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‘Guyana is an electoral autocracy’ – Int’l report
Table showing Guyana’s standing on the V-Dem chart
Kaieteur News – Guyana has been catergorised as an electoral autocracy by Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a research project that takes a comprehensive approach to understanding democratisation around the globe.
V-Dem is described as a unique approach to conceptualising and measuring democracy, providing multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections.
The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles. In its 2025 report, V-Dem noted that the most populous type of regime is clearly electoral autocracies with 46% of the world population, or 3.7 billion. It said some of the world’s more populous countries belong to this regime type, such as Ethiopia, India, and Pakistan. Indonesia also descended to this regime type in 2024, although to the autocratic “grey zone”, the report noted.
According to the report Latin America and the Caribbean has five democratising countries (or 20% of the region): Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, and Honduras. Three of them – Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador–are among the “U-turn” democratizers – countries that are success-fully reversing autocratisation processes of the previous years. “Yet, autocratisation is widespread in the region, with seven countries (or 28% of the region) currently regressing: Argentina, El Salvador, Guyana, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru,” the report noted.
According to the report the dividing line between electoral autocracies and electoral democracies deserves a special note. Categorical classifications like the RoW measure sacrifice some nuances and risk misclassifying countries when the underlying data puts them at, or very close to, thresholds. Some uncertainty therefore remains about regimes that are close to the threshold between democracy and autocracy.
Guyana is classified among the five grey zone electoral autocracies that could potentially be misclassified. The countries with Guyana are: Benin, Indonesia, Mauritius, and Mongolia. According to the V-Dem data, the best estimate is that these countries no longer qualify for the minimum standards of electoral democracy. “All of them except Benin are in episodes of autocratisation but Mauritius held a surprising election in 2024 that could mean a turnaround after years of autocratisation,” the report added. Overall, according to V-Dem taking the grey zone uncertainty into account, the number of democracies could range from 76 to 93, with 88 being our best estimate, while the number of autocracies might range from 86 to 103 countries, with 91 being our best estimate.
On its website V-Dem said that the study of democracy and democratisation lies at the center of political science and is increasingly important in economics, sociology, and history. It noted that in the post-Cold War world, democracy has also become a central foreign policy objective for many countries, and is often a critical condition for the distribution of international development assistance. The transition to democracy and its consolidation remains a key issue in global development today. “Yet, uncertainty persists over why some countries become and remain democratic and others do not. Despite much study, few propositions have been decisively rejected or confirmed. Additionally, the persistent uncertainty stems from a lingering data problem. No extant dataset, or set of datasets, has been sufficiently broad and sufficiently disaggregated to measure the diverse components of democracy across countries and through time,” the organisation said.
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