The world is more democratic than it was half a century ago, but the tide has turned. In 2025, 165 countries elected both their parliaments and their governments, a dramatic rise from the two that did so in the late 18th century, yet that figure has slipped from an all-time high of 176 recorded in 2016. Military coups and civil wars have stripped away elected institutions in Afghanistan, Madagascar, Niger and Sudan, while a broader erosion of competitive politics has reduced the number of full electoral democracies from 130 to 117 over the same period. Around 400 million fewer people now live under democratic rules than a decade ago.
From two nations to 165: the long arc of elections
In the late 1700s, political leaders were chosen by inheritance, force or elite negotiation. Parliaments, where they existed, were filled with aristocrats and bureaucrats. The United Kingdom and the United States stood alone in electing both legislature and executive. The 19th and early 20th centuries brought gradual expansion, but elections only became the global norm after 1945. Three distinct waves, after the first world war, in the late 1950s and 1960s, and at the end of the cold war, pushed the count upward. Each advance was followed by retreat: the second world war and the early 1970s saw sharp declines. The recent drop from 176 to 165 continues that pattern, though the baseline remains vastly higher than at any point before the 1990s.
The data comes from the Lexical Index project, built by political scientists Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring and Henrikas Bartusevičius, which codes the presence of elected parliaments and governments across 199 countries. Researchers at Our World in Data, including Bastian Herre, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Lucas Rodés-Guirao, have now combined that series with suffrage and competition indicators to produce the most comprehensive long-run picture yet assembled.
Suffrage expanded fast, then stalled
Elections mean little if few can vote. Two centuries ago the franchise was restricted to men of property, specific ethnicities or favoured religions. France, Mexico, Switzerland and Venezuela broadened rights in the mid-1800s, but only for men. New Zealand became the first country to grant universal suffrage in 1893. Progress remained glacial until the post-1945 period, when decolonisation and the collapse of fascist regimes saw the number of countries with universal voting rights in practice jump from fewer than two dozen to nearly 150 by 1990. The recent decline in this measure is not caused by new legal restrictions on the franchise; it reflects the loss of elected institutions altogether in the countries that have suffered coups or state collapse.
Legal barriers based on gender, income and ethnicity have largely disappeared worldwide. Remaining restrictions, age, citizenship, criminal conviction, are broadly accepted as legitimate. The critical point is that the right to vote now exists on paper for almost all adult citizens in almost all countries that hold elections. The problem is that elections themselves are vanishing in a growing number of states.
Competition: the missing link
An election with one candidate or a predetermined outcome does not hold power to account. The Lexical Index team tracks electoral competition through a proxy: whether an election has recently produced a change of government, known as electoral turnover. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, turnovers were vanishingly rare. A post-first-world-war spike saw more than 30 countries experience a handover, but the second world war wiped out those gains. Steady but limited progress followed until the 1990s, when turnovers spread rapidly, reaching more than half of all countries. Since then the curve has flattened. In 2025, 111 of 199 countries had seen a recent electoral turnover.
The proxy is imperfect. Japan's Liberal Democratic Party has governed almost continuously for 70 years not through fraud but through sustained popularity and a fragmented opposition; the absence of turnover there does not signal a lack of competition. Conversely, an incumbent can rig the process and still lose, the loss proves the election was clean enough for the opposition to squeak through, not that the contest was fair. The Lexical Index's own expert-coded competition indicator tells a similar story: competition is the most recent and fragile of democracy's building blocks.
When all conditions align: the electoral democracy count
A country qualifies as an electoral democracy in the Lexical Index classification only when it simultaneously possesses an elected government and parliament, universal suffrage, a political opposition and competitive elections. No country met all four criteria until New Zealand in 1893. The club grew slowly; democracies did not become a global majority until the 1990s. The peak came in 2015 with 130 countries. Since then, 13 have dropped out, including Côte d'Ivoire, Nicaragua and Serbia. The 2025 total stands at 117, leaving 82 countries outside the category.
The 1930s remain the starkest historical reversal: 20 democracies at the decade's start, only nine by its end. The current retreat is smaller in scale but geographically diffuse, affecting every region. For Europe, the departure of Serbia from the electoral democracy list is a particular concern, given its candidate status for EU membership and the Union's insistence on democratic standards as a precondition for accession.
People, not just countries: the population divide
Counting states obscures the human scale. In 1900, fewer than one million people, all in New Zealand, lived in an electoral democracy. India's transition in 1950 added more than 300 million at a stroke. The global democratic population more than tripled from 1.2 billion in 1965 to roughly four billion today. Yet the world's population has grown faster than democracy has spread. The absolute number of people without democratic rights is now higher than at any point in history. Recent backsliding in Myanmar, Nigeria and Turkey alone accounts for a substantial share of the 400 million-person decline since 2015.
This demographic reality complicates the narrative of democratic progress. Even as the proportion of humanity living under electoral democracy hovers near 50 per cent, the raw count of disenfranchised people rises. For policymakers in Brussels and national capitals, the implication is clear: defending existing democratic institutions matters as much as promoting new ones, because each reversal affects millions.
Europe's stake in the global trend
Europe was the cradle of the first and second democratic waves, and the European Union has made democratic conditionality central to its enlargement and neighbourhood policies. The European Commission's annual rule of law reports monitor member states for backsliding, while the European Parliament deploys election observation missions worldwide. The loss of electoral democracy status in Serbia, a candidate country, and the continued decline in Turkey, a long-standing applicant, directly challenge the EU's credibility as a guardian of democratic norms. Meanwhile, the Union's own members, Hungary prominent among them, face ongoing scrutiny over media freedom, judicial independence and electoral fairness.
The data also reveals that the post-cold-war wave which brought Central and Eastern European states into the democratic fold has not been consolidated everywhere. The recent dip in the number of electoral democracies coincides with a period in which the EU has struggled to enforce article 7 procedures against members accused of systemic violations. The gap between the Union's rhetorical commitment and its practical leverage is widening.
What the history tells us about the present
Two centuries of data show that democratic expansion has never been linear. It advances in bursts, retreats under pressure, and often stalls for decades. The institutions billions now rely on, secret ballots, independent electoral commissions, term limits, were built through partial victories and outright defeats. The current anxiety about democracy's future is not misplaced; the numbers confirm a genuine, multi-year reversal. But the long view also warns against fatalism. The world of 1900 was almost entirely undemocratic; the world of 2025 is roughly split. That transformation occurred despite two world wars, the Great Depression, the cold war and numerous regional conflicts. Democratic rights are never guaranteed, but they have proven remarkably resilient over the very long run.
People mentioned
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Bastian Herre
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Esteban Ortiz-Ospina
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Lucas Rodés-Guirao
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Svend-Erik Skaaning
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John Gerring
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Henrikas Bartusevičius
Organisations
Our World in Data · Lexical Index project
