One-third of the world's population lives in a declining democracy. That includes the United States.
By Anna Lührmann and Matthew Wilson at the Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/03/one-third-of-the-worlds-population-lives-in-a-declining-democracy-that-includes-americans/?noredirect=on&utm_source=reddit.com&utm_term=.8340451ad4e2
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Democracy is declining worldwide
At the end of 2017, most people in the world lived in democracies. But since then, one-third of the world’s population — or 2.5 billion people — have lived through “autocratization,” in which a leader or group of leaders began to limit those democratic attributes and to rule more unilaterally. The current autocratization trend is visible across the world — and affects Europe and the whole American continent. Only sub-Saharan Africa shows some democratic improvements on average.
And for the first time since 1979, the same number of countries (24 in total) are backsliding on democracy as are advancing. In the United States, weakening constraints on the executive branch have resulted in a significant decline of liberal democracy.
What’s more, only 15 percent of the world’s population lives in countries where everyone, regardless of gender or socioeconomic status, has roughly equal access to political power. Women enjoy at least somewhat — but not fully — equal access to political power in most Western countries, including the United States, as well as other countries such as Costa Rica, Rwanda, Ghana and Benin.
People with average levels of income have almost as much influence on politics as rich people in many Western countries — but not in the United States. On this indicator, the United States scores lowest among all Western countries, ranking 75th globally. One in four people, or almost 2 billion people, live in countries where the more economically well-off have gained more political power in the past 10 years.
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