The V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) Institute, Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden recently released the “Democracy Report 2023,“ with Hong Kong’s Liberal Democracy Index ranking dropping from 123rd last year in the world to 139, the 41st when counted from the bottom, a rating within the 20 to 30 percent of countries and regions considered the most undemocratic. China’s ranking remains unchanged, at 172nd in the world, which is the eighth from the bottom. The bottom five countries are North Korea, Eritrea, Afghanistan, Chad, and Syria.
The theme of this year’s report is “Defiance in the Face of Autocratization.” It is the seventh report published by the research group. It analyzed data from 202 countries and regions around the world (180 ranked), involving 4,000 scholars. Overall, the level of democracy around the world has declined over the past 35 years, on average falling back to the level it was in 1986. By 2022, 72 percent of the world’s population, a total of 5.7 billion people, lived in authoritarian countries. The Asia-Pacific region has regressed to the level of 1978, while Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbeans have even regressed to that at the end of the Cold War.
