On the State of Democracy in the World before and after the Great Recession

Abstract

Much has been said about the impact of the Great Recession (2008-2009) on the conditions and foundations of democracy, especially in the Western world. But has it really been like this? Today we have various options to approach the comparative study of the state of democracy in the world through wide-ranging cross-sectional and longitudinal sections. Perhaps one of the most successful is that of Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), whose approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy is to provide a data set that attempts to reflect the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of government that includes, but it goes beyond the simple presence of elections. For this reason, the V-Dem project collects data to measure different principles of democracy, one of which is the electoral one. In principle, the main finding of this documentary effort leads its authors to affirm that "autocratization", a word with which they call the decrease in democratic features, has accelerated in the world, particularly when the existing state at the time of The Great Recession will occur with the present situation in 2019. This has to be reflected in the state of the principles in the electoral question. Detailing the scope and characteristics of this loss of democratic features in general and its manifestation in the electoral sphere throughout this century and between two ten-year cuts (2000-2009 and 2010-2019) is the task that we propose to carry out in this paper. This, knowing that 2020 will represent a new watershed in the conditions for the development of democracy and elections in the world, given the experience of the Great Confinement, with a practice and hopefully temporary suspension of electoral exercises in the world and a return uncertain at the polls in which the repercussions of this event will gradually be seen in the spirit of the electoral bodies of the world.