Democracy

Bastian Herre; Esteban Ortiz-Ospina; Max Roser

Democracy

by Bastian Herre, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser

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Democracy is broadly understood to mean ‘rule by the people’.

In practice, it is often defined as people choosing their leaders in free and fair elections.

Other definitions go beyond this. For example, some of them see democracy as people having additional individual rights and being protected from the state.

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.

On this page, you can find data, visualizations, and writing on how democracy has spread across countries, how it differs between them, and whether we are moving towards a more democratic world.

Download data on GitHub

Key insights

The world has become much more democratic over the last two centuries

Many more countries have become democracies over the last two hundred years. The chart shows — based on data from Regimes of the World (RoW) — that a much larger share of countries are now democracies.

In the late 18th century, no country could be meaningfully characterized as a democracy. RoW classifies almost all of them as closed autocracies, in which citizens do not have the right to choose their political leaders through elections.¹

Elections spread throughout the 19th century, but they were often marred by limitations. Many countries became electoral autocracies, in which political leaders were chosen through elections, but citizens lacked additional freedoms to make those elections free and fair. Only a few countries held elections that were sufficiently meaningful to call them electoral democracies.² And even fewer had the additional individual and minority rights and the constrained governments to consider them liberal democracies.³

Electoral and liberal democracy then spread to many countries in the 20th century. By the end of the century, they had become common political systems around the globe and could be found across all world regions.

Today, the world is about evenly split between autocracies and democracies, according to this data. Most non-democracies are electoral autocracies. And almost half of all democracies have the additional individual and minority rights that characterize liberal democracies.

What you should know about this data

In this chart, we identify the political systems of countries with the Regimes of the World data by political scientists Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan Lindberg⁴, published by the Varieties of Democracy project.⁵

RoW distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.

Closed autocracy: citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections

Electoral autocracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair

Electoral democracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections

Liberal democracy: electoral democracy and citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts

We use the RoW classification and V-Dem data but expand the years and countries covered and refine the coding rules, as explained in our technical article on the RoW data.

We use the RoW data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify countries differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

Click to open interactive version

Two centuries ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them

Billions of people have gained democratic rights over the last two centuries. The chart shows that many more people now live in democracies, based on the Regimes of the World (RoW) data.

In the 19th century, few people had democratic political rights In 1800, almost everyone lived in political systems that RoW classifies as closed autocracies. No country was a democracy, and only 22 million people lived in the two countries classified as electoral autocracies: the United Kingdom and the United States.

Since then, many have gained democratic political rights, especially in the second half of the 20th century. By 2021, more than 1.2 billion people lived in electoral democracies in all regions of the world: many live in the populous countries of Indonesia, Brazil, and Nigeria. Another billion people lived in liberal democracies, such as those living in Ghana, South Korea, and the United States.

While democratic rights have spread far, they are still far from universal. Because the world’s population grew faster than democracy spread, the total number of people without democratic rights is higher than ever. Almost all of them reside in just one country: China.

There have also been recent setbacks, with some people losing political rights. Most prominently the 1.4 billion people living in India, which — according to the RoW data — became an electoral autocracy in 2019. Other data sources agree that India has become less democratic, but overall still consider India a democracy⁶

In this article we provide more detail:

200 years ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them

What you should know about this data

To see what share of the world’s population lived in each regime, you can tick the ‘Relative’ box in the interactive visualization.

For data on countries’ populations, we rely on combined data from Gapminder, the History database of the Global Environment (HYDE), and the United Nations Population Division.

We identify the political systems of countries with the Regimes of the World data by political scientists Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan Lindberg⁷, published by the Varieties of Democracy project.⁸

RoW distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.

Closed autocracy: citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections

Electoral autocracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair

Electoral democracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections

Liberal democracy: electoral democracy and citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts

We use the RoW classification and V-Dem data but expand the years and countries covered and refine the coding rules, as explained in our technical article on the RoW data.

We use the RoW data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify countries differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

People living in democracies autocracies v45 850x600

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory

Democracy is young in most countries that are democratic today. The chart shows that most electoral democracies are younger than its more senior citizens, relying on the Regimes of the World data.

Based on the Regimes of the World data, many democracies are less than a generation old. Some are younger than 18 — not older than the children in these countries — and others are only as old as the country’s young adults. In these democracies, most young people have experienced authoritarian rule, and older people have lacked democratic political rights for most of their lives.

A smaller group of countries have been electoral democracies for two or three generations. In them, children and young adults have only known life in a democracy. But their parents and grandparents have still experienced non-democratic rule.

Only a few countries have been democratic for a long time and have been electoral democracies for three generations or more. Democracy there is older than almost all of their citizens.

