The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, an independent research institute funded by a number of government organizations, the World Bank and several research institutions, recently issued the Democracy Report 2023 which attempts to gauge democracy levels across countries. In details, the report is based on version 13 of the V-Dem dataset, which relies on assessments, by some 4,000 experts from over 180 countries to generate some 31 million data points. Accordingly, the report ranks countries according to their scores on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), which is based on the dataset, in addition to classifying countries within four regime types, namely Liberal Democracy (LD), Electoral Democracy (ED), Electoral Autocracy (EA) and Closed Autocracy (CA). The report noted that democracy levels have continued their downturn, reaching levels recorded during the year 1986, implying that the democracy gains that have been recorded during the last 35 years have been eroded. In figures, the report uncovered that while the number of countries enjoying Liberal Democracies peaked at 44 during the year 2009, the number is now down to 32, its lowest level since the year 1995, representing just 13% of the world population. In tandem, the number of countries classified under Closed Autocracies has increased from 22 in 2012 to 33 in 2022, i.e. 28% of the world population, while Electoral Autocracy remains the most popular regime, despite only harboring 16% of the world’s population. The report also unveiled that 35 countries, a record number, experienced sizeable deteriorations in freedoms of expression during the year 2022, in comparison with just 7 countries a decade ago.

As far as results are concerned, Nordic countries occupied the top three positions, with Denmark topping the list with a score of 0.89 falling under the LD regime, followed by Sweden (0.87, “LD”) and Norway (0.86, “LD-”). As far as Arab countries are concerned, Kuwait came in first (ranking 100^th globally) with a score of 0.30 in the LDI and a regime type classified as “CA+”, followed by Lebanon (score of 0.26, 107^th international rank, regime type “EA”) and Morocco (score of 0.25, 109^th international rank, regime type “CA”). This means that Lebanon is considered an Electoral Autocracy by the Democracy Report 2023. The V-Dem report also classified Lebanon among the bottom 40%-50% of scores in the LDI.