While the world population grew, reaching the mark of 8 billion inhabitants that the UN projects for next Tuesday (15), the proportion of those living under political regimes considered not fully democratic also rose.
Today, 7 out of 10 people (5.7 billion) are in countries with these forms of government. In 2011, when the figure reached 7 billion — the revised UN projection indicates that, in fact, the figure was reached in 2010 — half the population lived under autocracies and half under democracies.
In this 2022, for about 3.6 billion inhabitants it is possible to vote in multiparty elections and choose a leader, but other rights, such as freedom of expression, and the independence of institutions such as the Legislative and Judiciary have been suppressed – these are the so-called electoral autocracies. . For another 2.1 billion who live in dictatorships, elections are no longer a reality or have become something of a facade, with no real political competition and persecution of opponents of the regime in force.
The calculation takes into account the analysis of the Swedish institute V-Dem, one of the most renowned globally in the task of classifying political regimes. The proportion in relation to the 8 billion inhabitants was made by the Sheetbased on the latest UN projections, published in July.
The more authoritarian world, part of what research institutes have called third wave authoritarianism, results from new and recycled forms of erosion of democratic systems, but in a way it is also related to overpopulation.
In absolute numbers, countries with democratic regimes and those with authoritarian regimes are almost equivalent: 89 to 90. It happens that the current autocracies are, to a large extent, nations with large numbers of inhabitants. The two most populous in the world—China and India, each with 1.4 billion people—, for example, are, respectively, a one-party dictatorship and an electoral autocracy by that classification.
According to Staffan Lindberg, director of V-Dem and professor at the University of Gothenburg, a significant number of residents do not necessarily create scenarios conducive to authoritarian systems, but large countries, usually with vast geopolitical influence, tend to drag smaller nations with them.
“Some do this intentionally. Vladimir Putin turned Russia into an autocracy when he took power and started to undermine democratic reforms in the former Soviet republics. And now we see a great example of that in Ukraine,” he tells Sheet🇧🇷 “There is also China’s influence in Southeast Asia and Africa.”
This trend was one of the factors that aroused concern in the international community regarding the authoritarian movements of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) in Brazil. In the latest V-Dem report, the country appears as a still democratic territory, but in a process of so-called autocratization, “guided by anti-pluralist parties that raise polarization to toxic levels”.
Largest country in Latin America in terms of territory and population, Brazil has important regional influence and weight in blocks such as the Brics and the CPLP, a community that brings together Portuguese-speaking countries.
The V-Dem database considers rankings for the year 2021. Since then, domestic scenarios have changed, and one country or another must jump from category to category –Burkina Faso was considered a democracy, but it saw two military coups this year .
Still, some phenomena remain constant. Africa, for example, is the region with the largest share of the population (over 85%) living under electoral autocracies and dictatorships. The figure is related to what Nic Cheeseman, a professor at the University of Birmingham in England and former director of the Center for African Studies at the University of Oxford, calls classical factors.
Namely: weak institutions and little independent from the Executive and politicization of the security forces. “The biggest challenge is to consolidate the resumption of civilian governments. Once the military takes over, they want to take economic advantages and perpetuate themselves there.”
Cheeseman says the new rush to Africa, driven in part by the search for natural gas suppliers amid the Ukraine War, could help boost democracy — or raffle it off. “Economic interest could be used to push for democracies, but this race tends to be more of a competition.”
Military coups follow a reality, but the authoritarian turn has changed its profile. In many of the non-democratic regimes there is what researcher Marina Slhessarenko Barreto, from Laut (Center for the Analysis of Freedom and Authoritarianism), describes as a corrosion of democracies from within, with legal tools such as changing laws.
“And autocratization strategies can be exported, acting as a kind of success story,” he says. “Russia has been a major exporter of autocratization techniques since the beginning of this century, for example with the laws that restricted the funding of NGOs.”
Staffan Lindberg says that inequality and the economic crisis are two of the factors that seem to favor the break with democracy. “The realization that you will have a worse future than your parents, of deprivation, creates anxiety, fear for the future. And that kind of fear, which we know from the 1930s, is dangerous. It helps undemocratic political forces to emerge and speak out: ‘I’ll fix it’.”
The world has already regressed to democratic levels similar to those of 1989, leading to the loss of advances of the last three decades. And, at least for the near future: the prognosis is not good: today, at least 33 countries are undergoing processes of authoritarian change, the highest volume in 50 years.
The designations of political regimes
- Dictatorships There are no Executive and Legislative elections or they take place without effective competition, as in one-party regimes;
- electoral autocracies They have multi-party elections, but fall short of other democratic pillars due to irregularities in institutional guarantees, such as freedom of expression;
- electoral democracies They have multi-party elections for the head of the Executive and institutional guarantees — this is the case in Brazil;
- liberal democracies In addition to multi-party elections and institutional guarantees, they are characterized by the effective supervision of the Executive by the Legislative and Judiciary and by having real surveillance and protection of civil liberties and the rule of law.
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