Is the world still moving towards democratic societies?

Great Debates
1

I was surprised to learn in one of my business classes that most of the world still does not have free press. The world is roughly split at 33% free, 33% partially free, and 33% not free according to some international journalism organization.

It made me wonder if countries are even moving towards democratic societies anymore. From what I’ve read about China, I figured the rest of the world was also following suit, though upon reflection this is a big assumption. Is the world as a whole still moving towards democracy, or veering off on some other new path?

2

That would be Freedom House, whose definition for Free, unfree and sorta free are, US Gov is friendly, unfriendly, and indifferent respectively.

Democratic and free long since ceased to have any meaning.

3

Why do you say that?

If necessary I guess we can substitute in “representative government”

4

Yes, I think so. Just look at Libya this year.

5

Freedom house does that, and the numbers aren’t exactly 1/3 splits. If you go by number of countries it is about a 90/60/40 split between free, partly free and not free. Freedom as defined by freedom house increased dramatically in the 70s and 80s, but once it got to the 90s it really didn’t increase in the sense that far fewer countries went were labeled ‘free’. However there has been advance from countries moving from ‘not free’ to ‘partly free’ during that period.


If you go by population, maybe 1/3 of the world is ‘not free’. But about 1/5 of the world lives in China, and China is ‘not free’.

Location is a big part of it. The americas are largely free, so is europe. But North Africa, the middle east and much of asia are not.

http://www.freedomhouse.org/uploads/fiw10/FIW_2010_MOF.pdf

Anyway, is the world moving towards freedom? I’d say so. I don’t know a lot about it, but supposedly even China has seen a lot of reforms in the last 20 years wrt to liberty and ability to address government abuses. The arab spring is ongoing. etc. By and large I’d say yes.

6

You ask the question, “Is the world moving toward democratic societies?”, but discuss freedom of the press.

So it makes me wonder: Why do you think freedom of the press has anything to do with a democratic society?

I know it’s what we are taught in civics classes, but I see no evidence that a free press is needed for a democratic society.

7

At least there is progress toowards democracy in MENA, despite the best efforts of several US Presidents. Ditto South and Central America before that.

8

Well… I’m 46 and it’s pretty obvious to me that we’ve been constantly moving towards more democratic societies during my lifetime.

When I was a kid, some western European countries (Portugal, Spain, Greece) were still dictatorships. Those became democracies.

Same thing happened in some Asian countries (Taiwan, South Korea).

About every single South American country was a dictatorship, and those all collapsed in turn, and there is currently none left.

Then there was the collapse of the iron curtain and all “east european” countries as well as several states of the former Soviet Union became free.

Just right now we have the Arab spring, despite its unpredicatble future.

Even sub-saharan African countries, despite their awful reputation, have become much freer (is that a word??) on the overall. Not even mentioning South Africa.

And I could find some other individual examples of countries moving from dictatorship to democracy (The Philippines), from dictatorship to a somewhat better state of affairs (Haiti), from vaguely to really democratic (Mexico).
And as mentioned by the OP, even China isn’t nearly as repressive as it was when I was a child/teen. I would even add that western democracies seem to be less willing to support opressive regimes (think of the USA propping up dictatorships in Latin America, or France doing the same, or worst, in her former African colonies).

So, until now, yes, there has been a considerable improvement. Democracies essentially didn’t exist outside of (most of) western Europe and North America when I was born in the mid-60s (Which doesn’t seem that long ago to me) Of course, it’s no guarantee for the future, but the more democratic countries there are the less acceptable dictatorships become.