Visualizations
The distribution of regimes, 2025
How many people live in closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies and liberal democracies.
View data table
What it shows
The figure distributes the world population across the four Regimes of the World (RoW) categories in V-Dem for 2025. It is a different way of looking at democratic backsliding: not how many countries fall into each category, but how many people live in each one.
The calculated values are approximately:
- Closed autocracy: 28%.
- Electoral autocracy: 45%.
- Electoral democracy: 19%.
- Liberal democracy: 8%.
How it is calculated
The v2x_regime classification from V-Dem for 2025 is weighted by each country’s population. V-Dem stops publishing e_pop after 2019; to keep comparability, the last available value before 2020 is carried forward. This is an approximation: populations change, but slowly.
The two autocratic categories together account for about 73%, in line with the 74% estimated in the V-Dem 2026 report. Differences come from country coverage and weights.
What it does not show
The chart says nothing about each country’s trajectory or the quality of its institutions. Nor does it distinguish between stable autocracies and autocracies in the process of closing. Series and case pages are the place for that.