The world in 2024 had more autocracies – meaning governments with at the very least “insufficient” levels of democratic freedoms, such as freedom of expression and association and free and fair elections – than democracies for the first time in more than two decades, according to a recent report from the Sweden-based V-Dem Institute. In total, 45 countries were “autocratizing” last year – an increase from 42 that were moving away from more democracy in 2023. That amounts to more than 3 billion people, or 40% of the world’s population.
Data used in V-Dem’s analysis – which relies upon thousands of experts and more than 600 indicators assessing concepts such as government censorship, media bias and autonomy for opposition parties – only covers events until the end of 2024. But its researchers still included a whole section dedicated to the actions of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has tested the limits of executive branch authority over the course of his first two months back in office.
In fact, if trends described by the authors continue throughout 2025, the United States’ government regime would “definitely” be reclassified in next year’s annual “Democracy Report,” says Staffan Lindberg, an author and editor of the report, founding director of the V-Dem Institute and a professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
“Normally, these things – over the past 25 years – play out over up to 10 years before democracy is sort of done away with,” Lindberg says. “The Trump administration was just unleashing all of it at the same time, more or less.”
Lindberg spoke with U.S. about the institute’s latest findings and his concerns about Trump 2.0’s actions. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I spoke with some experts last year who told me that the world was in the midst of a ‘democratic recession.’ Is that still the case after 2024?
“It’s even more the case. I think ‘democratic recession’ may even be misleading. We talk about a wave of ‘autocratization’ that is more, I think, telling of what is happening in the world.
“That means you have democracies less democratic, yes, but a vast majority of them, over the past 25 years, descend into what we label as ‘electoral autocracy.’ It’s having some trappings of democracy: You may hold multiparty elections, you may have freedom of expression on the books, you may have freedom for parties on paper. But these rights and freedoms are undermined to the extent that we can’t talk about democracy anymore. Multiparty elections – (Russian President Vladimir) Putin is still holding them in Russia, right? That doesn’t make you a democracy.
“At the end of 2024, this is worse than the 1930s for the world. It’s never been this great a share of countries in the world in autocratization at the same time, and the number of these electoral autocracies – but also these closed, really bad dictatorships – are going up, and the number of liberal democracies are just going down. So, it’s bad.”
Are there any examples of autocratization in 2024 that concern you the most?
“Georgia, for example, where the incoming government really screwed up the elections and it was very contentious with lots of protests, and the government is taking the country towards being aligned with Putin’s Russia instead of European democracies, where a large portion of the population wants it to go.
“Armenia is also another country that had bad developments. But in Europe, the situation in Hungary continues to get worse and it’s no longer a democracy. Greece has a number of far-right extremist parties.
“In Latin America, you have a continuation of the autocratization going on in Mexico, but also in Argentina under (President Javier) Milei, with attacks and undermining of freedom of expression, media, civil society, organizations, and threats and intimidation of the courts.”
This report doesn’t cover 2025 but your team does mention the U.S. and President Trump, and has a whole section dedicated to his administration’s early moves. Why did you all decide to include that and what concerns you about what you’re seeing in the U.S. under Donald Trump?
“We had our eyes on the U.S. I’m on the record in American media … back in 2020 saying that American democracy may not survive another term with Trump. I repeated that in the fall. We saw that he ran a very authoritarian campaign. That’s meaning a lot of the rhetoric used by Trump and the MAGA movement, that the Republican Party has turned into, is worse than the rhetoric that we have recorded for other leaders and parties around the world over the past 25 years – that when they come into power, they do away with democracy. All the red lights were blinking in terms of the early warnings.
“As we were starting to write the democracy report, the Trump administration went ahead at some record speed … undermining all kinds of institutions that could exercise accountability, from inspectors general to encroaching on the powers of Congress, questioning the courts, threatening media … and attacking universities.
“That’s extremely worrying. It seems like a lot of this is done in complete disregard of rule of law, existing legislation and even the Constitution. I mean, take one of the first actions of him to do away with birthright citizenship. It’s saying, ‘I don’t care what the Constitution says.’
“So from my perspective as a professor studying autocratization for so long across the world, it’s happening suddenly at rapid speed in this country.”
If these trends that you describe continue, could you see the U.S. getting a different classification in your report next year?
“Definitely yes. At the pace at which it is happening, if this continues, I would say that before the end of the summer, you no longer qualify as a democracy in the United States. Doesn’t mean you become North Korea – it’s a long way to go there – but it would mean that the rule of law, the constraints of the executive, critically, that they would be gone to such an extent that we can no longer talk about even a constitutional republic.
“That was the whole point of a constitutional republic from the Founding Fathers and onwards, to constrain the use of executive power, especially constrained against your opponents, whether they are in the opposition political party or they’re at the universities, or they are in the media, or they are in the civil society, or even if they have a difference of mind.
“The whole idea of the constitutional republic is to allow for that and not have a person in power that can silence all of those.”
What’s one hopeful example of democratization that you saw in 2024?
“I think both Brazil and Poland are two cases that are really encouraging at the moment. We could talk about the star democratizer of the last 15, 20 years: Seychelles, a little island there in the Indian Ocean.
“But for the world, Poland and Brazil are huge turnarounds. They were in episodes of autocratization. In Brazil’s case, under (former President Jair) Bolsonaro for four years. In the case of Poland, (under the Law and Justice party-led government) for more than double that time. They both managed to unite the pro-democratic forces in the political sphere.”