What brings democracy down?
It was only 16 years ago that Francis Fukuyama wrote The End of History and the Last Man , a best selling book that celebrated the "victory" of democracy. Things look different in this part of the 21st century. What accounts for the changes? After decades of triumph, democracy is losing ground The world has grown far more democratic since the second world war. In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies; by 2000 only eight states had never held a serious election. But since the financial crisis of 2007-08, democracy has regressed. Most watchdogs concur. The latest survey by Freedom House, an American think-tank, is called “Democracy in Crisis”. In 2017, for the 12th consecutive year, countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains… According to the Democracy Index from The Economist Intelligence Unit, a sister company of The Economist, 89 countries regressed in 2017; only 27 improved… What these indices measure is not simply democracy (ie