2026-03-24 · percent of countries
Flawed democracies are the largest single EIU bucket
Elections occur — with meaningful defects.
Most countries are neither full democracies nor outright autocracies — they sit in between. In the 2026 EIU scores, flawed democracies are the largest single bucket at 38% of countries: elections happen, but with meaningful defects. Asia & Pacific (32.2%), Africa (17.4%), and the Americas (12.4%) round out the grid.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of countries (0.1% of country count) · 1,000 cells
Context
Our World in Data's democracy research locates most countries in exactly this middle ground: leaders are elected and citizens can vote, but freedoms of association and expression are limited and elections fall short of free and fair. That pattern, it notes, is common across Africa and Asia.
The long-run trend is unmistakably upward — two centuries ago, no country could be meaningfully called a democracy — but the recent direction has reversed. The world has become less democratic of late and now splits roughly evenly between autocracies and democracies.
Many democracies are less than a generation old — twenty electoral democracies are younger than 18 by the Regimes of the World count OWID uses — so the flaws in this middle bucket land on countries where dictatorship is a living memory.
Economist Intelligence Unit democracy scores via OWID.
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-03-24-pol-democracy-flawed