Our key takeaway: If a country is operating in a democracy, it is easer to operate in a rights-respecting way: workers are more used to speaking up freely without fear of retaliation, there are civil society organisations operating and shining the light on issues, and governments play their part in ensuring a rights-respecting enabling environment. The less democratic the country, the harder it is for companies to respect human rights in practice. So the recently released V-Dem report matters for companies: we are back to 1985 levels of democracy. 71% of the world’s population – that is 5.7 billion people – live in autocracies. (Autocracies are regimes that do not hold free and fair elections, and do not provide sufficient levels of fundamental democratic components such as freedom of expression and freedom of association.) We have the most people (44% - 3.5 billion people) living in electoral autocracies, which are autocracies where elections are held, but without the presence of other fundamental democratic components. Only 29% of the world’s population – 2.3 billion people – live in liberal and electoral democracies. This year will be key to democracies ahead since 60 countries are holding national elections, which can in turn push countries more toward one side of the spectrum, or another. The glimmer of hope is that the V-Dem Institute highlights a possible shift happening away from electoral autocracies toward electoral democracies. Even if there are more people (population-wise) living in electoral autocracies, there are more countries (counting each country equally) that are in a state of electoral democracy. In fact, electoral democracies outnumber electoral autocracies and are the most common regime type for the third year in a row. If we compare autocracy numbers and democracy numbers on a country rather than population basis, we have 91 democracies and 88 autocracies. Note to companies: take a look to see whether the countries you are sourcing from are autocratizing, and take the time to think about what you - alongside others - can do to reverse the trend at this critical moment in time for democracy.
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute published its Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot (March 2024). V-Dem publishes the largest global dataset on democracy every year - relying on over 31 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2023. We use a different format this week of 2024 democracy report to highlight the key points from this report: