Over the eight years that I have been working as a columnist here at Folha, I have criticized analyzes of crises and threats to democracy as well as indices of the quality of democracy produced by. It is comforting to know that these institutions have recognized the shortcomings highlighted by many analysts. It was in part a product of Trump’s rise in 2016. His re-election in 2024 has a similar effect, symbolically magnifying the narrative of a global crisis of democracy. There have already been biases in the opposite direction: when Argentina left the military regime and Menem, who had been imprisoned by the regime, took power, no decline was detected in the indices during his term; Menem, however, increased the number of Supreme Court judges from 5 to 9, immediately guaranteeing a majority in the house. Conscious or not, analysts “rooted” for the transition to work.
There are at least three mistakes in these debates. The first is the failure to recognize that autocratization is not inexorable and cases of reversal are more frequent than those of regime enthronement. The VDEM has finally produced a mea culpa on this point, which has been the subject of criticism from several analysts. According to the institute, since 1900, More importantly: in the last 30 years, this percentage has risen to 70%. And the main thing: 93% of these reversals led to regimes with the same or better quality than the regimes in force before autocratization. If there is a real trend, it is towards democratization.
The second recognition by VDEM is that the worsening of the indices reflects the fact that in the last three decades democracy has spread to “difficult places”, where the probability of reversal would be much greater. These are very poor countries and/or where there has never been a representative regime. By construction, therefore, there have been more countries worsening than improving indices. Hence the bell curve in the indices of difficult places.
According to VDEM, the expression “autocratization” denotes decreases in the quality index of democracy regardless of its level. So when the score of countries like Norway or Denmark —or and — declines, it is concluded that they are “autocratizing”. The result is an inflation of cases of autocratization. The term is also inappropriate because it suggests government by a single individual. There is also the symmetric problem: that the increase in the score in non-democracies, when they go from personalist tyrannies to modern and bureaucratized autocracies (eg China) would be democratization, even if this change leads to decreasing probabilities of changing regimes.
A third misconception concerns a possible subjective bias in coding and comparability. In the case of VDEM, despite the technical excellence of its researchers and coders in different countries, they produce nonsense. Which, I recognize, are inevitable given the magnitude of the task involved. In its 2023 report, an entirely implausible conclusion is reached: that they had ceased to be liberal democracies. In your 2024 report, I record no anomalies like this.
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