Democracy

Democracy is broadly understood to mean ‘rule by the people’.

In practice, it is often defined as people choosing their leaders in free and fair elections.

Other definitions go beyond this. For example, some of them see democracy as people having additional individual rights and being protected from the state.

Democracy gives citizens the right to influence important decisions over their own lives and allows them to hold their leaders accountable.

But it can have other benefits too: democratic countries seem better governed than autocracies, seem to grow faster, and foster more peaceful conduct within and between them.

On this page, you can find data, visualizations, and writing on how democracy has spread across countries, how it differs between them, and whether we are moving towards a more democratic world.

Many more countries have become democracies over the last two hundred years. The chart shows — based on data from Regimes of the World (RoW) — that a much larger share of countries are now democracies.

In the late 18th century, no country could be meaningfully characterized as a democracy. RoW classifies almost all of them as closed autocracies, in which citizens do not have the right to choose their political leaders through elections. 1

Elections spread throughout the 19th century, but they were often marred by limitations. Many countries became electoral autocracies, in which political leaders were chosen through elections, but citizens lacked additional freedoms to make those elections free and fair. Only a few countries held elections that were sufficiently meaningful to call them electoral democracies. 2 And even fewer had the additional individual and minority rights and the constrained governments to consider them liberal democracies. 3

Electoral and liberal democracy then spread to many countries in the 20th century. By the end of the century, they had become common political systems around the globe and could be found across all world regions.

Today, the world is about evenly split between autocracies and democracies, according to this data. Most non-democracies are electoral autocracies. And about a third of all democracies have the additional individual and minority rights that characterize liberal democracies.

In this chart, we identify the political systems of countries with the Regimes of the World data by political scientists Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg, and Staffan Lindberg 4, published by the Varieties of Democracy project. 5 - RoW distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.

Closed autocracy: citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections

Electoral autocracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair

Electoral democracy: citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections

Liberal democracy: electoral democracy and citizens enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts

We use the RoW classification and V-Dem data but expand the years and countries covered and refine the coding rules, as explained in our technical article on the RoW data. - We use the RoW data here, but there are several other leading approaches to measuring democracy, which sometimes classify countries differently. You can explore them in our Democracy Data Explorer.

Billions of people have gained democratic rights over the last two centuries. The chart shows that many more people now live in democracies, based on the Regimes of the World (RoW) data.

In the 19th century, few people had democratic political rights. In 1800, almost everyone lived in political systems that RoW classifies as closed autocracies. No country was a democracy, and only 20 million people lived in the two countries classified as electoral autocracies: the United Kingdom and the United States.

Since then, many have gained democratic political rights, especially in the second half of the 20th century. By 2025, about 1.6 billion people lived in electoral democracies in all regions of the world: many live in the populous countries of Brazil, Malaysia, and South Africa. Another 600 million people lived in liberal democracies, such as those living in Chile, Germany, and Japan.