Bangladesh has improved one notch to 75th in the latest Democracy Index published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) on Thursday.
The overall score of Bangladesh is 5.99, on a scale of 0-10. Bangladesh has been classified as a ‘hybrid regime’. However, Bangladesh fared well in the South Asia region as only India (46) and Sri Lanka (67) are better in the global ranking.
The Democracy Index, which began in 2006, provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide in 165 independent states and two territories. This covers almost the entire population of the world.
The China challenge is the title of this year’s Democracy Index report and the focus of the second section is about how much of a challenge China poses to democracy.
EIU prepares the Democracy Index based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism, 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 classified as one of four types of regimes: “full democracy”, “flawed democracy”, “hybrid regime” or “authoritarian regime”.
Norway remains in first place in the index, while Afghanistan falls 28 places to the bottom of the rankings, displacing North Korea.
The report shows the deterioration in the global score in 2021 was driven by a decline in the average regional score everywhere in the world except for Eastern Europe, whose score stagnated at a low level.
There were especially large falls in Latin America (-0.26), North America (-0.22), and Asia and Australasia (-0.16).
Western Europe recorded a modest fall in its average regional score, of 0.07, continuing the region’s steady decline over the course of the past decade. The regional average score for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) fell marginally, by 0.03, and that for Sub-Saharan Africa by 0.04, but both suffered big declines in 2020 and both deteriorated in 2021 from a low base.
Eastern Europe was the only region not to regress compared with 2020, keeping the same regional average score of 5.36, but the stability of the score masks divergent experiences across the region, the EIU finds.
Asia:
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 in Asia 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,” says the report. 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.
Top and bottom:
At the bottom of the 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, and 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”.
China challenge:
The China challenge is the title of this year’s Democracy Index report and the focus of the second section has been given on China. How much of a challenge does China pose to democracy, the model of governance to which most people in the world have aspired for the past century? The potency of this political challenge is inextricably linked to China’s incredible economic success over the past three decades.
The report says the Chinese economy has grown at almost triple the pace of the US economy in nominal GDP terms since 1990, turning China from a poor developing country into an economic superpower with the second largest GDP in the world. China’s rulers have become more confident about promulgating the alleged superiority of their system over that of the West, and the Covid-19 pandemic has accentuated this trend.
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