72% of the world’s population lives in countries with autocratic regimes

A study conducted by an academic institution dedicated to assessing the global state of democracy has found that the progress made in democracy worldwide over the past 35 years has been reversed. The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy), situated within the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, is responsible for generating the most extensive global dataset on democracy.

V-Dem meticulously assesses hundreds of democracy-related attributes and, spanning from 1989 to 2022, has amassed a database comprising over 31 million data points for 202 countries. This collaborative initiative engages around four thousand researchers and experts from over 180 countries worldwide.

Utilizing this wealth of data, the institute has produced periodic reports on the global state of democracy. The 2023 report, analyzing data from 2022, is titled “Defiance in the Face of Autocratization.”

The prevalence of dictatorships now outnumbers that of liberal democracies, a fact showed by data prompting researchers to issue a warning. A primary conclusion of the report underlines the unsettling revelation that global progress in democracy over the past 35 years has been undone. Autocracy, defined as a concentration of state power in the hands of a single individual, has become notably widespread. In 2022, a staggering 72% of the world’s population, equivalent to 5.7 billion people, resided in countries governed by autocratic regimes, nearly reverting to the levels observed in 1986, as highlighted by the researchers.

Many of the autocratic regimes scrutinized in the study have transitioned to the status of dictatorships. For the first time in over two decades, there are more dictatorial regimes (closed autocracies) globally than liberal democracies: dictatorships encompass 28% of the population, constituting 2.2 billion people, while liberal democracies account for 13% of the population, totalling one billion people. The report underscores a particularly dramatic decline in the Asia-Pacific region, regressing to 1978 levels. Additionally, it reveals a significant reduction in the number of countries in the process of democratization over the last two decades, plummeting from 43 in 2002 to a mere 14 in 2022.

Autocratic regimes are systematically targeting the press, non-governmental organizations, and academic and cultural freedoms. The researchers draw conclusions from their collected and analyzed data, stating that government censorship of the media is worsening in 47 countries, and government repression of civil society organizations is worsening in 37 countries.

The interconnectedness of these issues is underscored by the observation that disinformation, polarization, and autocratization reinforce each other. Also, societies witnessing the consolidation of democracy experience a substantial reduction in the spread of misinformation and, to some extent, polarization.

Moreover, there is an economic dimension to these political trends. Authoritarian regimes have gained economic strength, becoming less reliant on democratically governed countries in recent years. The dependence of democracies on autocracies has doubled in the last 30 years. Currently, countries led by authoritarian regimes contribute to 46% of global GDP. Simultaneously, there has been a decline in the share of world trade among democracies, dropping from 74 in 1998 to 47% 2022, according to the study.