It defines democracy using seven key principles (electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, egalitarian, majoritarian, and consensual). And it distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian.
The institute has published its ninth annual report, Democracy Report 2025: 25, Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped?
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The authors note that when they were finishing the Democracy Report three years ago, Russia launched its full-scale, illegal invasion of Ukraine. The war is still going on.
Back then, the alliance backing the young, aspiring Ukrainian democracy was solid and included the United States of America.
While finishing this year’s Democracy Report, President Trump was voting against NATO allies in the UN and joining with autocracies like North Korea, Russia, and Sudan.
Military support to Ukraine was just cut off, and the words coming out of the Trump administration echo Kremlin rhetoric. European leaders are scrambling to mount a sufficient response. The world is going through another convulsion.
The USA nevertheless is listed among the shrinking number of countries which are categorised as liberal democracies.
New Zealand is on that list too – Kiwis are among only 7% of the East Asia and Pacific population who live in liberal democracies, alongside the people of Australia, Japan, and Taiwan.
According to V-Dem, the level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985 levels. By country averages, it is back to 1996.
The world has fewer democracies (N=88) than autocracies (N=91) for the first time in over 20 years.
Liberal democracies have become the least common regime type in the world, a total of 29 in 2024.
Nearly three out of four persons in the world – 72% – now live in autocracies. That’s the highest since 1978.
Simon Wren-Lewis, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Fellow of Merton College, University of Oxford, drew PoO’s attention to that disturbing trend on his blog, Mainly Macro.
He noted that other estimates point to the same trend and said:
At a global level there are obviously many reasons why this is happening, but in Western countries one stands out: the rise of right wing populism.
In many of the major economies, the main political divide is increasingly between one or more right wing populist parties and more mainstream parties of the centre or left. Of course from year to year political popularity can be volatile, but the trend is also unmistakable. This is happening either because of the growing popularity of an insurgent populist party (Rassemblement National and Reconquête in France, AFD in Germany, Fratelli d’Italia in Italy and Reform in the UK) or the transition of a mainstream party of the right into a populist party (the Republican party in the US and the Conservatives in the UK).
Wren-Lewis provided some comfort for those who who prefer democracy to autocracy and tyranny: he said
… democracy can survive the election of a right wing populist party into government. There are plenty of examples of where it has (Trump’s first term as POTUS, Poland and the UK, for example).
But if you were bracing for a “but” – you were right:
But the nature of right wing populism also means that there is a significant chance it may not. Populism is about a political party proclaiming that it alone represents ‘the people’, and that other parties or institutions represent ‘elites’ that work against the people. As a result, populist right wing governments tend to dismantle the key elements of a pluralistic democracy, such as an independent media, judiciary and civil service. They are autocratic, usually placing an unprecedented amount of power in one individual’s hands. In those circumstances, elections can easily cease to be fair, such that a democracy is effectively replaced with an autocracy.
If the key electoral contest in most major countries is between right wing populism and more mainstream parties, then right wing populists are likely to win at least some of these contests. If that sometimes leads to the end of democracy, or steadily erodes the possibility of fair elections, then unless autocracies collapse into democracies at an equal rate the number of democracies will steadily decline and the number of autocratic governments will increase. This process will be accelerated if autocracies intervene in other democracies to support right wing populism, as Russia has been doing and as Trump has started to do.
Wren-Lewis lists immigration among the issues that generate support for populist politicians.
He also mentions the rising number of older people, thanks to medical and other advances, and refers to the old age dependency ratio (“a crude measure”, he acknowledges) which divides the number of people 65 or older by the number of people of roughly working age (20-64).
In 1960, the dependency ratio for the OECD as a whole was 16%, but by 2020 it had doubled to 30%. By 2075 this ratio is expected to be nearly 60%. This means that a growing proportion of voters are no longer in work, so work-based economic issues will have less salience, although this effect is moderated to a minor degree by any increases in the retirement age. In addition, older people are more likely to vote. All this creates a growing pool of socially conservative voters which politicians can appeal to.
Wren-Lewis is pessimistic: to the extent that his analysis is valid, he says, it suggests that the factors that have created a growing demand for socially conservative populism, and further down the line the trend away from democracy, are unlikely to be reversed anytime soon.
Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.
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