Fragile Democracy

The rise of democracy has been one of the greatest collective human achievements of the last century, allowing large shares of the world's population to live in relative freedom and have the ability to participate meaningfully in the politics and society of their country. In recent years, this progress has come under threat though, with authoritarianism making an unwanted comeback.

September 15 marks International Day of Democracy - a day dedicated to promoting the principles of democracy and celebrating civic participation. It also provides an opportunity to review the state of democracy in the world at a time when "democracy and the rule of law are under assault from disinformation, division, and shrinking civic space," as UN Secretary-General António Guterres put it.

Our infographic, based on classifications from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project analyzed by Our World in Data highlights just how fragile democracy can be. The share of the world population living in either an electoral or liberal democracy was at its highest in 2001, when the figure was at 53.5 percent. Over the past decade, there has been a sharp decline though, driven partly by a downgrade of India, which is now considered an electoral autocracy. Even excluding this effect, the population-weighted level of democracy would be back to 1990, V-Dem notes in its 2025 Democracy Report. By 2024, just 28 percent of the world's population, or 2.3 billion people, lived in electoral or liberal democracies, down from almost 4 billion people in 2016.