Most non-democracies are electoral autocracies. Today, the world is about evenly split between autocracies and democracies, according to this data. By the end of the century, they had become common political systems around the globe and could be found across all world regions. 3Įlectoral and liberal democracy then spread to many countries in the 20th century. 2 And even fewer had the additional individual and minority rights and the constrained governments to consider them liberal democracies. Only a few countries held elections that were sufficiently meaningful to call them electoral democracies. Many countries became electoral autocracies, in which political leaders were chosen through elections, but citizens lacked additional freedoms to make those elections free and fair. 1Įlections spread throughout the 19th century, but they were often marred by limitations. RoW classifies almost all of them as closed autocracies, in which citizens do not have the right to choose their political leaders through elections. In the late 18th century, no country could be meaningfully characterized as a democracy. The chart shows - based on data from Regimes of the World (RoW) - that a much larger share of countries are now democracies. Many more countries have become democracies over the last two hundred years.
