A new study has found that 49.3 percent of the world’s population lives in some form of democracy while only 4.5 percent of people live in full democracies. The research was conducted across 165 countries by The Economist Intelligence Unit who found that 89 countries experienced a fall in their democracy score compared to 2016 with only 27 improving and the rest stagnating. The countries were rated on a 0 to 10 scale based on criteria encompassing civil liberties, the electoral process and pluralism, government functionality, political participation and political culture.
In 2017, Norway was ranked the world’s best democracy, recording the highest score across the above criteria, 9.87. Two other Northern European countries, Iceland and Sweden, came second with scores of 9.58 and 9.39 respectively. In last year’s study, the United States was downgraded from a “full democracy” to a “flawed democracy” and in the 2017 edition, it only came 21st overall with a score of 7.98. Unsurprisingly, North Korea and its authoritarian regime comes rock bottom of the ranking with a score of 1.08. Chad and Syria complete the bottom-three countries with both scoring 1.5 or less. Saudi Arabia is also among the ten worst countries for democracy, even though the U.S. has sold it billions of dollars worth of weaponry in recent years. The kingdom comes joint 159th with Uzbekistan, scoring 1.93 out of 10.
*Click below to enlarge (charted by Statista)
