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IRELAND is the sixth most democratic country in the world, according to a new report.

In their newly-issued research into democracy around the world in 2019, the Economist Intelligence Unit (The EIU) states that there are only 22 truly democratic countries in the world, with Norway, Iceland and Sweden being the most democratic, and Ireland in sixth place, just ahead of Denmark.

The United Kingdom lies in 14th place.

The Democracy Index is deemed important in matters of trade democracy means stability and a marked lack of corruption, two factors crucial in commercial as well as social development in any country.

Irelands improved position on the index is due to advances in civil liberties in recent times in issues such as gay rights and abortion.

The EIUs Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of democracy worldwide in 165 independent states and two territories. The survey covers the vast majority of the worlds states, encompassing almost the entire population of the world.

Ranking is judged on five categories:electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties. Ireland, scoring high in all categories, has steadily moved up the index since 2011.

Based on its scores on a range of indicators within the categories, each country is itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime or authoritarian regime

Five EU countries are regarded as having flawed democracies: Portugal, Malta, Belgium, Cyprus and Greece. The rest of the EU countries, including Ireland, are regarded as full democracies.

According to the EIUs measure of democracy, almost one-half (48.4 per cent) of the worlds population live in a democracy of some sort, although only 5.7 per cent reside in a full democracy.

This is down from 8.9 per cent in 2015 as a result of the US being demoted from a full democracy to a flawed democracy in 2016.

More than one-third of the worlds population lives under authoritarian rule, with China accounting for a large part of this, according to the report.

The worlds least democratic country is adjudged to be North Korea, just behind the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Norway

Iceland

Sweden

New Zealand

Finland

Ireland

Denmark

Canada

Australia

Switzerland

Originally posted here:
New study ranks Ireland one of the world's most democratic nations - Irish Post

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Calls are growing for the Senate to call witnesses in President Trumps impeachment trial, after The New York Times published details about former national security adviser John Boltons forthcoming book. In an unpublished draft of the book, Bolton writes that President Trump personally told him in August that he wanted to maintain a freeze on $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until Ukraine turned over materials related to former Vice President Joe Biden and supporters of Hillary Clinton in Ukraine. Bolton sent a draft of the book to the White House for review in December.

The Democratic House impeachment managers issued a statement saying, quote, There can be no doubt now that Mr. Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the Presidents defense and therefore must be called as a witness at the impeachment trial of President Trump, unquote.

The New York Times broke the story Sunday, one day after President Trumps legal team began its defense of the president at the impeachment trial. During Saturdays opening arguments, White House deputy counsel Mike Purpura claimed the Democratic case for impeachment is based on assumptions.

MIKE PURPURA: In his public testimony, Ambassador Sondland used variations of the words assume, presume, guess, speculate and believe over 30 times. Here are some examples.

GORDON SONDLAND: That was my presumption, my personal presumption. That was my belief. That was my presumption, yeah.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: Is that right?

GORDON SONDLAND: I said I presume that might have to be done in order to get the aid released. It was a presumption. Ive been very clear as to when I was presuming, and I was presuming on the aid. It would be pure, you know, guesswork on my part, speculation, I dont know. That was the problem, Mr. Goldman. No one told me directly that the aid was tied to anything. I was presuming it was.

MIKE PURPURA: All the Democrats have to support the alleged link between security assistance and investigations is Ambassador Sondlands assumptions and presumptions.

AMY GOODMAN: During Saturdays opening argument, Trumps attorney Pat Cipollone accused the Democrats of attempting to overturn an election.

PAT CIPOLLONE: For all their talk about election interference, that theyre here to perpetrate the most massive interference in an election in American history. And we cant allow that to happen. It would violate our Constitution. It would violate our history. It would violate our obligations to the future.

AMY GOODMAN: Trumps lawyers will continue their opening arguments today. On Friday, the Democratic House impeachment managers wrapped up their three days of opening arguments. This is Democratic Congressmember Adam Schiff, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

REP. ADAM SCHIFF: But lets just try to step into someone elses shoes for a moment. Lets imagine it wasnt Joe Biden. Lets imagine it was any one of us. Lets imagine the most powerful person in the world was asking a foreign nation to conduct a sham investigation into one of us. What would we think about it then? Would we think, Thats good U.S. policy? Would we think, He has every right to do it? Would we think, Thats a perfect call? It shouldnt have mattered that it was Marie Yovanovitch. It shouldnt matter that it was Joe Biden, because, Ill tell you something, the next time it just may be you.

AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the Senate impeachment trial, were joined by Dan Friedman, reporter in Mother Jones D.C. bureau who focuses on foreign influence and national security. His recent piece is headlined Trumps Legal Team Opened Their Impeachment Defense with a Blizzard of Lies.