Because electoral democracy is defined as political rights being broad, but not necessarily universal, not everyone has enjoyed democratic political rights in these countries. For example, in some countries governments have forbidden parts of the population, such as women, to vote and stand in elections.

Liberal democracy, in which citizens enjoy additional individual and minority rights, is an even rarer and more recent achievement than electoral democracy. Democracy is a recent achievement regardless of the measure used.

In this article we provide more detail:

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory

What you should know about this data

In this chart, we identify the political systems of countries with the Regimes of the World data by political scientists Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan Lindberg⁹, published by the Varieties of Democracy project.¹⁰

Regimes of the World distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.

Closed autocracy: citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections

Electoral autocracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair

Electoral democracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections

Liberal democracy: electoral democracy and citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts

We use the RoW classification and V-Dem data but expand the years and countries covered and refine the coding rules, as explained in our technical article on the RoW data.

We use the RoW data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify countries differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

Number electoral democracies age v33 850x600

People around the world have gained democratic rights, but some have many more rights than others

There are large differences in the degree to which citizens enjoy political rights — between democracies and non-democracies, but also within each group. The chart — relying on the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data — shows that some countries are much more democratic than others.

While almost all countries are much more democratic than they were 100 years ago, there are still large differences between them.

Some countries — mostly located in Europe and the Americas — are highly democratic: they have elected political leaders, elections are broadly free and fair, and most citizens have the right to vote.

Others, especially in Asia, are highly undemocratic. Based on V-Dem, this includes countries such as China, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. There, citizens do not have the right to choose their political leaders in popular elections.

Most countries, often in Africa and Asia, fall somewhere in the middle. Political leaders are elected and citizens have the right to vote there, but their rights to associate and express their opinions are limited, and elections are not entirely free and fair.

The chart looks at electoral democratic institutions. Looking at liberal democracy or data from other leading approaches shows similar differences.

In this article we provide more detail:

People around the world have gained democratic rights, but some have many more rights than others

What you should know about this data

In this chart, we rely on the Electoral Democracy Index by the Varieties of Democracy project ¹¹ to measure democracy.

The Electoral Democracy Index scores each country on a spectrum, with some countries being more democratic than others. Political systems with the following features are considered more democratic:

Elected political leaders: broad elections choose the chief executive and legislature

Comprehensive voting rights: all adult citizens have the legal right to vote in national elections

Free and fair elections: no election violence, government intimidation, fraud, large irregularities, and vote-buying

Freedom of association: parties and civil society organizations can form and operate freely

Freedom of expression: people can voice their views and the media presents different political perspectives

We expand the years and countries covered by the V-Dem data as explained in our article on the data.

We use the V-Dem data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes score countries very differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

Distribution electoral democracy vdem v10 850x600

The world has recently become less democratic

The world has become less democratic in recent years. The chart shows that more countries have been autocratizing recently, based on the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) data.

The number of countries that are autocratizing has been increasing: for 2021, ERT identifies 30 that were autocratizing, remaining close to the all-time high of 31 countries in 2019.

For a long time, the number of autocratizing countries was offset by democratizing ones. But since 2011, the number of countries that are becoming more autocratic has been higher.

Democracy is in decline, regardless of how we measure it — the number of democracies has declined; fewer people are living in democracies, countries; and people on average have fewer democratic rights, and more people live in autocratizing countries.

Other approaches to measuring democracy also suggest that the world has recently become less democratic — the number of democracies has declined; fewer people are living in democracies, countries and people have on average fewer democratic rights, and more people live in autocratizing countries.

The world was at its democratic ‘all-time high’ in the early 2010s. But since then it has fallen, and now looks more like the 2000s, the 1990s, or even the late 1980s, depending on which democracy measure we rely on.

We have seen similar democratic declines before, and past declines were reversed. People fought previous phases of autocratization in the 1930s and 1960/70s, turned the tide, and pushed democratic rights to unprecedented heights. We can do it again.

In this article we provide more detail:

The world has recently become less democratic

What you should know about this data

For data on which countries are becoming less or more democratic, we rely on data from the Episodes of Regime Transformation project.¹²

We use their data to identify which countries are autocratizing, democratizing, and which countries are not clearly moving in either direction.¹³

ERT seeks to strike a balance between large and small changes in how democratic countries are. ¹⁴ It captures smaller changes in the level of democracy that fall short of regime change. At the same time, it only codes a country as autocratizing when there is a substantial decrease in its democracy score. This is because very small decreases may be fleeting and not indicate broader shifts towards less democracy, or overstate changes altogether because the measurement is uncertain.¹⁵ ERT also allows for temporary stagnation because autocratization may not happen abruptly in one year, but slowly over several years.¹⁶

We use the ERT data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify or score countries differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

Explore data on Democracy

This explorer seeks to make data on democracy easier to access and understand. It provides and explains data from eight leading democracy datasets: their main democracy measures, indicators of specific characteristics, and global and regional overviews. You can learn more about the approaches — and which democracy measure may be best to answer your questions — in our article explaining how researchers measure democracy.

