How elections spread, voting rights expanded, and political competition developed around the world over the last two centuries.
Most people around the world think democracy is a good way to run a country, but they are often dissatisfied with how it is working in practice and are concerned about where it is heading.1
These worries are consistent with expert surveys tracking the state of democracy worldwide. Across measures of free and fair elections and other features of democracy, like civil rights and checks on power, dozens of countries have become less democratic over the last decade.
But if we step back and look at the longer history of democracy — as we’ll do in this article — we see a broader trend of remarkable progress. The world used to be deeply undemocratic, and despite setbacks, it remains much more democratic than it was only half a century ago.
That progress was never steady or secure. The rights and institutions that many of us now live under were built through many partial victories and outright setbacks.
We do not say this to dismiss the real issues that many democracies face today. Quite the opposite. The longer perspective helps us appreciate the democratic institutions that so many of us around the world continue to value, and the efforts that are necessary to protect and expand them.
That is the focus of this article. We look at how the building blocks of electoral democracy developed over the last two hundred years: how elections spread, voting rights expanded, and meaningful political competition developed.
The spread of elections
In the late 18th century, political leaders were usually chosen by inheritance, force, or through negotiation among the elite. Many leaders were monarchs who inherited their position from their parents. Parliaments didn’t exist, or were similarly filled with aristocrats and bureaucrats.
Over the next two centuries, that changed. Most leaders in government and parliament are now elected. Some leaders still take power violently (usually through coups), but there are few monarchs left, and even fewer with political power. Most members of parliament, too, have to face elections.
The chart below tracks this rise in elections, using data from the Lexical Index project by political scientists Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevičius.2 We’ll use this source throughout the article.
The chart shows that barely any country had both an elected parliament and an elected government in the late 18th century. Only two of the 76 countries included did: the United Kingdom and the United States.
More countries began electing their leaders in the 19th and early 20th century, but it wasn’t until the second half of the 20th century that elections became the predominant way of choosing political leaders worldwide.
Most recently, in 2025, only 34 countries didn’t have elected parliaments and governments; the other 165 did. You can see the breakdown in the small chart (click to enlarge).
With the previous chart, we also see that the spread of elections wasn’t stable. The world saw rapid progress in the aftermath of World War I, in the late 1950s and 1960s, and at the end of the 20th century. But elections declined during World War II and in the early 1970s.
Today, the number of countries with elected parliaments and governments is 165, down from an all-time high of 176 in 2016. In recent years, military coups and civil wars toppled elected governments and parliaments in countries like Afghanistan, Madagascar, Niger, and Sudan.
Still, this data highlights a major change in how countries choose their leaders: those chosen by blood and through violence have become rare, and those chosen by elections are far more common.
At the same time, elections alone don’t tell us anything about who gets to vote in them. That’s why we look at voting rights next.
The expansion of voting rights
Two centuries ago, very few people could choose their country’s political leaders. It was mostly a privilege of the powerful.
As we just saw, elections became more common in the 19th century. But the right to vote in these elections remained heavily restricted: to men, to landowners or taxpayers, and to people of a certain skin color or religion.
Over time, most of those restrictions fell away. Legal barriers based on gender, income, and ethnicity have largely disappeared. Some others, especially those based on age, citizenship, and criminal convictions, have remained in place. But across most of the world, the right to vote has been extended to almost all adult citizens.
The next chart shows this spread of universal voting rights. Because the legal right to vote doesn’t matter much if your country never holds elections, the chart also considers whether countries elect their governments and parliaments in practice.3
We see in the chart that some countries (such as France, Mexico, Switzerland, and Venezuela) broadened voting rights in the mid-1800s — but only for men.
It wasn’t until a half-century later that women in New Zealand gained the right to vote in 1893, making it the first country to have universal voting rights. You can track individual countries in this chart.
Progress remained slow until the second half of the 20th century. But then it happened fast: at the end of World War II, fewer than two dozen countries had universal voting rights in practice. When the Cold War ended, that number had gone up to almost 150.
The chart also shows that this number has fallen recently. That’s not because any country restricted formal voting rights, but because some countries stopped having elected parliaments and governments altogether.
Taken together, this chart and the one before show that elections were not the only thing that spread across the world; so did the right to vote in them.
