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ABSTRACT
This article analyses the state of democracy around the world in 2021. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen in 2021 was down to 1989 levels. In 2021, autocracies were on the rise, harbouring 70% of the world population, or 5.4 billion people. There was also a record number of countries autocratizing in 2021: 33 countries, home to 36% of the global population. In recent years, the EU seems to be facing its own wave of autocratization, with 20% of its members autocratizing over the last decade. In addition to the continued downturn in global democracy, this article documents several signs that autocratization is changing in nature. Polarization increased substantially and significantly in 40 countries between 2011 and 2021, and our analysis indicates that polarization increasingly damages democracy especially recently and under anti-pluralist governments. Over the past decade, the data also shows that autocratic governments more frequently used misinformation to shape domestic and international opinion. Finally, with five military coups and one self-coup, 2021 featured an unprecedented increase in coups for this century. These coups contributed to the uptick in the number of closed autocracies in 2021 and seem to signal a shift toward emboldened autocratic actors.
Acknowledgements
This article is based on the V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report 2022 (Boese et al., 2022). We thank Hugo Tai and Jeremy Glass for skilful research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Coppedge et al., V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v12. Every annual update improves the quality of the data and the scores reported in earlier State of the World articles may therefore not always match. For details on the methodology, see Pemstein et al., “The V-Dem Measurement Model.”
2 This article uses a simplified metric to capture which countries are autocratizing or democratizing. It measures the difference between the country score on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) in 2021 and 2011. A country is autocratizing or democratizing if the difference is statistically significant (the confidence intervals do not overlap) and substantial (the difference is greater than 0.05 on a 0–1 scale). For a more sophisticated measure, see the “Episodes of Regime Transformation” Project: On Github (https://github.com/vdeminstitute/ert) and Maerz et al., Introducing the ERT dataset.
3 In 2021 there were also two failed coup attempts, in Sudan (September) and Niger (March). Please find data tracking coup attempts at https://www.arresteddictatorship.com/global-instances-of-coups.html.
4 Huntington, The Third Wave.
5 The typology and indicator are published in Lührmann, Tannenberg, and Lindberg, “Regimes of the World.”
6 Uncertainty about countries scoring close to the threshold between democracy and autocracy applied to 20 countries in 2021. Thus, the number of autocracies in the world might range from 80 to 100 countries, with 90 being the best estimate. See the variable v2x_regime_amb in the V-Dem Dataset, v12.
7 Lührmann and Lindberg, “Third Wave of Autocratization.”
8 V-Dem measures this feature as the range of consultation at the elite level; the extent to which political elites give public justifications for their positions on matters of public policy; justify their positions in terms of the public good; and acknowledge and respect counterarguments.
9 Hellmeier et al., “State of the world 2020.”
10 See Appendix for a not on the Covid-19 pandemic and autocratization.
11 Boese et al., “How Democracies Prevail.”
12 For further discussion of how to identify anti-pluralist parties, see Lührmann et al., “Disrupting the autocratization sequence”.
19 Maerz et al., “State of the World 2019.”
24 Hellmeier and Weidmann, “Pulling the Strings? The Strategic Use.”
25 E.g. Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid, call it “pernicious.” See also Haggard and Kaufman, Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World; Lührmann, “Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence.”
28 Campbell, Polarized; LeBas, “Can Polarization be Positive?”; Stavrakakis, “Paradoxes of Polarization.”
29 E.g. Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
30 Graham and Svolik, “Democracy in America?”; Svolik, “Polarization Versus Democracy.”
31 Haggard and Kaufman, Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World; Lührmann, “Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence.”
32 Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
34 Vegetti, “The Political Nature of Ideological Polarization.”
35 Somer, “Turkey: The Slippery Slope.”
36 Polarization is measured with the V-Dem political polarization variable (v2cacamps, lagged one year). Anti-pluralist ruling parties are those scoring above the 75th percentile in the V-Party data’s anti-pluralist index. Lindberg et al., Varieties of Party Identity and Organization. We fill this variable forward as long as the head of government did not change.
37 Somer, McCoy, and Luke, “Pernicious Polarization, Autocratization and Opposition Strategies.”
38 Lührmann, Medzihorsky, and Lindberg, Walking the Talk.
39 These authors use the dependent variable of autocratization episodes, while we look at the effect on V-Dem’s LDI.
40 This sample based on whether there was substantial and significant decline in the LDI comparing year t to year t-10. In the Appendix, we run the same analysis using the Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset (Maerz et al., Introducing the ERT dataset), which offers a more sophisticated measure of regime change. The results, in and in Appendix are quite similar, though the effect sizes are larger in the sample constructed from the ERT data. If anything, the analysis here understates the evolving effect of polarization on democracy.
