Report Ranking Democracy and Autocracy of Every Nation

LewisBraham

Good read: https://v-dem.net/documents/29/V-dem_democracyreport2023_lowres.pdf

Among the findings:

1. Democracy in the World 2022

Advances in global levels of democracy made over the last 35 years have been wiped out.
72% of the world’s population – 5.7 billion people – live in autocracies by 2022.

Global Level is Back to 1986
• The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2022 is down to 1986 levels.
• The decline is most dramatic in the Asia-Pacific region,which is back to levels last recorded in 1978.
• Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, are back to levels last seen around the end of the Cold War.

More Dictatorships than Liberal Democracies
• The world has more closed autocracies than liberal democracies – for the first time in more than two decades.
• 28% of the population – 2.2 billion people – live in closed autocracies.
• 13% of the population – 1 billion people – live in liberal democracies.

Drastic Changes in Last Ten Years
• Freedom of Expression is deteriorating in 35 countries in 2022 – ten years ago it was only 7.
• Government censorship of the media is worsening in 47 countries.
• Government repression of civil society organizations is worsening in 37 countries.
• Quality of elections is worsening in 30 countries

2. Democratizers and Autocratizers
The number of democratizing countries is down to 14 with only 2% of the world’s population.They have not been so few since 1973 – 50 years ago.

All regions are affected – but Africa harbors the largest number of democratizing (N=5) as well
as autocratizing (N=12) countries. A New Record of 42 Countries Autocratizing
• A record 42 autocratizers with 43% of the world’s population– up from 33 countries and 36% of the population last year.

3. The Major Autocratizers
Democracy broke down in 7 out of the top 10 autocratizers in the last 10 years.
Democracy also failed in 5 out of the top 10 autocratizers in the shorter 3-year perspective.
In 2 democracies – Brazil and Poland – autocratization stalled before democracy broke down.
Armenia, Greece, and Mauritius are democracies in steep decline.

What Autocrats Attack
• Censorship of the media and repression of CSOs increases and academic freedom declines in more than 25 of the autocratizing countries.

• Academic and cultural freedom, and freedom of discussion also rank among the top institutions attacked by autocratizing rulers.

Disinformation, Polarization, and Autocratization
• Disinformation, polarization, and autocratization reinforce each other.
• Top democratizers conversely reduce the spread of disinfor mation substantially, and to some extent also polarization.

Old_Joe

Lewis- Thanks very much for the summary- I was intimidated, time-wise, by the abundance of information.

hank

I enjoyed (wrong word perhaps) looking at the color-coded map LB’s linked source in the investing section contains (Reasons for investing in EM X-China thread). Golly - To think that the UK is in the same camp as Spain and Italy is a bit troubling.