O Estado da Democracia no Mundo - Visual Capitalist

Mapped: The State of Democracy Around the World

Only 8% of the world’s population actually lives in a full, functioning democracy, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

Meanwhile, another 37% of people live in some type of “flawed democracy”, while 55% of the world does not live in democracy at all, based on the EIU’s latest Democracy Index Report.

Events such as the war in Ukraine and restrictive, long-lasting COVID-19 measures, have caused numerous declines to country democracy scores in recent years. Since the source report first began tracking scores in 2006, the global average has fallen from 5.52 to 5.29.

The Methodology

The EIU measures democracy by assessing 60 indicators across five key categories:

1. Electoral process and pluralism
2. Political culture
3. Political participation
4. Functioning of government
5. Civil liberties

Each category has a rank of 0-10 based on how the indicators fared, and the overall democracy score is an average of each of the five categories. For example, here’s a look at the U.S.’ scoring out of 10 in each of the overall categories in 2022:

Electoral process and pluralism	Functioning of government	Political participation	Political culture	Civil liberties
9.17	6.43	8.89	6.25	8.53

🇺🇸 Total U.S. democracy score = 7.85 / 10

This score defines the U.S. as a flawed democracy and ranks it 30th overall in the world, down four spots from last year’s ranking. “Flawed” in this case simply means there are problems, ranging from poor political culture to governance issues, but flawed democracies are still considered to have free and fair elections, as well as civil liberties.

The World’s Democracies by Region

Below we map out the state of democracy across various regions around the world.