Charting democracy’s ups and downs, 2006 to 2024 Global average Democracy Index score out of 10 (10=best)
Democracy isn’t working It is clear that having formal democratic institutions is not enough to sustain public support, especially if those institutions have been hollowed out and decisionmaking is outsourced to non-elected bodies. Governments and political parties in many democracies have become estranged from citizens and as a consequence are no longer responsive to their concerns.
The biggest score changes: more bad than good. There were more deteriorations than improvements in countries’ index scores in 2024 (see chart, Top ten upgrades and downgrades). Unsurprisingly, the biggest changes tend to occur in the bottom half of the index rankings, among the “hybrid regimes” and “authoritarian regimes”. The recent trend among the latter has been for downward movements in scores, as autocracies dig in and become more entrenched. The tendency among countries occupying what we might call a “grey zone” between democracy and authoritarianism—the “hybrid regimes”—is to oscillate as they are pulled in two directions between pressure to democratise and forces pushing against this.
Top 10 Upgrades and Downgrades