Democracy Keeps Declining Worldwide. NewsWire

NewsWire: 6/28/21

• A new annual report shows democracy's global retreat accelerated in the pandemic year of 2020, with India's shift to an "electoral autocracy" affecting nearly 20% of the world's population. While still a strong "liberal democracy," the United States is also in retreat according to several measures, especially in attitudes toward freedom of expression among the young. (V-Dem Institute)
• NH: According to two new annual reports, democracy and freedom around the world continue to ebb.
• The best-known global index ("Freedom in the World"), published annually by Freedom House since 1972, gives every country a score based on several measures of civil liberty and political democracy. The average global score peaked in 2005 and has been declining in every subsequent year. During this past year (see Freedom in the World 2021) the decline steepened: In 2020, 73 countries showed declining scores; only 28 countries improved.

• Based on country scores, Freedom House designates every country as "free," "partly free," or "not free." The report's biggest news was India's re-designation in 2020 from "free" to "partly free." Though India counts as just one country in the index, it has long been hailed as "the world's biggest democracy." Now, after the BJP's successful effort to suppress media freedom and degrade the civil status of Muslims, we'll have to call it something else.

• Since 2005, 7 free countries have (net) shifted to partly-free, where the electoral process and expression is strongly regulated. Examples include Pakistan, Mexico, Hungary, and now India. And 10 partly-free countries have become "not free," where elections either don't happen or (more often) the outcomes are effectively predetermined. Here, examples include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.
• In all of Asia, there are currently only six "free" countries: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Mongolia, Israel, and Cyprus. And, as a sign of the times, four of these are not recognized by neighboring autocracies. Taiwan and Mongolia are not recognized by China. Cyprus is not recognized by Turkey. And Israel is still not recognized by most of its Arab neighbors, including Jordan, which was re-classified last year from partly free to not free.

• The report also offers a good overview of where and why the democracy scores have declined the most over the last 15 years. 

• Regionally, the largest declines have been in Eurasia: Russia, the ex-Soviet "Stans," and eastern and central Europe. President Victor Orban's self-proclaimed "illiberal democracy" in Hungary is something of a bellwether. Africa and the Mideast have also fared poorly.
• By type of freedom, the worst losses have been in rule of law and in rights of expression and association. Several Asia-Pacific countries have improved their electoral process. But this is one hallmark of today's "global democratic recession": the form of electoral democracy is preserved even while the substance is wiped out.
• Another major annual index of democracy, now in its fifth year, is published by the V-Dem Institute, run out of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. Unlike Freedom House, which is U.S. supported and has been around since World War II, V-Dem is a newer and younger project more oriented to poli sci quants and big data analysts. Its indexes are based on almost 30 million data points from 202 countries since 1789.
• In its assessment of trends over the last several decades, however, V-Dem comes to pretty much the same conclusions as Freedom House: Global democracy is now in steep decline. Or, as V-Dem puts it, the great "third wave of democratization" that swept the world in the 1970s and 1980s has since been largely reversed by a new "third wave of autocratization." This in fact is the title of its latest annual report, "Autocratization Turns Viral: Democracy Report 2021."
• Using a country-based point system (like Freedom House), V-Dem categorizes countries a bit differently. There are four bins: liberal democracy, electoral democracy, electoral autocracy, and closed autocracy. Here's how regime types have changed since 1972. The left scale adds up regimes by number of countries. The right scale adds up regimes by share of the global population living under those regimes.

• By either measure, the trend over time doesn't look good. And that's to put it mildly. By number of countries, liberal democracies have been losing ground--and closed autocracies have been gaining ground--ever since 2012. And by share of population, liberal democracies (at 14%) are now at their lowest share ever. And all forms of autocracy, at 68%, are now at their highest share ever.
• The big jump in "electoral autocracy" as a share of population which took place in 2019 was due to India. Like Freedom House, V-Dem redefined India that year. But unlike Freedom House, V-Dem tosses India into the same bin as Russia, Cambodia, and Iran. "Electoral autocracy," per V-Dem, is now the most common regime type, lived under by nearly half of the world's population. Sure, there are elections--but good luck establishing any sort of serious opposition party.
• V-Dem also tracks how the world has changed in terms of raw democracy index scores. Here things don't look quite so bad.