41 Haggard and Kaufman, Democratic Regress in the Contemporary World.
42 Graham and Svolik, “Democracy in America?”; Svolik, “Polarization Versus Democracy.”
43 We use the terms misinformation and disinformation interchangeably.
44 The World Bank, World Development Report 2021.
45 Annaka, Political Regime, Data Transparency; Kapoor et al., “Authoritarian Governments Appear to Manipulate Covid Data.”
46 Magee and Doces, “Reconsidering Regime Type and Growth.”
47 Delli Carpini and Keeter, What Americans Know About Politics; Jerit and Zhao, “Political Misinformation.”
48 Kuklinski et al., “Misinformation and the Currency of Democratic Citizenship.”
49 Osmundsen et al., “Partisan Polarization is the Primary Psychological.”
50 Hochschild and Einstein, “Misinformation and Democratic Politics”; Ibid.
51 Mechkova et al., Measuring Internet Politics.
52 E.g. Hollyer, Rosendorff, and Vreeland, “Democracy and Transparency”; Rosendorff and Doces, “Transparency and Unfair Eviction in Democracies and Autocracies.”
53 Wang and Huang, “When ‘Fake News’ Becomes Real.”
54 Weidmann et al., “Digital Discrimination.”
55 Keremoğlu and Weidmann, “How Dictators Control the Internet”; King, Pan, and Roberts, “How Censorship in China.”
56 Lutscher et al., “At Home and Abroad.”
57 Silva and Proksch, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”
58 Rose, Brexit, Trump, and Post-Truth Politics.
60 Iasiello, “Russia’s Improved Information Operations”; Khaldarova and Pantti, “The Narrative Battle Over the Ukrainian Conflict.”
61 Bennett and Livingston, “The Disinformation Order.”
62 Polyakova, “The Kremlin’s Plot Against Democracy.”
64 A coup occurs when the military or political elites unseat the sitting executive by illegal means. Powell and Thyne, “Global Instances of Coups from 1950 to 2010”; Bennett, Bjørnskov, and Gohmann, “Coups, Regime Transitions, and Institutional Consequences.”
73 Hyde, Democracy’s Backsliding in the International Environment.
74 Marinov and Goemans, “Coups and Democracy”; Yukawa et al., “Coup d’état and a Democratic Signal.”
75 Hegre, “Democracy and Armed Conflict”; Hegre, Bernhard, and Teorell, “Civil Society and the Democratic Peace.”
76 Find an overview of the project here: https://www.v-dem.net/pandem.html. Find the latest policy brief from the project here: https://www.v-dem.net/media/publications/pb_32.pdf.
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Notes on contributors
Vanessa A. Boese
Vanessa A. Boese is Assistant Professor at the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She has worked on the measurement of political institutions, on democratic resilience, on processes of regime transformation (democratization and autocratization) and on how these processes interact with conflict, or socio-economic outcomes. The findings from her research are published or forthcoming in journals such as the British Journal of Political Science, International Studies Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Democratization, and the Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy.
Martin Lundstedt
Martin Lundstedt is an assistant researcher at the V-Dem Institute, Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg.
Kelly Morrison
Kelly Morrison is a postdoctoral fellow at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on human rights, democracy, and political violence. Her previous research has appeared in the Journal of Politics.
Yuko Sato
Yuko Sato is a postdoctoral fellow at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg. Her research focuses on popular protests, voting behavior, democratization, and autocratization, with a regional focus on Latin America. Her previous research has appeared in Electoral Studies, Policy Studies Journal, and Democratization.
Staffan I. Lindberg
Staffan I. Lindberg is Professor of political science and Director of the university-wide research infrastructure V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg, founding Principal Investigator of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), founding Director of the national research infrastructure DEMSCORE, Wallenberg Academy Fellow, author of Democracy and Elections in Africa as well as other books and over 60 articles on issues such as democracy, elections, democratization, autocratization, accountability, clientelism, sequence analysis methods, women's representation, and voting behavior. Lindberg also has extensive experience as consultant on development and democracy, and as advisor to international organizations.