Research & Writing

200 years ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them

Half of all countries are democracies. But how many people enjoy democratic rights?

Bastian Herre

The world has recently become less democratic

Many more people have democratic rights than in the past. Some of this progress has recently been reversed.

Bastian Herre

Measuring Democracy

Democracy data: how do researchers measure democracy?

There are many ways to classify and measure political systems. What approaches do different researchers take?

Bastian Herre

The ‘Varieties of Democracy’ data: how do researchers measure democracy?

There are many ways to measure democracy. Here is how the Varieties of Democracy project does it, one of the leading sources of global democracy data.

Bastian Herre

The ‘Regimes of the World’ data: how do researchers measure democracy?

There are many ways to measure democracy. Here is how the Regimes of the World classification does it, one of the leading sources of global democracy data.

Bastian Herre

Interactive charts on Democracy

Endnotes

The United Kingdom and the United States were the only countries that could be classified as electoral autocracies, because its political leaders were chosen through elections, but citizens lacked additional freedoms to make those elections free and fair.
Examples are France and New Zealand.
Examples are Australia, Belgium, and Switzerland.
Lührmann, Anna, Marcus Tannnberg, and Staffan Lindberg. 2018. Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes. Politics and Governance 6(1): 60-77.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryden, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. VDem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v12. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
RoW’s reclassification is the result of recent changes in the V-Dem data, which identify declines in the autonomy of the election management body, the freedom and fairness of elections, and especially the freedom of expression, the media, and civil society. You can read more in V-Dem’s 2021 annual report Autocratization Turns Viral.
Lührmann, Anna, Marcus Tannnberg, and Staffan Lindberg. 2018. Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes. Politics and Governance 6(1): 60-77.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryden, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. VDem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v12. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
Lührmann, Anna, Marcus Tannnberg, and Staffan Lindberg. 2018. Regimes of the World (RoW): Opening New Avenues for the Comparative Study of Political Regimes. Politics and Governance 6(1): 60-77.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryden, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. VDem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v12. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Oskar Ryden, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2022. VDem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v12. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
Edgell, Amanda, Seraphine Maerz, Laura Maxwell, Richard Morgan, Juraj Medzihorsky, Matthew Wilson, Vanessa Boese, Sebastian Hellmeier, Jean Lachapelle, Patrik Lindenfors, Anna Lührmann, and Staffan Lindberg. 2020. Episodes of Regime Transformation Dataset (v2.0).
Based on ERT, a country is autocratizing from when V-Dem’s electoral democracy index decreases by 0.01, until the score increases or remains unchanged for four years, and the total decrease between the start and end amounts to a decrease of at least 0.10. Democratizing countries are classified analogously. We exclude Ukraine from 2002 to 2004 and El Salvador from 2015 and 2017 because for them democratizing and autocratizing episodes happen to overlap.
Seraphine Maerz, Amanda Edgell, Matthew Wilson, Sebastian Hellmeier, Staffan Lindberg. 2021. A Framework for Understanding Regime Transformation: Introducing the ERT Dataset. Varieties of Democracy Institute: Working Paper No. 113. University of Gothenburg.
This means, however, that some countries are not classified as autocratizing even though their score visibly declines. One example is the United States in the 2010s, whose decline between 2015 and 2020 fell just barely short of the ERT threshold.
Bermeo, Nancy. 2016. On democratic backsliding. Journal of Democracy 27(1): 5-19.

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Bastian Herre, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser (2013) - "Democracy". Published online at OurWorldInData.org. Retrieved from: 'http://staging-site-cloudflare-pages/democracy' [Online Resource]

BibTeX citation

@article{owiddemocracy,
    author = {Bastian Herre and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Max Roser},
    title = {Democracy},
    journal = {Our World in Data},
    year = {2013},
    note = {http://staging-site-cloudflare-pages/democracy}
}

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Democracy

Key insights

The world has become much more democratic over the last two centuries

What you should know about this data

Two centuries ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them

What you should know about this data

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory

What you should know about this data

People around the world have gained democratic rights, but some have many more rights than others

What you should know about this data

The world has recently become less democratic

What you should know about this data

Explore data on Democracy

Research & Writing

More Key articles on Democracy

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory

People around the world have gained democratic rights, but some have many more rights than others

Does democracy lead to better health?

Measuring Democracy

Interactive charts on Democracy