Democracy Facing Global Challenges : V-Dem Annual Democracy Report 2019
Report, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, (May 2019)Abstract
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with some 27 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2018. Involving over 3,000 scholars and other country experts,V-Dem measures hundreds of different
attributes of democracy. V-Dem enables new ways to study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy embracing its multiple meanings. The trend of autocratization continues, but global democracy levels are not in free fall. 24 countries are now severely aff ected by what is established as a “third wave of autocratization.” Among them are populous countries such as Brazil, India and the United States, as well as several Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Serbia). Almost one-third of the world’s population lives in countries undergoing autocratization, surging from 415 million in 2016 to 2.3 billion in 2018. 21 countries have made progress on democracy over the past ten years, among them Armenia, Burkina Faso, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Tunisia. This testifi es to the continued appeal of democratic values. Democracy still prevails in a majority of countries in the world (99 countries, 55 percent;). The world is thus unmistakably
more democratic compared to any point during the last century. However, the number of liberal democracies has declined from 44 in 2008 to 39 in 2018. This report presents the fi rst model for forecasting autocratization and identifi es the top-10 most at-risk countries in the world. These fi ndings serve as an invitation for
action by the policy and practitioner communities.