The original article can be read as “Schlumpfs graphic 116” in the online Nebelspalter of 17 June 2024.
Democracy is generally understood to mean “government by the people”. This means that the people themselves determine their government in free and fair elections. In addition, democracy also means that the state protects the individual rights of its citizens, including protecting these citizens from the state itself. Furthermore, in a democracy, people can influence important political decisions that affect their lives, and those in power are accountable to the people.
What is important:
- Modern democracies first appear in history around the middle of the 19th century.
- After a major upswing from the middle of the 20th century, around half of all countries are now governed democratically – despite recent setbacks.
- However, there are still major differences between countries in terms of the freedom to exercise democratic rights.
Democracy can therefore be defined quite differently. Dividing countries into democracies and autocracies, as shown in the chart below, is therefore to some extent a matter of judgement. I follow the research of the team of the website “Our World in Data” (see here), which takes into account different data sources that can be compared on their website.
The most comprehensive data source for democracies is the “V-Dem Dataset” (V-Dem stands for “Varieties of Democracy”, see here). This dataset is based on the evaluations of around 3,500 local country experts and the V-Dem Institute’s own researchers, which is based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Under the title “Regimes of the World” (RoW, see here), three researchers from this institute have defined a specific classification of all countries into democracies (two types) and autocracies (two types):
- Closed autocracy: citizens do not have the right to elect the government or legislature from multiple parties.
- Electoral autocracy: Citizens have this right, but lack freedom of assembly and expression, making elections neither free nor fair.
- Electoral democracy: Citizens have the right to elect the executive and the legislature in free and fair multi-party elections.
- Liberal democracy: In addition to electoral democracy, citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, they are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are controlled by the legislature and the courts.
The history of modern democracy begins in Switzerland in 1848
The next chart shows the historical development of these four forms of government from 1789 to 2023 as a percentage:
The red and orange areas show the shares of the two forms of autocracy. The dark and light blue areas show the proportions of democracies. The starting year 1789 was not chosen at random: This was the year in which the French Revolution began, which was a reaction to the oppression of the people by the king. It laid the foundations for human rights and democracy in Europe. In the millennia before that, there were always rulers (kings, popes), the privileged (nobility, clergy) and the oppressed (citizens, peasants, slaves) in all states, which did not allow the establishment of democracy.
As the chart shows, however, until the European revolutions of 1848/49 there was still no democracy according to the above criteria, and only one tenth of the countries had an electoral autocracy. But then came Switzerland: with the Federal Constitution of 1848, it became the first modern democracy in history. In the same year, universal suffrage (for men only) was introduced in France along with Switzerland.
Today, around half of all countries are democratic
This marked the beginning of a democratic development that was still hesitant until after the Second World War. Afterwards, however, there was a significant increase that led to a peak at the beginning of our century. In 2005, 53 per cent of countries were democratically governed, almost half of them liberal democracies. In the last decade, however, there have been setbacks: By 2023, the proportion of liberal democracies had fallen to 18 per cent, and the proportion of closed autocracies had risen to 19 per cent.
The next chart shows how the population is divided between the different forms of government over the same period (see here). The world population increased eightfold in the period under consideration:
With the same colour scheme as in the previous graphic, the story can now be told in a different way: While in 1798 only 760 million people lived in a closed autocracy, by 2023 there were 2180 million, almost three times more – two thirds of them in China, by the way. In contrast, the number of people living in democracies today is given as 2350 million. In percentage terms, however, this is only just under 30 per cent, although – as we have seen – a good half of all countries are democratically governed.
Is India still a democracy?
This difference is due to the fact that a particularly populous country like India has been downgraded from a democracy to an autocracy. In the graph above, you can see a marked reduction in the light blue area in 2017: According to the source RoW, India, with its 1425 million inhabitants, has since then only been an electoral autocracy again. Other data sources such as V-Dem recognise that India has become less democratic, but still list the country among democracies.
This difference in judgement shows how much discretion the researchers have to decide on their categorisation. A further approach illustrates this: In the aforementioned V-Dem project, a so-called “index of electoral democracy” was also defined (see here). Countries are categorised on a scale between zero and one.
Political rights are distributed more fairly today
The closer the score is to one, the more the political system of the country in question corresponds to that of a good electoral democracy and therefore fulfils the following criteria:
- The political leadership (executive and legislature) is determined in general elections.
- All adult citizens have the right to vote.
- Elections are free and fair.
- Parties and civil society organisations can be formed freely.
- Freedom of expression is guaranteed.
The next chart shows the status of this index in 2023:
If you compare this status of 2023 with the past, you can see that the distribution has become more egalitarian: whereas a hundred years ago the differences between the few (European) countries with high scores and the vast majority of poorly ranked countries were very large, they have narrowed considerably to this day. However, there are still all gradations of political rights, from ideal to non-existent democracy.
At the top of this list are – not surprisingly – almost exclusively European countries. The top eight places are occupied by Denmark (0.92), Ireland, Estonia, Belgium, Switzerland (0.89), Norway, New Zealand and Sweden. At the bottom are the United Arab Emirates (0.1), Qatar, North Korea, Myanmar, Afghanistan, China (0.07), Eritrea and Saudi Arabia (0.01).
With a global average of 0.49, the European countries (marked in dark blue in the chart) are clearly at the top of the continental rankings with 0.73. Compared to other country comparisons, in which Africa is usually found at the bottom, Africa (purple) with 0.38 is surprisingly ahead of Asia (green) at the bottom with 0.33.
Despite all the imponderables: The fact that today half of all countries and 30 to 50 per cent of all people live in democratic states is a historical novelty and contributes to the history of human progress over the last 200 years.
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