The Autocratic Turn: Understanding and Resisting Democratic Decline
After decades of expansion, democracy has been in global retreat, with autocracies now governing the majority of humanity. This founding report documents the scale and mechanisms of democratic backsliding, examines why external interventions so often fail, and surveys the contested but important set of levers — from anti-corruption to information integrity — for defending democratic institutions.
The Autocratic Turn: Understanding and Resisting Democratic Decline
Executive Summary
For the first time in a generation, autocracies outnumber democracies and govern most of the world's people. Democratic backsliding — the incremental erosion of checks and balances, free media, and fair elections, often by elected leaders themselves — has become the dominant global political trend. Because democratic governance underpins rights, conflict avoidance, and the collective capacity to address every other global problem, its decline carries civilizational stakes. But reversing it from outside is genuinely hard, which keeps tractability low.
The Scale of the Problem
According to the V-Dem Institute, 72% of the world's population — about 5.8 billion people — lived under autocratic rule in 2024, up from roughly 49% in 2004, the highest share since the late 1970s. The "third wave" of democratization has given way to a sustained period of autocratization affecting both new and long-established democracies.
The Mechanisms of Backsliding
Modern democratic decline rarely arrives via tanks and coups. It proceeds through:
- Executive aggrandizement: Elected leaders weakening courts, legislatures, and term limits.
- Media capture and information manipulation: Eroding the shared factual basis for democratic deliberation.
- Electoral manipulation: Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and tilted playing fields short of outright fraud.
- Polarization: Affective polarization that makes voters tolerate anti-democratic behavior by their own side.
Why This Is Hard (Low Tractability)
External actors have weak and sometimes counterproductive track records. Democracy promotion can be delegitimized as foreign interference; sanctions and conditionality have mixed effects; and the deepest drivers — polarization, elite incentives, and propaganda — are structural and domestic. There is no reliable lever to reverse backsliding on demand.
The Neglectedness Landscape
A substantial democracy-support ecosystem exists (Freedom House, V-Dem, the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, EU programs), so the area is only moderately neglected. But funding is shrinking in real terms and is dwarfed by the scale of the global trend.
Tractable Directions
- Anti-corruption as a defense of institutional integrity.
- Information integrity — supporting independent media and countering disinformation.
- Pro-democracy reform of electoral and judicial safeguards where windows open.
- Rigorous evaluation of which democracy-support interventions actually work.
Recommendations
- Invest in measurement and evaluation to learn what works.
- Prioritize domestic civil-society and media resilience over top-down promotion.
- Treat anti-corruption and information integrity as high-leverage entry points.
- Maintain realistic expectations given low tractability.
Further Reading
- V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report (annual)
- Freedom House, "Freedom in the World" (annual)
- Levitsky & Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018)
- Bermeo, N., "On Democratic Backsliding," Journal of Democracy (2016)