And several hundred million people lost democratic rights when India’s democracy eroded. But these declines in democracy were temporary. People in India and around the world gained more democratic rights than ever before. People turned previous autocratic tides by advocating relentlessly for governing themselves democratically. We have done it before, and can do it again.
