2026-04-12 · percent of world population
Electoral autocracies hold another big population block
Votes happen — but incumbents keep meaningful advantages.
One in four people — 25% of the world's population — lived in electoral autocracies in 2026: countries where citizens vote in multi-party elections, but limits on association and expression keep those contests from being free and fair. The grid sets that share against the 75% of humanity living under every other regime type, closed autocracies and democracies alike.
1 cell = 0.1 percent of world population (0.1% of world population) · 1,000 cells
Context
The figures use the Regimes of the World classification from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which sorts countries into closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies. Most of today's non-democracies fall into the electoral autocracy category.
Recent setbacks have shifted people into this category: the RoW data has classified India, home to about 1.4 billion people, as an electoral autocracy since 2017, though other leading measures still rate India a democracy. And because world population has grown faster than democracy has spread, the total number of people living without democratic rights is higher than ever.
On the other side, V-Dem counted about 1.6 billion people in electoral democracies and another 600 million in liberal democracies by 2025, in countries such as Brazil, Germany, Japan, and South Africa. The 'other' 75% also includes closed autocracies such as China, where citizens cannot choose their leaders in elections. By country count, the world is now roughly evenly split between democracies and autocracies.
Electoral democracy vs autocracy population shares (V-Dem via OWID).
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Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2026-04-12-pol-autocracy-electoral-pop