Guyana sees improvement on democracy list
– significant progress on EIU 2018 Index
– ranks 54
DPI, Guyana – Sunday, January 13, 2019
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EUI) 2018 Democracy Index, Guyana is one of 48 countries which have made significant progress in the realization of a full democracy.
According to the EIU’s eleventh index, Guyana was ranked as having a flawed democracy with an overall score of 6.67. This is an improvement from its score in 2017 which was 6.46. It also puts Guyana at number 54 on the list bringing the country close to its neighbours Suriname, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago.
A snippet of the index.
A flawed democracy is defined by the EIU as “a country that has free and fair elections and even where problems exist the basic civil liberties of citizens are respected.” It was noted that countries categorized as having flawed democracy face issues with governance, underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation.
The EIU Democracy Index provides an overview of the state of the world democracy for 165 countries and two states. It is based on five categories. These are the electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture.
Each country is then classified as one of the four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, the hybrid regime and authoritarian regime based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories.
Compared to 2017, 42 countries recorded a decline in their overall score in 2018 with 48 countries recording improvements. A decline was also recorded of people living in some form of democracy with 49.3% in 2017 to 47.7% in 2018.
It was noted that only 4.5% of the world’s population live in countries with full democracies, 43.2% live in flawed democracies and 52.3% live in hybrid or authoritarian regimes.
The index showed that presently, there are only 20 full democracies, 55 flawed democracies, 39 hybrid regimes and 53 authoritarians.
Anara Khan.
Image: http://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index.