Global democracy is in decline — including in SA, though Africa bucks the trend
Paris — A third of the world’s population resides in countries where democracy is in retreat, including India, Turkey, Brazil, Poland, Russia and the US, researchers reported Thursday. "While most people in the world still live in democracies in 2017, democracy has declined in 24 countries home to 2.6-billion people," they reported in the journal Democratization. The drift towards autocratic rule, where checks against executive power are weakened, has occurred mainly in democratic regions, notably Europe and the US. "Media autonomy, freedom of expression, and the rule of law have undergone the greatest declines," said lead author Anna Luhrmann, a political scientist at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. "This worrisome trend makes elections less meaningful across the world." People in countries backsliding on liberal democracy by far outnumber those living in nations making progress, she noted. The only region bucking the global trend is Africa, which has shown incremental but ...
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