Data Insights
Bite-sized insights on how the world is changing, published every few days.
DemocracySeptember 19, 2025
Honest elections matter to people everywhere
Honest elections matter because they give people a say in how their country is run. They help ensure that governments reflect the people's will and that policies respond to real needs.
It’s sometimes assumed that support for democracy and fair elections is limited to particular regions or cultures. However, data from the Integrated Values Surveys, which asks people across many countries how much honest elections matter to them, shows otherwise.
Across all the countries surveyed, large majorities said honest elections are important in their lives. Nearly everyone said so in Indonesia, South Korea, and the UK. Even in countries where experts judge elections as unfree or unfair — like Iran, Egypt, or Russia — around 80% to 90% still said they matter.
In some contexts, people may feel pressure to answer this question in a certain way, either downplaying or overstating the importance of elections. Still, the consistency of results across such different countries suggests the demand is real.
Explore more data on free and fair elections for all countries →
April 01, 2025
Four countries that have successfully reversed democratic decline in recent years
Several countries have recently managed to stop and even reverse the erosion of their democratic institutions.
The chart illustrates these turnarounds using the liberal democracy index from the Varieties of Democracy project. This index measures key aspects of democracy, such as the fairness of elections and checks on government power. It ranges from 0 (highly autocratic) to 1 (highly democratic).
The four countries in the chart all saw serious declines in democracy over the past 20 years—these declines are shown in red. In Thailand, democracy eroded quickly, while in Zambia, it happened more slowly.
Still, in each case, people resisted growing authoritarianism. As a result, these countries were able to partially or fully restore previous levels of liberal democracy.
These examples show that when democracy deteriorates, its fate is not sealed, and democratic institutions can be reclaimed.
Read more about how democratic decline has been reversed before in my article →
March 05, 2025
More than 80% of countries vote, but less than 40% do so freely and fairly
People might associate democracy with having the right to vote. But meaningful democracy is much more than that.
In 2022, nearly every country granted its citizens the right to vote. 85% of them had an elected parliament and government. In 82%, elections were multi-party, meaning that people had more than one option on the ballot. You can see this in the chart.
But, fewer than two-thirds of these elections were genuinely competitive. In others, voters were systematically pressured or intimidated, the timing of elections was violated, or election fraud influenced the results.
Even more concerning, in only 39% of countries were people able to express their political opinions and associate freely.
As a result, just over one-third of countries recently held elections that met all of these democratic criteria and can be considered truly free and fair.
Find out which countries have all democratic criteria and which don't →
October 01, 2024
Democracy is still young in most countries considered democratic today
Most electoral democracies are younger than the oldest people who live in them.
The chart shows that almost two dozen democracies are younger than 18 — as young as the children in these countries. Others are only as old as their young adults. This is based on data from Regimes of the World.
In these younger democracies, most people have experienced life under authoritarian rule, and older people lacked democratic political rights for most of their lives.
A larger group of countries have been electoral democracies for one to three generations. In these countries, children and young adults have only known life in a democracy, but their parents and grandparents have experienced non-democratic rule.
Only ten countries have been democratic for more than 90 years. In these places, democracy is older than almost all of their citizens.
July 03, 2024
Young people are less likely to vote than older people — often considerably so
In many countries, there are large differences in voter turnout between young and older people. The chart shows the data for recent national elections in four countries.
In the 2022 French elections, 76% of those aged 18–24 voted, while 92% of people aged 50–59 did — a difference of 16 percentage points.
We see the same pattern in the UK and the US. Only slightly more than half of young people voted in their 2019 and 2020 elections, while around three out of four older people did.
This data comes from post-election surveys by Insee, the British Election Study, the US Census Bureau, and the Federal Returning Officer of Germany.
Explore more data on voter turnout around the world →
May 27, 2024
One in five democracies is eroding
Based on the Episodes of Regime Transformation data, this chart shows that around 20% of democracies were slowly deteriorating in 2023.
According to the underlying expert assessments by country experts, elections are becoming less meaningful, free, or fair in these countries.
This rate of democratic erosion is unprecedented.
This is partly because the data seeks to capture gradual declines in democratic institutions, while historically, democracies often broke down rapidly in coups d’état or foreign invasions.
So, while political rights are under threat in a substantial share of democracies, there is still time to act to halt this decline, restore democratic rights, and even deepen democratic institutions.
If you want to learn more, you can read my article on recent changes in democracy, for which we just updated the data.
May 14, 2024
The share of democracies has recently stagnated but remains near its historical high
Over the last twenty years, the share of countries that are democracies has remained relatively stable.
Relying on data from Varieties of Democracy, which we just updated, the chart shows that around half of all countries are democracies.
The world remains close to the historical high in the early 2000s and is much more democratic than 50 years ago; only 20% of countries were democracies in the early 1970s.
However, the chart shows smaller changes within democratic regimes: the share of liberal democracies, which grant additional individual and minority rights and constrain their governments, has decreased over the last decade.
While democracy has remained fairly resilient over the last few decades, this recent stagnation and limited rollback stresses that progress on increasing political rights is neither linear nor guaranteed.