This chart may be a little confusing with all the colours on top of each other, but just focus on the green area! The green area represents the share of people living under democracy – which was 56% in 2015, to be precise. That’s 4.1 billion people (!!). The rest of the population lives either under an autocracy (mainly China), or closed/open anocracy.

I find this progress remarkable since 200 years ago, the concept of democracy basically didn’t exist. Even as recently as 1980, only 35% of the population – that’s 1.5 billion people – lived under democratic rule. Within 35 years however, we managed to increase that number by more than 2.5 times!

Now, if you don’t know what the terms autocracy and anocracy mean, don’t worry, you’re not alone. I had to look it up myself (thanks Wikipedia!😉). Autocracy basically refers to a regime where all power is concentrated in one person, while anocracy doesn’t really have an exact official definition. It is a mixture of autocratic and democratic elements and is often defined by high occurence of violent conflict and human rights violations in general.

For a more detailed look into this topic, please visit the source at: OurWorldInData.org. The chart is licensed under CC-BY-SA by the author Max Roser.

Featured image courtesy of fill via Pixabay.com