• The average global score has been declining since 2010 and is now back to where it was at the end of the 1980s. But it's still better than it was back in the bad old 1970s. That's mainly due to the decline in outright strongmen and military dictators who don't bother having elections at all. Today's autocracies--with such notable exceptions as China--generally feel obligated to hold some sort of popular election, if only to boast that they are supported by "the people." Indeed, in most countries where liberal democracy or electoral democracy has recently lost ground, populism has become its fiercest competitor.
• Speaking of rising populism, how does the United States fare in these indexes?
• Both Freedom House and V-Dem still place the US in the highest class of democracy--as a "free country" or as a "liberal democracy." But since 2010, the US score has fallen--and it has fallen more steeply than in most other liberal democracies. In 2010, its score was among the very highest in the world. Today, its score is in the lower tier of its class. While it hasn't sunk as far or as fast as Poland, Hungary, Slovenia, Brazil, or India, it is among the poorer performers.
• V-Dem points out three measures in particular where the United States has recently been downgraded. The first is its electoral democracy index: quality of elections and freedom of media and association. The second is its liberal component index: checks and balances on the executive, civil liberties, and the independence of the judiciary. The third is the deliberative component index: decisions reached by appeals to the common good and balanced debate as opposed to appeals to emotion, party solidarity, parochial interests, and coercion.
• Since two of these indexes touch on the freedom and quality of political debate, it might be useful to look at two recent publications that monitor political expression around the world.
• One is the 2020 World Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders. A major recent theme of this index, as with the democracy indexes, is decline--in particular declining freedom of expression. Around the world today, roughly 50 to 100 journalists are killed for their views each year (nearly all deaths go unpunished) and hundreds are incarcerated. To be sure, there's no confusing freedom of speech in America with freedom of speech, say, in Saudi Arabia (whose crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, apparently ordered the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi). Still, the American trend is nothing to brag about.
• Press freedom in the United States, according to the Index, is still deemed  "fairly good," but no longer "good" (a status reserved for only 12 countries, most of them in western Europe). It now ranks the US at number 44 among nations, two slots below South Korea and two slots above Tonga.
• Are changing popular attitudes in America toward free expression driving some of the changes in policy climate? In previous NewsWires, we've pointed out a long-term generational trend that seems to be at work in much of the world today. That is the tendency of later-born cohorts, at any given age, to express less positive views about democracy and freedom of expression. (See "Are Millennials Giving Up on Democracy," "Global Millennials: Down on Democracy and Drawn to Populism," and "Who's Really Turning Away from Democracy?")
• A new global survey on attitudes toward free expression, published by Justicia (a Danish legal think tank), offers some further support to this view. In a section focusing on results for the United States, the survey shows responses to five questions about free speech and breaks them down by gender, age, and education.

• In general, Americans' support for free speech is quite high across all of these groups. But it's significant that Americans aged 18-34 are significantly less supportive of free speech than older age groups in answers to four out of the five questions. On the fifth question, about "insulting the national flag," they were roughly as supportive as older age groups.
• The survey was conducted in 2021, raising the possibility that the answers could reflect younger Americans' greater support for the incoming President Joe Biden. But educational levels, which were even more positively correlated with support for Biden, break the other way on  most of these questions: More educated Americans consistently support more pro-free speech answers. The report's authors confirm, in a separate regression analysis, that Americans under age 35 consistently favored less support for free speech independently from their support for Biden or Trump.
• My takeaway: Younger voters, in America as in most other countries across the world, are reassessing the pros and cons of liberal democracy across the board. And this reassessment may be enabling, if not always driving, a global turnaround in the political trends--toward ever more democracy--that older generations once believed were unidirectional and irreversible.

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