U.S. Allies Drive Much of World’s Democratic Decline, Data Shows (original) (raw)
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The Interpreter
Washington-aligned countries backslid at nearly double the rate of non-allies, data shows, complicating long-held assumptions about American influence.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey at the United Nations General Assembly in 2019. Turkey under Mr. Erdogan has seen a shift toward illiberal democracy.Credit...Dave Sanders for The New York Times
Nov. 16, 2021
The United States and its allies accounted for a significantly outsize share of global democratic backsliding in the last decade, according to a new analysis.
American allies remain, on average, more democratic than the rest of the world. But nearly all have suffered a degree of democratic erosion since 2010, meaning that core elements like election fairness or judicial independence have weakened, and at rates far outpacing average declines among other countries.
With few exceptions, U.S.-aligned countries saw almost no democratic growth in that period, even as many beyond Washington’s orbit did.
The findings are reflected in data recorded by V-Dem, a Sweden-based nonprofit that tracks countries’ level of democracy across a host of indicators, and analyzed by The New York Times.
The revelations cast democracy’s travails, a defining trend of the current era, in a sharp light. They suggest that much of the world’s backsliding is not imposed on democracies by foreign powers, but rather is a rot rising within the world’s most powerful network of mostly democratic alliances.
In many cases, democracies like France or Slovenia saw institutions degrade, if only slightly, amid politics of backlash and distrust. In others, dictatorships like Bahrain curtailed already-modest freedoms. But, often, the trend was driven by a shift toward illiberal democracy.
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