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Nov 2, 2023 · Europe keeps its status as the world’s highest-performing region in democratic performance, but declines have been seen in many countries, according to the Global State of Democracy 2023 Report.
- Summary
- Introduction
- Shared Challenges
- Priority U.S. Challenges
- Priority European Challenges
- Grounds For Common Approaches
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
Liberal democracy is in crisis where it was long thought most securely established. In both Western Europe and the United States, polls suggest voters are losing faith in democratic institutions; polarization and illiberalism appear to be on the rise. A striking feature of this crisis moment is the perception that many of the most pressing politica...
Liberal democracy is in crisis in places where it was long thought most securely established. In both Western Europe and the United States, polls suggest voters are losing faith in democratic institutions; polarization and illiberalism appear to be on the rise. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the average quality of d...
Rising Distrust in Democratic Institutions
Political scientists like Russell J. Dalton and Pippa Norris already in the 1990s had observed decreasing levels of trust in political institutions across many established democracies.4 This long-standing trend exploded into the public consciousness with the unexpected electoral successes of populist outsiders in 2016 and 2017, which highlighted widespread public disenchantment with the political status quo. Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk even warned that the West was witnessing early si...
Disconnect Between Mainstream Political Parties and Citizens
One institution has borne the brunt of popular discontent: mainstream political parties are struggling to engage ordinary citizens. In Europe, the result has been a rise in support for far-right (and, in some countries, far-left) parties and populist movements. In the United States, it is expressed in growing voter discontent with both major parties. In both places, new civic and protest movements have emerged that circumvent traditional forms of party engagement. Political parties are consis...
Problematic Public Information Space
On both sides of the Atlantic, governments and citizens are struggling to adjust to increasingly fragmented public information spaces and deliberate efforts to spread disinformation and stir mistrust. The speed, scale, and reach of digital information flows have fundamentally reshaped the ways information is disseminated and consumed. As little as five years ago, this trend was still celebrated by many as fundamentally democratizing. Yet the sheer amount of information now available also mean...
These trends—while not entirely new—have received much greater attention with the rising electoral success of populist parties and leaders. Yet despite this new sense of shared democratic distress, the United States still suffers from longer-standing institutional problems and democratic weaknesses that are somewhat or much less acute in Europe, an...
Rise of Illiberal Movements and Parties
In Europe, the most severe current challenges relate to the outcomes of democratic politics. Whereas the majority of the preceding analysis has focused on Western Europe, the clearest threat to democracy on the continent stems from continued democratic backsliding in Central Europe, particularly in Poland and Hungary. In both countries, elections have brought to power antipluralistic and openly intolerant majoritarian regimes that are systematically dismantling democratic checks and balances....
Democracy Deficit in the European Union
In addition to democratic backsliding driven by unchecked majoritarianism, European democracies also face a set of unique challenges derived from the delegation of policymaking from the national to the European level. While the EU on the surface has a democratic structure, the complexity of the current institutional setup obscures lines of accountability. As a result, many European citizens view EU decisionmaking processes to be opaque and far removed.143 The EU currently has two main sources...
Established democracies on both sides of the Atlantic are beset by a sense of crisis. At a time when the liberal democratic model has become more contested at the international level, Western democracies are also struggling with internal discontent. Longer-term problems of political representation and participation have become more visible and urge...
The author thanks Thomas Carothers, Rachel Kleinfeld, and Richard Youngs for closely reviewing various iterations of this project and offering helpful guidance and suggestions. Gratitude also goes to Gareth Fowler for his excellent research assistance and to Samuel Brase and the Carnegie communications team for their valuable contributions to this ...
1 Economist Intelligence Unit, “Democracy Index 2016: Revenge of the Deplorables,” Economist, January 2017, http://felipesahagun.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Democracy-Index-2016.pdf. 2The term “Europe” in this paper is used to refer primarily to West and East-Central Europe (Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia). Some statistics use aver...
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May 13, 2022 · Americas. North America (Canada and U.S.) is the top-ranked region in the Democracy Index with an average score of 8.36, but this dropped significantly from 8.58 in 2020. Both countries have dropped their positions in the global ranking, however, Canada still maintains the status as a full democracy.
- Raul Amoros
Mar 31, 2021 · Across all three European countries surveyed, satisfaction with democracy has increased substantially: up 14 points in France, 15 points in Germany and 29 points in the UK between 2019 and 2020. In contrast, in the U.S., the percentage of people who say they are satisfied with democracy has remained relatively consistent in recent years.
- Shannon Greenwood
- Americans and Western Europeans largely agree about what is important for democracy, but they put greater emphasis on these principles than Central and Eastern Europeans.
- American and Western European publics are similarly divided over whether people benefit from how the government is run – and share similar disdain for elected officials.
- Americans increasingly resemble Western Europeans in attitudes about LGBT rights and gender equality, and they generally are more progressive than Central and Eastern Europeans.
- Americans see religion as more important than most Europeans – whether in their daily lives or in terms of the ability to practice freely. Around half of Americans (47%) say religion is very important in their daily lives, which is significantly higher than the median of 22% of Western Europeans or 19% of Central and Eastern Europeans who say the same.
Jun 17, 2022 · So how do researchers address these challenges and identify which countries are democratic and undemocratic? In our work on Democracy, we provide data from eight leading approaches of measuring democracy: Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) by the V-Dem project 1; Regimes of the World (RoW) by Lührmann et al. (2018) 2, which use V-Dem data
How has democracy spread across countries? Are we moving towards a more democratic world? Explore global data and research on democracy.
