The UK-based company Economist Intelligence Unit, or EIU's Democracy Index ranks nations on five parameters : electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.
Based on its scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: “full democracy”, “flawed democracy”, “hybrid regime” or “authoritarian regime”.
Bangladesh is still a “hybrid regime”, according to the latest report published on Thursday for 2021.
In Asia and Australia Region, it rank 16th with 7.42 points for electoral process and pluralism, 6.07 for the functioning of government, 5.56 for political participation, 5.56 for political culture, and 5.29 for civil liberties.
In South Asia, India (46th) and Sri Lanka (67th) are ahead of Bangladesh. In the 2020 index, Bangladesh gained four places on the previous year’s rankings.
At the bottom of the latest rankings, there was a dramatic change, with Afghanistan and Myanmar displacing North Korea to take the bottom two places. Two war-torn African countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic sit above North Korea to fill the bottom five slots. Syria, Turkmenistan, Chad, Laos and Equatorial Guinea make up the others in the bottom ten.
The Nordics -- Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark -- dominate the top tier of the Democracy Index rankings, and Norway is number one once again, thanks to its very high scores for electoral process and pluralism, political participation, and civil liberties.
Countries in Western Europe account for seven of the top ten places in the global democracy rankings and 12 of the 21 nations classified as “full democracies”.
The sharp decline in the North America average score in 2021 was driven mainly by a deterioration in Canada, whose score fell by 0.37 points to 8.87. Canada’s worsening score raises questions about whether it might begin to suffer from some of the same afflictions as its US neighbour, such as extremely low levels of public trust in political parties and government institutions.
The US score declined further as its new president Joe Biden, struggled to arrest the democratic decline that has occurred over the past few decades. At the end of 2021, Biden hosted the first of two Summits for Democracy, whose aim is to revive democracy globally. Given the tarnishing of America’s democratic credentials in recent years, the initiative elicited cynicism in many parts of the world.
China has confounded the expectations of many Western analysts and governments who believed that it would become more democratic as it became richer. On the contrary, it has become less free.
China is classified as an “authoritarian regime” in the Democracy Index. It has a total score of 2.21, down from 2.97 in 2006, and sits in 148th position (out of 167), close to the bottom of the global rankings.
The global public health crisis has compounded many pre-pandemic trends such as an increasingly technocratic approach to managing society in Western democracies, and a tendency in many nonconsolidated democracies or authoritarian regimes to resort to coercion.
As recorded in the Democracy Index in recent years, democracy has not been in robust health for some time. In 2021, as in 2020, its resilience was further tested by the coronavirus pandemic. The average global score in the 2021 Democracy Index fell from 5.37 in 2020 to 5.28, representing a bigger year-on-year decline than the previous year and setting another dismal record for the worst global score since the index was first produced in 2006.
The year 2020 was a good one for the Asia region despite the pandemic, because it gained three “full democracies” (Japan, South Korea and Taiwan).
However, 2021 brought a reversal of fortunes, not for any of the “full democracies”, but because of two stunning country downgrades at the other end of the rankings. The overall regional average score fell from 5.62 in 2020 to 5.46, with two countries accounting
for much of the decline. Afghanistan’s total score fell from an already very low 2.85 in 2020 to 0.32 in 2021 and the country fell 28 places to the bottom of the rankings, displacing North Korea.
It was joined at the bottom by Myanmar, whose score also declined precipitously from 3.04 in 2020 to 1.02, resulting in a fall of 31 places down the rankings from 135th to 166th place.
“Of course, this does not tell the whole story: only eight of the region’s 28 countries recorded a decline in their total score and some, such as Indonesia, made impressive gains,” the report said.
“Nevertheless, Asia has struggled to sustain the upwards momentum that it had established up to 2016: its average score of 5.46 is only just above the 5.44 recorded in 2006, and it is 0.30 below the highpoint of 5.74 recorded in 2015 and 2016.”
