2026-03-09 · percent of world population
Year
Six in ten live under non-democratic rule
Four V-Dem regime buckets — population-weighted, not a simple two-color split.
Six in ten people live under non-democratic rule in 2026. This grid weights V-Dem's four regime buckets by population: closed autocracies and electoral autocracies each cover 30% of the world's people, electoral democracies 25%, and liberal democracies just 15%. Count countries instead and the world looks roughly even — count people and the autocratic majority stands out.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of world population (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
V-Dem's Regimes of the World classification sorts political systems into four buckets. Closed autocracies deny citizens multi-party elections; electoral autocracies hold elections but lack the freedoms that make them free and fair; electoral democracies meet that bar; and liberal democracies add individual and minority rights plus constrained executives.
The population weighting matters. By country count the world is roughly evenly split between autocracies and democracies, but China's vast population lives under closed autocracy, and India — home to 1.4 billion people — has been classified as an electoral autocracy in this dataset since 2017, even though other measures still count it as a democracy.
The world has recently become less democratic, and because population has grown faster than democracy has spread, the number of people without democratic rights is higher than ever. Many democracies are also young: twenty electoral democracies are younger than 18.
Population living in democratic vs non-democratic regimes (V-Dem).
Share and export
Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-03-09-pol-live-autocracy-60