Youth bulges do not automatically raise participation

Beyond the spotlight band, the grid puts Asia & Pacific at 33.8% of world population, Africa at 18.2%, and the Americas — excluding spotlight countries — at 13%. That distribution fits Our World in Data's V-Dem-based finding that most countries, often in Africa and Asia, sit in the middle: leaders are elected, but association and expression are constrained and elections fall short of free and fair.

Institutions are young almost everywhere: twenty electoral democracies are younger than 18, only a few countries have been democratic for more than 90 years, and the world is now about evenly split between democracies and autocracies. Youthful populations often coexist with youthful regimes, which is one reason age structure alone predicts little about participation.

The stakes are counted in billions: by 2025, about 1.6 billion people lived in electoral democracies and another 600 million in liberal democracies, while the number without democratic rights is higher than ever. Many of those live in China, and India's 1.4 billion people have been classified as an electoral autocracy since 2017 under Regimes of the World — though other sources still call India a democracy, while agreeing it has become less democratic.

Participation index population shares (V-Dem via OWID).