This brings us to the next building block of an electoral democracy: elections and voting rights aren’t effective if those in power don’t face meaningful competition. Exercising your right to vote means you can hold your leaders accountable. It means citizens have options to choose from, and to kick out if they do a bad job. That is why we turn next to electoral competition.
The rise of competitive elections
The introduction of elections has not always meant real competition. In many places, results have often been a foregone conclusion.
In some elections, there is only one candidate on the ballot and no real political opposition. In others, incumbents face opposition but undermine the contest in other ways: intimidating voters, bribing officials to meddle with the ballots, or pressuring the media for favorable coverage.
Where this happens, governments rarely lose, even when they govern badly. One core function of elections — holding leaders accountable — is missing.
But over recent decades, many elections have become much more competitive: voters are now more likely to choose freely among several candidates, and fraud, if it happens at all, is less likely to change the result.
As a result, incumbents are more likely to lose power, which gives them reason to govern in ways voters actually want.
In the next chart, we track this through a proxy: we plot changes in electoral competition by looking at where elections recently led to a change in government (also called an electoral turnover). To do that, we adapted the data from the Lexical Index project.4
The chart shows that competition for political office is a rarer and more recent development than elections and universal voting rights. (You can track individual countries in this chart.)
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, elections very rarely led to a change in government.
There was some progress in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, as well as a wave of political competition after World War I, when at one point more than 30 countries had recently seen power change hands, especially in Europe. But that faded again in the wake of World War II.
After steady but limited progress between the 1950s and 1980s, changes in government spread rapidly in the 1990s, reaching more than half of all countries.
In the last two decades, political competition has increased more slowly. In 2025, 111 out of 199 countries had experienced a recent electoral turnover.
The chart shows that political competition, as captured by electoral turnovers, has become much more common. Voters often decide they’d like a change in who holds power, and as a result, political leaders have to work harder to win over voters.
This is by no means a perfect proxy. Electoral turnovers are more likely to happen under political competition, but the two are not the same.
Elections can be competitive without a change in government. Consider the case of Japan, where the Liberal Democratic Party has been in power almost continuously for the last 70 years, not because the party engaged in fraud or voter intimidation, but because it has remained popular and the opposition has been fragmented.
Similarly, turnovers can happen without competition. Incumbents can intimidate voters, stuff ballots, and persecute the media, and still lose. The loss doesn’t mean that the election was clean; it just means that it was clean enough for the opposition to squeak out a win.
How electoral democracies became the majority
In a democracy, we would expect governments and parliaments to be elected, almost all adults to be able to vote, and elections to be genuinely competitive. In the previous sections, we looked at these different building blocks separately. But we haven’t looked at when all of them come together.
So in the next chart, we track the countries that met all these conditions simultaneously. The Lexical Index project classifies countries as “electoral democracies” if they have an elected government and parliament, universal voting rights, a political opposition, and competitive elections. On the chart below, we call countries that don’t have all of these features “non-democracies”.5
Until the late 19th century, no country met all the conditions of an electoral democracy. That changed in 1893, when women gained the right to vote in New Zealand, where elections had already become competitive.
Other countries followed, but progress was relatively slow. Democracies did not become a majority until the 1990s. By 2025, 117 countries qualified, against 82 that did not. You can see the breakdown in the small chart (click to enlarge).
In the chart, we can also see that the spread of electoral democracies was uneven and marked by clear setbacks. The clearest expression of that is the 1930s: there were 20 democracies in the early years of the decade, but only nine remained by its end.
Another setback is visible more recently. In 2015, the number of countries that met all conditions reached its highest historical level, at 130 countries. The number has since decreased by 13, affecting countries from around the world, including Côte d’Ivoire, Nicaragua, and Serbia.
Billions of people have gained democratic rights — billions still go without
So far, we have tracked the rise of electoral democracy by counting countries. But the number of people with these rights matters, too: if the democracies are small and the largest countries are not democratic, then most people in the world are still not living under a democracy. So it is worth asking not just how many countries are democracies, but how many people live in them.
In the next chart, we see the breakdown for the global population over the past two centuries.
In 1900, fewer than a million people lived in a democracy, all of them in New Zealand.6
That changed over the 20th century. More than 300 million people joined when India became a democracy in 1950, and hundreds of millions more in other countries did in the decades that followed. The number of people living in democracies more than tripled from 1.2 billion in 1965 to about 4 billion today.
