Decline in democracy worldwide may be reaching ‘turning point’: researchers

A new report on global freedom finds that democracy could be approaching a “turning point” for improvement.

The nonpartisan nonprofit Freedom House found that global freedom declined in 2022 for the 17th consecutive year, but noted that “the gap between the numbers of countries that improved and declined was the narrowest it has ever been since the negative pattern began.”

Thirty-five countries saw a worsening of their political rights and civil liberties last year, according to the report, but 34 countries experienced an improvement.

“This latest edition documents a continuation of troubling trends, but it also gives some reason to hope that the freedom recession of the past 17 years may be turning a corner. There is nothing inevitable about authoritarian expansion. While authoritarian regimes remain extremely dangerous, they are not unbeatable,” said Freedom House President Michael Abramowitz.

The observed changes for the 34 countries that saw freedom improvements included competitive elections and the rollback of COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in some places, the report notes.

Freedom deterioration was driven by “a trend of attacks on freedom of expression” that has been prominent throughout the last 17 years of democratic downturn, and the researchers found that media freedom “came under pressure” in 157 countries and territories last year.

On the researchers’ four-point freedom scale, 33 countries and territories received a zero for media freedom and 15 received a zero for individuals’ right to personal expression, tallies that have more than doubled in the last two decades.

Ukraine saw the second-worst decline in political rights and civil liberties, according to the research, after Russia invaded early last year — and Russia itself also made the top 10 list of countries with the biggest declines.

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