The United States appears for the first time in the list of “declining democracies”, mainly due to the deterioration during the second half of the Trump presidency, according to a report on democracy in the world published Monday.
More than a quarter of the world’s population now lives in a declining democracy and close to 70% if authoritarian or “hybrid” regimes are added, with a trend towards democratic degradation that has not stopped since 2016, according to the annual report of the International IDEA organization, based in Stockholm.
Updated every year, its list of declining democracies already included India, Brazil, the Philippines and two European Union countries, Poland and Hungary. A third European nation, Slovenia, was added this year.
Although the United States remains “a high-level democracy,” the US decline is related to the decline in the country’s indicators for “civic freedoms and government controls,” one of the co-authors, Alexander Hudson, told AFP. of the study.
International IDEA especially cites the “historic turn” in the November 2020 presidential election challengeings by Donald Trump and “the curtailment of congressional investigations into the president’s action between 2018 and 2020.”
“We classified the United States as + in decline + for the first time this year, but our data suggests that the episode of deterioration began at least in 2019,” stresses Hudson.
Covering half a century of democratic indicators and following the majority of the world’s countries (about 160), International IDEA classifies them into three categories: democracy (including “backward democracy”), “hybrid” regimes, and authoritarian regimes.
“The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States is shown by the growing tendency to question reliable electoral results, efforts to suppress participation, and rampant polarization (…) which is one of the most worrying developments for democracy in the past. worldwide, “International IDEA Secretary General Kevin Casas-Zamora told AFP.
When seven nations registered, the number of countries where democracy is considered in decline doubled in a decade.
Two countries that were on the list last year (Ukraine and North Macedonia) were dropped from the list as the situation improved. Two others, Mali and Serbia, were excluded as they are not considered democracies.
For the fifth consecutive year in 2020, the number of countries moving towards authoritarianism exceeded the number of countries in the democratization phase.
An unprecedented situation since the beginning of the organization’s data in the 70s and that should continue in 2021.
Burma, Afghanistan, Mali
Burma will decline from the rank of democracy to that of an authoritarian regime, while Afghanistan and Mali will move from the level of hybrid regimes to that of authoritarian regimes.
Zambia, now classified as a democracy, is the only country that positively changed categories this year.
By 2021, International IDEA’s provisional score records 98 democracies, the lowest number in several years, 20 “hybrid” regimes, including Russia, Morocco and Turkey, and 47 authoritarian regimes, including China, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Iran.
Adding the declining democracies and the hybrid and authoritarian regimes, “it reaches 70% of the world’s population. This shows that something serious is happening in terms of democratic quality,” Casas-Zamora underlined.
International IDEA confirmed its conclusions last year, according to which more than six countries out of ten applied problematic measures for human rights or respect for democratic rules against Covid-19, because they were “illegal, disproportionate, without a time limit or superfluous “.
More than nine authoritarian regimes out of ten are involved in these acts, although also more than 40% of democracies.
“The pandemic clearly accelerated some negative trends, especially in countries where democracy and the rule of law have suffered from before,” according to Casas-Zamora.
