2026-03-08 · percent of world population
Asia’s democratic population share is rising but uneven
East Asia vs South Asia differ sharply.
Asia is home to most of the world's population, yet in 2026 only 22% of Asians lived in democracies while 78% did not — so the region's trajectory will largely decide whether the world becomes more democratic. Two centuries of gains are real, but recent setbacks make the rise uneven, and East and South Asia now diverge sharply.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of world population (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
Worldwide, about 1.6 billion people lived in electoral democracies by 2025, with another 600 million in liberal democracies such as Japan, Germany, and Chile, according to V-Dem's Regimes of the World data. Yet because population grew faster than democracy spread, the number of people without democratic rights is higher than ever.
India is the pivotal case: V-Dem's Regimes of the World measure reclassified its 1.4 billion people as living in an electoral autocracy in 2017, though other leading sources still consider India a democracy — just a less democratic one. Meanwhile, many of the world's people without democratic rights live in China alone.
The East–South contrast runs through the data: East Asia spans Japan, one of the world's liberal democracies, and China and North Korea, among the least democratic countries in V-Dem's data. South Asia's total is dominated by India, whose 1.4 billion people weigh heavily in the regional balance.
Population living in democratic vs non-democratic regimes (V-Dem).
Share and export
Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-03-08-pol-live-asia-dem