In its annual survey, the monitoring group Freedom House, which uses a range of data to assess social, political and economic freedoms, found that global freedom plummeted for the fifth year in a row in 2010, the longest continuous decline in nearly 40 years. In fact, there are now fewer elected democracies than there were in 1995.
A mountain of other evidence supported Freedom House's findings. One of the other most comprehensive studies of global democracy, compiled by Germany's Bertelsmann Foundation, uses data examining the ability of democracies to function, manage government and uphold freedoms to produce what it calls the Transformation Index.
The most recent index found "the overall quality of democracy has eroded [throughout the developing world] ... the key components of a functioning democracy, such as political participation and civil liberties, have suffered qualitative erosion ... these developments threaten to hollow out the quality and substance of governance". The index concluded that the number of "highly defective democracies" - democracies with institutions, elections and political culture so flawed that they no longer qualified as real democracies - had roughly doubled between 2006 and 2010.
