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- Democracy gives citizens the right to influence important decisions over their own lives and allows them to hold their leaders accountable. But it can have other benefits too: democratic countries seem better governed than autocracies, seem to grow faster, and foster more peaceful conduct within and between them.
ourworldindata.org › democracy
The index measures the state of democracy in 167 of the world's countries by tracking 60 indicators in five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
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By 2023, about 1.3 billion people lived in electoral democracies in all regions of the world: many live in the populous countries of Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa. Another billion people lived in liberal democracies, such as those living in Chile, South Korea, and the United States.
- How Can Researchers Measure How Democratic A Country is?
- The World Was Highly Undemocratic in The 18th and 19th Centuries
- The World Was Mostly Undemocratic in The Early 20th Century
- Democracy Spread Across The World in The Second Half of The 20th Century
- Democracy’s Spread Has Slowed in The 21st Century
- Some Countries Are Much More Democratic Than Others
Measuring how democratic countries are comes with many challenges. People do not always agree on what characteristics define a democracy. Its characteristics — such as whether an election was free and fair — are difficult to assess. The assessments of experts are to some degree subjective and they may disagree; either about a specific characteristi...
The world did not always look like it does today. It has become much more democratic over time. A very clear way of showing this is to look at the distribution of democracy scores at different stages in history. Here we do this in the form of a bar chart, where electoral democracy is again measured on a scale from 0 to 1. The shortest bars here are...
By 1900, political institutions had become more diverse, but remained highly undemocratic in most countries. A fair number of countries in Europe and the Americas now had some democratic features: citizens especially had become freer to associate and express their opinions. A couple of countries, such as Australia, France, and Switzerland, had even...
Many countries then became much more democratic in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1990s especially, democratic institutions expanded across the world. Countries in South America shed their highly autocratic political systems that had spread in the 1970s. According to V-Dem, a considerable number of countries in Africa became fairly dem...
The spread of democracy has slowed in the 21st century compared to previous decades. While some countries became more democratic according to V-Dem, such as Tunisia and Peru, many stagnated or became less democratic — some, such as Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, and Poland considerably so. Despite these declines in democracy, almost all countrie...
While the world has become much more democratic over the last 200 years, there are still large differences between countries. As the previous chart shows, some countries — mostly located in Europe and the Americas — are highly democratic: they have elected political leaders, elections are free and fair, and most citizens have the right to vote and ...
Apr 24, 2023 · Political culture. Political participation. Functioning of government. Civil liberties. Each category has a rank of 0-10 based on how the indicators fared, and the overall democracy score is an average of each of the five categories. For example, here’s a look at the U.S.’ scoring out of 10 in each of the overall categories in 2022:
May 22, 2024 · More than one-third of the world's population live under authoritarian rule (39.4%), a share that has been creeping up in recent years. According to the 2023 Democracy Index, 74 of the 167 countries and territories covered by the model are democracies of some type.
May 14, 2019 · Nearly four dozen other countries – 46, or 28% – exhibited elements of both democracy and autocracy. Broadly speaking, the share of democracies among the world’s governments has been on an upward trend since the mid-1970s, and now sits just shy of its post-World War II record (58% in 2016).
Today, the dominant form of democracy is representative democracy, where citizens elect government officials to govern on their behalf such as in a parliamentary or presidential democracy.
