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Global Democracy at Seventeen-Year Low, at Best [1]

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Date: 2023-02-06  

The four best democracy indexes in the West confirm that democracy has been receding in the world for at least sixteen years straight, or is, at best, at a seventeen-year low. It depends on which one you look at.

The Economist Intelligence Unit released its 2022 Democracy Index on February 2nd. The global democracy score was nearly identical to 2021. This would seem at first glance to imply stagnation in 2022; however, the world actually backslid democratically. The reason is that while nations were upgraded for releasing their pandemic restrictions and restoring civil liberties (for which they had previously been downgraded in 2020-21), the upgrades were canceled out by declines in other categories of democracy in most regions of the world.

Here’s the explanation from pages 4-5 of the report:

“From a global perspective the year 2022 was a disappointing one for democracy, given expectations that there might be a rebound in the overall index score as pandemic-related prohibitions were lifted over the course of the year. Instead, the average global score stagnated. At 5.29, it scarcely improved from the 5.28 recorded in 2021. This leaves the index score well below the pre-pandemic global average of 5.44, and even further below the historical high of 5.55 recorded in 2014 and 2015 (and also in 2008, just before the global financial crisis). […] it is striking that there was not a rebound in the index total score. The positive effect of the restoration of individual freedoms that had been temporarily curtailed by the covid-19 pandemic was cancelled out by other negative developments globally”.

While these numbers don’t seem so bad from the point of view of a “historical high” of 5.55 in 2014 and 2015, the Introduction to the 2022 Index neglected to mention that the 2021 Index set a “record for the worst global score since the world democracy index was first produced in 2006.” So, that means 2022 now marks a seventeen-year low for this particular democracy index. We appear to be going backward in history. We can expect even worse findings from the other three major democracy indexes in the West:

— The Democracy Report covering 2022 from Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) in Sweden will be released in March. The report covering 2021 was bleak. Here’s the Executive Summary:

DEMOCRACY WORLDWIDE IN 2021

• The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 is down to 1989 levels. The last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated.

• Dictatorships are on the rise and harbor 70% of the world population – 5.4 billion people.

• There are signals that the nature of autocratization is changing. Back to 1989 Levels

• Liberal democracies peaked in 2012 with 42 countries and are now down to the lowest levels in over 25 years – 34 nations home to only 13% of the world population.

• The democratic decline is especially evident in Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, as well as in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean. Dictatorships on the Rise

• The increasing number of closed autocracies – up from 25 to 30 countries with 26% of the world population – contributes to the changing nature of autocratization.

• Electoral autocracy remains the most common regime type and harbors 44% of the world’s population, or 3.4 billion people.

— The “Freedom in the World 2022” report from Freedom House in Washington, D.C., says we have had 16 “consecutive” years of liberal democratic backsliding. While their categorization of regime types is different from EIU, they don’t go as far back in time as V-Dem:

“The present threat to democracy is the product of 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom. A total of 60 countries suffered declines over the past year, while only 25 improved. As of today, some 38 percent of the global population live in Not Free countries, the highest proportion since 1997. Only about 20 percent now live in Free countries.”

— The “Global State of Democracy Report 2022” from Sweden’s International IDEA is also out.

From the Introduction:

“At the end of 2022, the world is trapped beneath the weight of a multitude of old and new problems. […] Worryingly, the number of people who believe that democracy is the answer to these problems is shrinking. The Global State of Democracy’s latest findings reveal a decline in and stagnation of democracy around the world. [...]” “While people’s ability and willingness to publicly protest is a sign of functioning democracy, it is also a warning. Governments’ failure to effectively respond could damage the legitimacy of the democratic model. The World Values Survey (which covers 77 countries) demonstrates that less than half (47.4 per cent) of all respondents believe democracy is important, down from 52.4 per cent in 2017. This is a worrying drop, especially since less than half believe that having a democracy is ‘very good’. At the same time, confidence in democratic government is dropping. Survey data indicate that the proportion of people who agree with the idea that having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections has been consistently growing in recent years. In 2009, the World Values Survey reported that only 38 per cent of respondents thought this idea was fairly good or very good. In 2021, that figure had risen to 52 per cent.”

International IDEA also found that democratic “innovation” in response to new problems has stagnated. Liberal democracy is stuck at a crossroads and nobody knows how to proceed.

Take a look at the following quotes from the “The Democratic Disconnect” by Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk, pages 5-17, in the Journal of Democracy, July 2016, Volume 27, Number 3.

“Even in some of the richest and most politically stable regions of the world, it seems as though democracy is in a state of serious disrepair. Most political scientists, however, have steadfastly declined to view these trends as an indication of structural problems in the functioning of liberal democracy, much less as a threat to its very existence.” "Even as democracy has come to be the only form of government widely viewed as legitimate, it has lost the trust of many citizens who no longer believe that democracy can deliver on their most pressing needs and preferences. The optimistic view that this decline in confidence merely represents a temporary downturn is no more than a pleasing assumption, based in part on a reluctance to call into question the vaunted stability of affluent democracies. Democracies do not die overnight, nor do democracies that have begun to deconsolidate necessarily fail. […] In a world where most citizens fervently support democracy, where antisystem parties are marginal or nonexistent, and where major political forces respect the rules of the political game, democratic breakdown is extremely unlikely. It is no longer certain, however, that this is the world we live in."

These quotations summarize data from Waves 3 through 6 of the World Values Surveys (1995–2014). Data from the most recent, seventh “Wave”, are even worse, which is what International IDEA was referring to above.

In the second paragraph, Foa and Mounk state that the confidence of educated opinion in democracy is “no more than a pleasing assumption.” Their point is easily illustrated: click on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2022 democracy report above. The nations of the world are color coded every year by the EIU according to their democratic strength on a 1-10 scale. Norway is consistently at the top, along with the other four Nordics. Norway’s score in 2021 was 9.75 and 9.81 in 2022. As sophisticated as the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index is, the 1-10 scale is based on existing democracies—the strength of each of which is relative to that of the others. The standard of measurement, in other words, is self-referential.

The “pleasing assumption” here becomes immediately obvious if we imagine the scale going from 1-13 or 1-15 instead of 1-10. Suddenly, a score of 9.81 looks fairly weak. Norway may have beaten all the competition in that case, but they would still have a long way to go to get to the top of the ranking and we would be left wondering how well democracy can hold up under sustained pressure. How strong is 9.81 really when we have no example or even a theory of anything stronger?

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