This article, by Celestine Bohlen and published in The New York Times, is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum which concluded last week in the Greek capital. Here is an excerpt:

More than a decade ago, a group of political scientists tried to come up with a better way to measure and rank the world’s democracies.

“We were frustrated with existing measures of democracy, with their flaws and inadequacies, with existing indices,” said Staffan I. Lindberg, director of the V-Dem Institute in Stockholm. “So we came up with better measures. But after we did, the world turned around and headed toward autocratization.”

When Mr. Lindberg and his colleagues were first testing their methodology in 2009 and 2010, democracy worldwide was already starting to falter.

By 2021, the number of liberal democracies was at a 10-year-low of 34, representing just 13 percent of the world’s population, according to V-Dem’s 2022 report. The level of democracy enjoyed by the average global citizen was down to 1989 levels, before new democracies sprang up after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the report said.

Read the full article here.