Brazil among world’s top 10 democratic backsliding countries

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 the world’s population.

As the ranking below shows, this 0.28 decrease puts Brazil at higher levels of autocratization than countries such as Serbia and Benin. Interestingly, Brazil is the only country in the list that has retained its status as an electoral democracy across the 10-year period.

All others have had their regime types downgraded, either from liberal democracy to electoral democracy, electoral...