Mediapart: There are more dictators in the world, but people are resisting

An academic report said the world is experiencing another year of democratic decline and regimes in general have become more authoritarian around the world, although mass democratic mobilization has not yet disappeared.

The French site Media part – which reviewed the latest annual report of the “V-Dem project” – said that 68% of the world’s population lived under authoritarian regimes in 2020, and that 34% of them lived in from countries where the degree of despotism He pointed out that the degree of despotism in recent times encompassed all types of regimes.

An interesting scale

The report “Transcribing Democracy”, led by a team of researchers from the University of Go then burg in Sweden, collects the experience of more than 3,000 correspondents around the world. Thanks to this data, academics measure the quality of democracy or the extent of its rejection in more than two hundred countries, although this approach, admittedly fascinating Interesting because of its versatility and uses, it is criticized, says the site.

The architects of this project start from a complex definition of democracy that goes beyond the simple holding of elections, and they divide the components of democracy according to the freedoms and equality enjoyed by citizens, which it is vis-à-vis the State when the leaders are chosen. either in social and economic terms, or in the opportunities for effective participation in life.

The scores obtained for each of these components provide a classification of existing systems and distinguish between “liberal democracies”, “electoral democracies”, “electoral authoritarian regimes” and “closed authoritarian regimes”, according to the site.

While these designations can be somewhat artificial – as the site says – and the boundaries between them are undefined, they provide an objective measure of the extent of progress or regression, at the country or regional level. or even at the level of the whole. world, and over long periods of time, which better helps to determine the tendencies towards democracy or “authoritarianism” and the way in which it takes place and the events associated with it.

The site questioned the main conclusions reached by the last report of the “Forms of Democracy” project, which includes the results of 2020, to show that, among them, the confirmation of the existence of a continuing wave of tyranny, which tends to accelerate, even if the world is even more democratic than it was in the seventies or eighties.

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Decline of rights and freedoms

However, “the democratic rights and freedoms of the average citizen in 2020 are similar to the level they were in 1990” although they continued to advance over the next twenty years – as the conclusion says – knowing that America Latin, Asia and the Pacific, Central Asia, Central and Eastern Europe are the main sites of decline. Publicity

With the decline in the number of closed or stricter authoritarian regimes, electoral authoritarian regimes have now become the most prevalent type of system on the planet, and since India’s entry into this category, the population within it has clearly increased, so that 43% of the people in the world live in authoritarian electoral regimes, according to the calculations of the project.

In other words – says the report – this percentage of the world’s population lives in systems with limited and biased pluralism, and does not live under the rule of law in the true sense of the word, while only 14% of the population world lives, in some thirty countries, in a true liberal democracy.