🗳️ Democracy

Welcome to Latinometrics. We bring you Latin American insights and trends through concise, thought-provoking data visualizations.

It was just two years ago that the title of world's most populous country was passed between two Asian giants. India officially surpassed its northeastern neighbor in population, ending a century-old reign for China as the world's largest country by population. With this, the title officially went to a democracy...albeit a flawed one.

Per our friends over at the Economist Intelligence Unit, democracy can be evaluated at four primary levels: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, or authoritarian regime.

A number of factors tied to political participation, electoral choices, and institutions all contribute to a country's score, which changes from year to year.

It may surprise you (or not) that most countries we consider democracies, like India or the United States, are actually deemed flawed democracies. For full democracies, you'd have to look rather to Canada, Japan, or European countries like Spain and the United Kingdom.

Very little of the world's population lives in a full democracy today, and Latin America is no exception. Citizens of the region's largest country, Brazil, live in a flawed democracy marked by widespread polarization and corruption.

Mexicans, meanwhile, have seen in the past few years an institutional weakening by the ultra-popular MORENA party, taking recent judicial reforms from last fall as a notable example. This harkens back to the seven-decade 'perfect dictatorship' by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which only lost power in 2000.

Latin America's only two full democracies? Costa Rica and Uruguay, which through pluralism, checks and balances, and healthy political competition have managed to secure republican values for their people.

Lots of progress to be made for the world's most democratic region.

Comment of the Week 🗣️

Ariel and Erik dispute that there are more cows per capita in Cuba than in countries like Mexico, Chile, and Honduras.

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