Democracy under threat – these graphs show how autocracies are on the rise

We live in turbulent times: financial crisis, terrorism, climate change, migration crisis, Corona, now the war in Ukraine – the world hardly ever stands still in the 21st century. Such times of crisis and the accompanying social change are always a stress test for democracy. People crave simple answers to complex questions, and democracy simply cannot provide them.

The world is currently experiencing a wave of autocratization, as the University of Gothenburg’s “Varieties of Democracy” project (V-Dem) points out in its latest report. In 2022, 42 states will evolve towards autocracy, i.e. the uncontrolled exercise of power by one person or a group of people. In contrast, only 13 states showed democratizing tendencies. The democratic “awakening” of the 1990s has almost completely died down.

All regions of the world are affected by autocratization – including Europe. In Greece, Hungary, Poland and Serbia in particular, democracy has eroded worryingly in recent years. Media freedom, free elections and the independence of the judiciary are curtailed, while a democratic facade is maintained on the outside.

The V-Dem report is based on the "Liberal Democracy Index" (LDI), which uses hundreds of indicators to calculate a country's democratic status. With an LDI of 0.851, Switzerland ranks 4th globally, ahead of just three Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. The lowest LDIs are in Afghanistan (0.280), Eritrea (0.012), and North Korea (0.010).

However, the LDI only indicates the democratic status of a country, but not under what rule the inhabitants of a country actually live. For this, “V-Dem” uses the “Regimes of the World” (RoW) indicator, which assigns four forms of government to states: liberal democracy, electoral democracy, electoral autocracy and closed autocracy (see infobox).

Here, too, the trend towards autocratisation is clearly visible. By the end of 2022, there were more closed autocracies than liberal democracies (33:32) in the world for the first time since 1995. Because India and Nigeria, among others, are no longer regarded as electoral democracies, but as electoral autocracy, 72 percent of the world's population - a total of 5.7 billion people - currently live under an autocratic government. Ten years ago it was still 46 percent.

There are many reasons for the increasing autocratization: unfulfilled prosperity promises, too high demands when dealing with crises, sharp polarization as a result of social upheavals, fragmented party landscapes. They contribute to the disillusionment of politics in democratic countries and ensure that extreme parties gain support.

But there are also positive examples: after Donald Trump was voted out under Joe Biden, the United States is back on track for a democratic revival. For years, Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro was one of the fastest moving countries towards autocracy. In any case, with the election of Lula da Silva, this trend seems to have stopped. There are also encouraging trends in countries such as Malaysia, Honduras, Sri Lanka and Ecuador. And despite all the crises, the democracies in Western Europe have so far remained stable.