The annual Democracy Index, published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, has issued its starkest warning to date: democracy is in global retreat, and the rate of decline is accelerating in ways that challenge assumptions about the inevitability of democratic progress.
The 2024 report finds that only 7.8% of the world's population — roughly 650 million people — lives under what the index classifies as a "full democracy." This represents a decline from 8.9% a decade ago and the lowest figure since the index began in 2006.
The Hybrid Threat
Most troubling to researchers is not the rise of outright autocracies — which are relatively few — but the proliferation of what the index terms "electoral autocracies" and "flawed democracies." These hybrid regimes maintain the formal structures of democratic governance — elections, parliaments, independent courts — while systematically hollowing out their substance through media manipulation, judicial capture, and the weaponisation of legal processes against political opponents.