Brazil has become more autocratic in the last decade. New data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project ranks the country fourth in a list of the world’s top ten countries undergoing a process of autocratization. Brazil’s liberal democracy index dropped 0.28 points, falling from 0.79 in 2010 to 0.51 in 2020.
As The Brazilian Report discussed last month, democratic backsliding is not a phenomenon restricted to Brazil. V-Dem confirms patterns found by The Economist and Freedom House earlier this year and identifies a “third wave of autocratization” worldwide, engulfing 25 countries and 35 percent of...