The Economist magazine has published an annual ranking of EIU countries by the level of democracy development.

At the top of the list: Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, Ireland and Switzerland. Ukraine is ranked 87th in it, and Russia is on the 146th.

At the same time, The Economist reminds that in 2022 the protracted decline of world democracy has stopped. The annual study assesses the state of democracy in 167 countries based on five indicators: the electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties. Each indicator is evaluated on a scale of up to ten points.

According to the latest edition, almost half (45.3%) of the world's population lives in some kind of democracy, while more than a third (36.9%) live under authoritarian rule (see map). The global indicator of 5.29 out of ten, which is only 0.01 more than in the previous year, is a stagnation of the process, and not a reversal from the fading of democracy that began in 2016, which was expected.

One of the reasons why the trend was expected to change was the lifting of pandemic-related restrictions in 2022. The widespread suppression of individual freedoms, originally designed to protect people from COVID-19, led to a decrease in indicators in 2020 and 2021. But any improvements in 2022 were negated by negative events in other countries. Moreover, China, where almost a fifth of the world's population lives, only in December ended the policy of "zero morbidity", locking up tens of millions of its citizens for many months. The government abandoned the "zero morbidity" policy after widespread protests against it. However, the repressive reaction of the state to these protests contributed to a decrease in the assessment of democracy in China to 1.94 points out of ten, which is the lowest since 2006, the year the rating was compiled.

Developing countries