The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute has released its annual Democracy Report, which found that autocratization – the decline of democratic traits – is surging, though resistance against the trend is growing.
The report determined that autocratization accelerated across the world in 2019, with autocracies now in the majority (92 countries) and 34 percent of people (2.6 billion) living in autocratizing nations. Large declines in democracy were reported in G20 nations including Brazil, India, and the United States.
But pro-democracy mass mobilization reaced an all-time high in 2019: The share of countries with pro-democracy mass protests rose from 27 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2019, including in Algeria, Bolivia, Hong Kong, Malawi, Poland and Sudan. Twenty-two countries also experienced pro-democracy mass protests in the last 10 years that were followed by substantial democratization.
Along with the report, the V-Dem Institute released an updated version of its award-winning dataset covering virtually all countries from 1789 to 2019. Version 10 includes 470+ V-Dem indicators, 82 indices, and 5 high-level indices.
V-Dem is a collaborative project led by four principal investigators, including Kellogg Faculty Fellow Michael Coppedge and former Visiting Fellow John Gerring (University of Texas at Austin). The Kellogg Institute helped launch the project in its early stages, serving as V -Dem 's institutional home in the US, and today is the Regional V-Dem Center in North America.