It's a massive election year around the world too -- and democracy may be losing

[marmar]

It's a massive election year around the world too — and democracy may be losing
Nearly half the world is holding elections this year — but a new report suggests democracy is in big trouble

By PAUL ROSENBERG
PUBLISHED APRIL 13, 2024 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) Nearly half the world’s population live in countries that will hold national elections this year, the largest such proportion in more than a century. But the big picture is complicated: “Over half of the 60 countries holding national elections this year are experiencing a democratic decline, risking the integrity of the electoral process…. The worsening election quality is concerning, given the pivotal role elections play,” warns the V-Dem Institute in a press release announcing its 2024 report, titled “Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot.”

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The extraordinary wave of 2024 elections, which encompasses seven of the world’s 10 largest countries — Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia and the U.S. — along with other prominent nations such as Iran, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea and the U.K., comes as the erosion of democracy, or “autocratization,” in V-Dem’s language, continues in many different places.

Strikingly, the report includes two contrasting perspectives: a commentary from four investigators in the larger V-Dem Project argues that the current erosion of democracy “is fairly modest,” and calls for “a more measured tone,” while a special boxed section points in the opposite direction, highlighting a growing threat that V-Dem isn’t fully capable of measuring: the authoritarian-dominated BRICS bloc of nations, which allies the autocratic regimes of Russia, Iran and China with large Global South democracies such as Brazil and South Africa.

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The picture was very different after the end of the Cold War. There was a broad trend of democratization in the 1990s, largely resulting from relaxed great-power backing for autocratic allies, both in the former Soviet bloc and in regions where the U.S. had “backed or installed dictators, encouraged violent repression of left-wing elements, and sponsored anti-democratic armed groups,” as Fisher wrote. After 9/11, however, the U.S. revived it’s longtime support for autocratic allies, particularly in the Islamic world. ..............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/04/13/its-a-massive-year-around-the-world-too--and-democracy-may-be-losing/