The World Has Recently Become Less Democratic

 

From ourworldindata.org:

The world has become less democratic in recent years. The chart shows that more countries have been autocratizing recently, based on the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) data.

The number of countries that are autocratizing has been increasing: for 2023, ERT identifies 42 that were autocratizing — close to an all-time high.

For a long time, the number of autocratizing countries was offset by democratizing ones. But since 2013, the number of countries that are becoming more autocratic has been higher.

The countries that are becoming less democratic are both eroding democracies and hardening autocracies.

Other approaches to measuring democracy also suggest that the world has recently become less democratic — the number of democracies has declined; fewer people are living in democracies, countries and peoplehave on average fewer democratic rights, and more people live inautocratizing countries.

The world was at its democratic ‘all-time high’ in the early 2010s. But since then it has fallen, and now looks more like the 2000s, the 1990s, or even the late 1980s, depending on which democracy measure we rely on.

We have seen similar democratic declines before, and past declines were reversed. People fought previous phases of autocratization in the 1930s and 1960/70s, turned the tide, and pushed democratic rights to unprecedented heights. We can do it again.