Democracy in 2018
The notion that democracy may be on the wane as the preferred form of governance would have been inconceivable twenty years ago. Yet now, even some of the older western democracies exhibit disturbing trends that have been described in an annual survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit as “democracy recession.”
The annual survey, conducted since 2006, ranks each of 167 countries on 60 indicators, covering five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based upon total scores, countries fall into one of four types of regimes: full democracy; flawed democracy; hybrid regime; or authoritarian regime.
From 2006 to 2018 the number of full democracies decreased from 26 to 20, while the number of hybrid regimes increased from 33 to 39. Seven countries that were considered full democracies in 2006 had been downgraded to flawed democracies by 2018. They are Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Greece, Japan, Portugal and the United States.
The 2018 report highlights the one category to register an improvement – political participation, which is a combination of nine separate indicators. At a global level, advances were recorded in two of those indicators – the proportion of population following politics in the news, and the proportion willing to engage in lawful demonstrations.
But the most striking advance in political participation was recorded in the participation of women, which improved more than any other of the 60 indicators in the Democracy Index model. In some countries, participation has been facilitated by setting quotas for candidates, or the establishment of reserved seats for women. Most notably, the report cites the United States’ 2018 mid-term elections, in which women’s elections to Congress reached an all-time high.
The report finds the improvement in political participation more striking when compared alongside the deterioration in other categories. The functioning of government is the lowest-ranking category in the index, due to consistently low scores for transparency, accountability and corruption.
The 2018 report ties increased political participation to deterioration in the functioning of government and political culture. Voter turnout was high in big elections in Brazil and Mexico as well as the United States. The report states that “increased engagement, voter turnout and activism have in many countries around the world been in the name of anti-establishment parties and politicians who could shake up political systems and the practice of democracy in unexpected ways.” The report warns that the rise in political engagement, combined with a longer-term trend toward limitations on civil liberties, “is a potentially volatile mix, and could be a recipe for instability and social unrest in 2019.”