Still, even today, the world’s population is almost evenly split between those who live in democracies and those who don’t.
And because the world’s population has grown faster than democracy has spread, the total number of people without democratic rights is higher than ever. Recent backsliding has added to that, with around 400 million fewer people living in democracies than a decade ago, such as in Myanmar, Nigeria, and Turkey.
The centuries-long fight for democratic rights
Over the last two centuries, the way politics works has fundamentally changed. In short, politics has become much more democratic.
This means that billions of people now have more say in the important decisions that affect their lives: what their children are taught in school, how much they pay in taxes, and whether their country goes to war.
This doesn’t mean that everyone has these rights, that concerns about democracy’s future are misplaced, or that elections are all that democracy requires.
Over the last two centuries, the way politics works has fundamentally changed. In short, politics has become much more democratic.
But looking at the past and seeing how far we have come can help us make sense of the current moment.
The democratic institutions we have today were built over more than 200 years. It required going against seemingly impossible odds, enduring setbacks, and pressing on after partial victories.
This history reminds us that democratic rights are never guaranteed. But it also shows us that politics can change for the better, sometimes beyond what people at the time could imagine.
Acknowledgments
We thank Edouard Mathieu, Hannah Ritchie, and Max Roser for their comments on this article.
200 years ago, everyone lacked democratic rights. Now, billions of people have them
Half of all countries are democracies. But how many people enjoy democratic rights?
In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory.
How old are democracies across the world?
The world has recently become less democratic
Many more people have democratic rights than in the past. Some of this progress has recently been reversed.
Endnotes
We see this in international surveys. In 2023, the Pew Research Center ran a set of nationally representative surveys covering 24 countries around the world and found that in every one of them, the majority of people rated representative democracy as a good way to govern their country. In most cases, the majority was overwhelming: in 19 of the 24 countries, more than three-quarters of respondents said so. The same survey also asked people whether they were satisfied with the way democracy works, and there the results flipped. In 17 of the 24, the majority said they were dissatisfied with how democracy was working in practice. A more recent Pew update found a similar result: in 15 of the 23 countries surveyed in 2025, a majority were still dissatisfied.
Other surveys point in the same direction. A 2023 survey by the Open Society Foundations covered 30 countries worldwide and asked related but different questions. It found the same mix: support for democratic principles alongside reservations about how democracy is working. 86% of respondents said that it was important to them to live in a democracy, and only 20% thought authoritarian countries were better than democracies at delivering what citizens want. At the same time, 23% of people thought that corruption was the most important challenge facing their country, and 58% feared political unrest could lead to violence in the next year.
Svend-Erik Skaaning, John Gerring, and Henrikas Bartusevičius. 2015. A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy. Comparative Political Studies.
The data in this section tracks who has the right to vote, not how many people actually cast a ballot.
Such data on voter turnout might seem like the more natural measure of electoral participation.
But this data can be hard to interpret: it can reflect officials manipulating results to inflate the numbers, or laws that make voting mandatory and push turnout close to 100% in some places but not others. And some people would argue that deciding not to vote is part of one’s democratic rights.
We still publish data on turnout: as a share of the entire voting-age population, and as a share of registered voters.
The data identifies when changes in government happened. We built on that by counting those changes as “recent” that happened in the previous 12 years.
We chose 12 years because it covers three terms when elections are held every four years, and two terms when they are held every five or six years.
Above, we looked at electoral turnovers to identify which elections are competitive. But for their classification, the Lexical Index researchers focus on electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and the timing of elections: for elections to be competitive, fraud can’t be consequential, intimidation can’t be systematic, and elections have to regularly happen.
You can track individual countries in this chart.
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Bastian Herre, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Lucas Rodés-Guirao (2026) - “The rise of electoral democracy” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: 'https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260824-000123/the-rise-of-electoral-democracy.html' [Online Resource] (archived on August 24, 2026).
BibTeX citation
@article{owid-the-rise-of-electoral-democracy,
author = {Bastian Herre and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina and Lucas Rodés-Guirao},
title = {The rise of electoral democracy},
journal = {Our World in Data},
year = {2026},
note = {https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260824-000123/the-rise-of-electoral-democracy.html}
}
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