If knowledgeable researchers can be found, their assessments are still to some degree subjective, and they may disagree with others. If they agree on what democracy is and that countries can come meaningfully close to it, its characteristics - such as whether an election is free and fair - still are difficult to assess. People disagree about what characterizes a democracy, and whether actual political systems can even come close to such an ideal. Identifying which countries are democracies comes with many challenges. This tells us how the political rights of the world’s population have changed over the past two hundred years. To answer these questions, we need to combine long-term data on countries’ populations 1 with information on their political systems. How many people have democratic political rights around the world? And how has their number changed over the last two hundred years? If we adopt the common and famous understanding of democracy as rule by the people, we should also look at how many people get to have a say in their government. When India democratized in the 1950s, this same transition affected almost 400 million people. When Tunisia became democratic in 2012, its population of 11 million gained the political rights that came with it. But the mere number of countries does not tell us how many people enjoy democratic rights. It is an astonishing achievement that many countries are now governed democratically. In the 19th century, there were few countries one could call democracies. When French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille prison in 1789 in pursuit of liberty, equality, and fraternity (and weapons), they could not have imagined how far democratic political rights would have spread a mere 200 years later.
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