[OC] The Economist’s Democracy Index has released scores for 2024, these are maps showing the overall score by country, the scores for the Index’s five categories by country, and the change in overall score since 2023.
Posted by Flagmaker123
[OC] The Economist’s Democracy Index has released scores for 2024, these are maps showing the overall score by country, the scores for the Index’s five categories by country, and the change in overall score since 2023.
Posted by Flagmaker123
14 comments
Source is [The Economist’s Democracy Index report](https://image.b.economist.com/lib/fe8d13727c61047f7c/m/1/609fbc8d-4724-440d-b827-2c7b7300353d.pdf?utm_campaign=MA00001514&utm_medium=email-owned&utm_source=eiu-marketing-cloud&RefID=&utm_term=20250226&utm_id=2064759&sfmc_id=00QWT00000J2uGH2AZ&utm_content=cta-button-1&id_mc=279801853), and the maps were generated through [MapChart](https://www.mapchart.net/).
The [Economist Democracy Index](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index) is a democracy index made by the [Economist Intelligence Unit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economist_Intelligence_Unit). It scores countries on a scale from 0 to 10 with 0 being the most authoritarian and 10 being the most democratic. Scores are assigned through asking experts (and sometimes public opinion surveys in the country) a set of 60 questions in 5 different categories (electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, civil liberties). Each answer is converted to a number between 0 and 1, then all the answers in one category are added together, then it’s multiplied by 10, and then divided by the number of questions in the category. This produces a score for each of the 5 categories and then the average of these 5 categories is used for the overall score.
Criticisms of the Economist Democracy Index include a lack of transparency on who exactly these experts are, as it is unspecified what kind of experts there are, where these experts are from, and whether the experts are employed by the Economist or not. It has also been accused of having a bias in favor of Western interests, ranking Western nations & their allies higher and their opponents lower than they should be.
these maps are as ugly as they are meaningless.
Yikes. The oceans are really authoritative.
Props to New Zealand, Norway and Ireland for being dark blue on every single one of them.
the economist just asks a few dudes what they think about each country. That’s why west good, east bad (except for western-aligned countries of course.
Afghanistan and Burma worse than North Korea?
im guessing this is less about free speach and more about direct and indirect representation
You can tell how bad these are just by looking at how they rank Japan, a country that, while developed, has been a 1-party state almost without interruption since WW2. Its intra-party politics are more important than elections, and the LDP is supported by wildly egregious gerrymandering and pork barrel projects that essentially lock it into power forever. Opponents sometimes win as unstable coalitions that immediately fall apart, but don’t pose any serious challenge to the LDP’s continual dominance. Yet it’s supposedly more democratic than France by a serious margin.
The civil liberties score is somewhat ridiculous with respect to China. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s FAR from “worse than Iraq, same as North Korea and Afghanistan”-tier.
Full offense at the US rating higher in political participation than Australia. Australia has mandatory voting, it’s a twenty minute errand on a Saturday and they put on a sausage sizzle so you can get a snack on the way out. A third of those dipshits in America didn’t even bother to vote.
Romania, an EU country, is not a democracy but a “hybrid regime”.
Rating the US any type of democracy while it’s being run by a dictator who has publicly proclaimed himself as such is, ah, a choice.
Let’s look at the situation in Romania logically: a candidate has been proven to have violated electoral laws; more precisely, not only did he fail to declare the tens of millions of euros he used in his campaign, but he repeatedly declared having used **zero** funds.
With those “zero funds used,” he benefited – through the help of Russia and China – from an army of fake followers on TikTok and other social media platforms, larger than the entire population of Romania. All this while having clear, **100% irrefutable** ties to legionnaires (fascists) who were planning a violent coup.
The elections were annulled, and the candidate was barred from running in the presidential race. Somehow, after all this, “democracy” has suffered?! The process of removing him from the race was democracy **defending itself**.
Therefore, I reserve my right not to take these maps seriously.
How is Japan dark blue but has been ruled by a single party for almost all of its years after WW2?
The LDP has such strong local connections with different interest groups and clienteles that it’s incredibly hard for the other parties to compete
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