On March 2nd, 2022, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute released the Democracy Report 2022, where Lebanon is noted as decreasing in its democracy index.
Lebanon was classified in the Electoral Autocracies, which means a system of government where one person has absolute power over a state. It is “the most common regime type and harbors the largest share of the world population 44% or 3.4 billion people,” according to V-Dem.
The report further indicated that the country sees a movement downwards from one level to another.
Lebanon was also classified in the bottom 40-50%, along with Malaysia, Kuwait, and Singapore in the Liberal Democracy Index between 2011 and 2021.
From 202 countries evaluated, Lebanon ranked 103 in the Liberal Democracy Index, 99 in the Electoral Democracy Index, 113 in the Liberal Component Index, and 116 in the Egalitarian Component Index.
Previously, Lebanon was declared an Authoritarian Regime by The Economist’s Democracy Index 2021, after being labeled a Hybrid Regime in 2020.
The 2022 Democracy Report by V-Dem Institute noted that the world is amid a “democratic recession”, with many countries now down to the lowest levels of democracy since 1989. “The last 30 years of democratic advances are now eradicated,” V-Dem remarked in that regard.
Each year, V-Dem produces a large global database on democracy, using over 30 million data points. and assessing 202 countries from 1789 to 2021.
The countries are sorted “by regime type in 2021, and after that in alphabetical order.”
The V-Dem Institute is an independent research institute, based at the Department of Political Science of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
It is funded by the World Bank and several research institutions to gather data, including the Country Expert data collection, and present the latest research findings on democracy in the world.
