Global State of Democracy Report, 2021

Context: The number of countries moving towards authoritarianism in 2020 was higher than that of countries going in the other direction, towards democracy, the Global State of Democracy Report, 2021 released by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International-IDEA).
Key Findings

• “The pandemic has prolonged this existing negative trend into a five-year stretch, the longest such period since the start of the third wave of democratisation in the 1970s. 

Democratically elected Governments, including established democracies, are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics. This democratic backsliding has often enjoyed significant popular support,” the report said.

• The report highlighted the case of Brazil and India as “some of the most worrying examples of backsliding. However, India remained in the category of a mid-level performing democracy as it has since 2000.
• “The United States and three members of the European Union (EU) [Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, which holds the chair of the EU in 2021] have also seen concerning democratic declines,”.

In non-democratic regimes, the trend was deepening, it said. “The year 2020 was the worst on record, in terms of the number of countries affected by deepening autocratisation. The pandemic has thus had a particularly damaging effect on non-democratic countries, further closing their already reduced civic space,” the report said.

• The report cited the example of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s baseless allegations about electoral integrity as part of the increasing trend of questioning elections in established democracies.
• “The uneven global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as anti-vaccine views, undermine the uptake of vaccination programmes and risk prolonging the health crisis and normalising restrictions on basic freedoms,”.
• However, the report also pointed out that many democracies had proved to be resilient to the pandemic.

About the report

• International IDEA’s Global State of Democracy Report reviews the state of democracy around the world over the course of 2020 and 2021, with democratic trends since 2015 used as a contextual reference. 
• It is based on analysis of events that have impacted democratic governance globally. 
• The Global Monitor provides monthly data on pandemic measures and their impact on democracy for 165 countries in the world. 
• The Global State of Democracy Indices provide quantitative data on democratic quality for the same countries, based on 28 indicators of democracy up until the end of 2020. 

The conceptual framework on which both data sources are based defines democracy as based on five core pillars:-

• Representative Government, Fundamental Rights, Checks on Government, Impartial Administration and Participatory Engagement. 
• These five attributes provide the organizing structure for this report.

Key Concepts

• The reports refer to three main regime types: democracies, hybrid and authoritarian regimes. Hybrid and authoritarian regimes are both classified as non-democratic.
• Democracies, at a minimum, hold competitive elections in which the opposition stands a realistic chance of accessing power. This is not the case in hybrid and authoritarian regimes. However, hybrid regimes tend to have a somewhat more open—but still insufficient—space for civil society and the media than authoritarian regimes.
• Democracies can be weak, mid-range performing or high-performing, and this status changes from year to year, based on a country’s annual democracy scores.
• Democracies in any of these categories can be backsliding, eroding and/or fragile, capturing changes in democratic performance over time. 
• Backsliding democracies are those that have experienced gradual but significant weakening of Checks on Government and Civil Liberties, such as Freedom of Expression and Freedom of Association and Assembly, over time. This is often through intentional policies and reforms aimed at weakening the rule of law and civic space. Backsliding can affect democracies at any level of performance.
• Eroding democracies have experienced statistically significant declines in any of the democracy aspects over the past 5 or 10 years. The democracies with the highest levels of erosion tend also to be classified as backsliding.
• Fragile democracies are those that have experienced an undemocratic interruption at any point since their first transition to democracy. 
• Deepening authoritarianism is a decline in any of the democracy aspects of non-democratic regimes.