Belarus: Getting closer to North Korea

The Economist Intelligence Unit has released the fourth Democracy Index. This year’s index was titled The Democracy Index 2011: Democracy under stress.

The Democracy Index measures the state of democracy of a country basing on expert evaluation and public-opinion surveys from the respective countries. The Index describes five different categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture, “Belorusskie Novosti” reports.

165 states and 2 territories were analyzed. All of them were divided into four categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. In comparison with last year’s results, the number of world’s population living in full democracies decreased to 11.3%, while the number of people in counties with authoritarian regimes grew to 37.6%.

Only 25 countries were ranked as full democracies. The top three are Norway, Iceland and Denmark. 53 countries were classified as flawed democracies. Among the post-Soviet republics, the highest ranks were given to Estonia (34th), Lithuania (41st), Latvia (48th), and Moldova (64th).

Ukraine (79th), Georgia (102nd), Kyrgyzstan (107th), and Armenia (111th), have hybrid regimes. In 2010, Russia was classified as the hybrid regime and ranked 107th, but it dropped ten points to authoritarian regimes. However, Kazakhstan (137th) and Belarus do even worst.

This year, Belarus dropped from Nr 130 to Nr 139. The Index shows that the situation with democracy is worse in Azerbaijan (140th), Tajikistan (151st), Uzbekistan (164th) and Turkmenistan (165).Traditionally, the lowest-ranked countries are Chad and North Korea (166th and 167th respectively).