Democratic Institutions (Würzburg Study): We’re Number 37

Since 2016, researchers under the direction of Professor Hans-Joachim Lauth at the University of Würzburg in Germany have developed the Democracy Matrix project. That research measures the quality of democracy in over 175 countries, and its most recent analysis was from 2019.

The Democracy Matrix considers fifteen fields, with countries grouped in five categories, according to their democratic characteristics: “Working Democracy” (such as all of the Europe and North America; 37 countries in all), “Deficient Democracy” (most of South America; 46 countries), “Hybrid Regimes” (such as Mexico, India, and Nigeria; 41 countries), “Moderate Autocracies” (Russia, Egypt, and Cuba; 34 countries), and “Hard Autocracies” (China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran; 21 countries). They find that, when measuring population rather than simply the number of states, that almost half of the states worldwide have democratic regimes, but only a little more than one fourth of the world’s population lives in democracies.”

Based on these fifteen measurements, the United States remains a working democracy, but is outpaced by 36 other countries. The year before, the Democracy Matrix rankings had the United States at 38th place in the world and labelled as a “Deficient Democracy.” All this is before the 2020 presidential election, the Big Lie, the “Stop the Steal” efforts, the blatant attempts of Donald Trump and his allies to discredit the election results, and the unprecedented storming of the Capitol attempting to deny Biden his rightful victory.

Then came the 2024 victory of Donald Trump. Critics feared the worst: without any guardrails, with compliant majorities in both the House and the Senate, and with an agenda suffused with revenge and retribution, how could democracy survive? Would Trump follow through on his most blatant campaign promises: jailing opponents, purging the federal bureaucracy of critics, pardoning convicted January 6th instigators, ridding the military of so-called “woke” leaders, bypassing the legislative branch, flaunting the courts, and replacing democratic decision making with autocratic fiat and his billionaire friends. Trump supporters, on the other hand, dismiss the most egregious insults and claims, as mere campaign hyperbole, and welcoming what they consider much-needed changes in how the federal government operates. The next time international rankings are published, will the United States still be classified as a “flawed democracy,” or will it be labelled more as an authoritarian state.

Sources: Democracy Matrix, University of Würzburg, https://www.democracymatrix.com/fileadmin/Mediapool/PDFs/Report/DeMaX_Report_2019_Growing_Hybridity.pdf.