

To see what share of the world’s population lived in each regime, you can tick the ‘Relative’ box in the interactive visualization.Other data sources agree that India has become less democratic, but overall still consider India a democracy 6 Most prominently the 1.4 billion people living in India, which - according to the RoW data - became an electoral autocracy in 2017. There have also been recent setbacks, with many people losing political rights. Almost all of them reside in just one country: China. Because the world’s population grew faster than democracy spread, the total number of people without democratic rights is higher than ever. While democratic rights have spread far, they are still far from universal. Another billion people lived in liberal democracies, such as those living in Chile, South Korea, and the United States. By 2022, about 1.3 billion people lived in electoral democracies in all regions of the world: many live in the populous countries of Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa. Since then, many have gained democratic political rights, especially in the second half of the 20th century. 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.

In 1800, almost everyone lived in political systems that RoW classifies as closed autocracies. In the 19th century, few people had democratic political rights.

The chart shows that many more people now live in democracies, based on the Regimes of the World (RoW) data. Now, billions of people have themīillions of people have gained democratic rights over the last two centuries. Two centuries ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer. We use the RoW data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify countries differently.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.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
#Democratic processes definition free
