The V-Dem Institute’s tracker shows that, after widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s, many more countries are now becoming autocratic than democratic, especially weighted by population:
The V-Dem tracker you show doesn’t show “widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s.” It shows a giant explosion all of a sudden starting in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and then an equally sudden reversion from about 2000-2004.
It’s tracking autocratization, the sign of the direction of change, rather than the magnitude of autocracy or of its rate of change. If the world saw a wave of democratization (as during the USSR’s collapse) followed by even a minor systemic reversion to the mean, we would observe this as a giant spike in democratization followed by a giant spike in autocratization.
That said, V-Dem does appear to be a pretty large, serious, thoughtful and data-backed organization, and they have enough examples of autocratization trends in their report that I am updating to say yes, it does look like there’s some sort of genuinely concerning autocratization process going on globally.
The V-Dem tracker you show doesn’t show “widespread growth in democracy during the 1980s and 90s.” It shows a giant explosion all of a sudden starting in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, and then an equally sudden reversion from about 2000-2004.
It’s tracking autocratization, the sign of the direction of change, rather than the magnitude of autocracy or of its rate of change. If the world saw a wave of democratization (as during the USSR’s collapse) followed by even a minor systemic reversion to the mean, we would observe this as a giant spike in democratization followed by a giant spike in autocratization.
That said, V-Dem does appear to be a pretty large, serious, thoughtful and data-backed organization, and they have enough examples of autocratization trends in their report that I am updating to say yes, it does look like there’s some sort of genuinely concerning autocratization process going on globally.