And I want to go into that, Dan, but, first, this latest news that has just been released over the last 24 hours, The New York Times saying that Bolton, in his book manuscript, has said that Trump directly told him that he was withholding military aid to Ukraine unless they would investigate the Bidens, as well, if you can talk about this, the significance of this?

DAN FRIEDMAN: Sure, yeah. I think a key argument that Trumps lawyers have made is that there is no evidence, as I think some of your clips showed they have argued that there is no evidence indicating that Trump linked the hold on aid to Ukraine to his push for Ukraine to announce these investigations that would help him politically. And Trump has also said that the aid was not related to his wish for investigations. So, Boltons manuscript, as reported by the Times, completely blows up that claim. It falsifies the sort of key, crux claim of their defense of him so far. So its hard to overestimate how bad it is for Trumps defense.

I would also point out that Mick Mulvaney, in public testimony, the White House chief of staff excuse me, in his press conference that he had back in October, also said that he had direct conversations with Trump in which Trump linked the hold on aid to wanting Ukraine to announce investigations. So, we shouldnt forget that also Mulvaney could be a witness linking, connecting the push for aid to investigations. So, the Senate is going to have an opportunity to vote on whether they want to subpoena Bolton, Mulvaney and others. And obviously, the report from the Times makes that vote a lot harder from Republicans if theyre going to try to continue to suppress this evidence.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this means and what Republicans you see I mean, well see today will be as theyre confronted with what Bolton is going to say. And then also address the issue of executive privilege that President Trump will try to make. And does that protect is it a broad shield, or can that be challenged? And if Bolton himself, if subpoenaed, wants to testify, whether or not Trump invokes executive privilege, can he say what he wants?

DAN FRIEDMAN: I think the short answer is they can assert executive privilege. If the Senate subpoenas him, there is for information that he has already reportedly put in the manuscript of a book that is going to be published for anyone to read and, of course, theres still a review process for that. But nevertheless, it is a very difficult argument for them to make, and I think ultimately its a political question. So, they can attempt to assert executive privilege, but with a Senate subpoena and Bolton wanting to testify, its very difficult to suppress that information.

The other point that I would make is, Trump, in his tweet, in which he denied that he had told Bolton that he wanted to hold the aid to force the investigations, is making the case for why Bolton should be subpoenaed. If Trump is saying Bolton is lying, that is a very strong argument for why Bolton should be put under oath, under penalty of perjury, and asked whether it is true that Trump made this connection. So, you know, the Republicans are going to have a hard time keeping Bolton from testifying, and Im sure that theyll try.

AMY GOODMAN: So, Dan, lets go to what happened on Saturday. The Democratic House managers wrapped up their arguments on Friday. Talk about the gist of what you call the blizzard of lies, what the Trump defense team said in their first day of arguments, and how little time they actually used.

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. They did it all in just a few hours, and they managed to make a lot of claims that are false or deeply misleading.

One of the claims, which was in the clips you played, was that there was no link established between the hold on aid and investigations by Ukraine. One problem with that, we just talked about, is that Bolton has now contradicted that. Another problem with that is that they simply ignored that there was testimony by Gordon Sondland, who they were quoting, linking a refusal to have a White House meeting with Ukraines president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to trying to force him to have these investigations that would help Trump politically. So, Sondland, elsewhere in his testimony, said there was a quid pro quo, famously it was a big deal There was a quid pro quo, I am sure of that, linking excuse me linking a White House meeting to investigations. And, you know, Trumps lawyers didnt say, Well, dont pay attention to that. Its not as important. They just literally ignored it. So, I think that goes to sort of the veracity of their argument overall.

Another argument they made is that the Ukrainians were not aware of the hold on aid until, I think, September. That also ignored public statements by the former deputy foreign minister from Ukraine, who said, We did know about it, and also testimony by Laura Cooper, whos a Defense Department official, who said that she also heard the Ukrainians were concerned about the hold on aid, back in July. In both cases, theyre saying they knew about it in July.

So, those are, I think, two big examples, but, you know, there are a whole bunch of others. They said that there is a they talked about the call that Trump had with Zelensky, and repeatedly referred to it, the transcript of the call. I think anybody whos paid attention to that knows its not actually a transcript. There may be important parts of that testimony that conversation that are not included in that memorandum of the conversation. Its a summary of what people who were listening remember. So, there was just a lot of false and misleading claims to pick through, if you were watching on Saturday.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk more about ABC News obtaining that recording of what appears to show President Trump saying that he wanted the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch fired, after speaking at a private gathering that included Lev Parnas? Let me go to that

DAN FRIEDMAN: Sure.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, let me go, before you respond, Dan, to that clip.

LEV PARNAS: Germany is going behind our

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Germany is not doing much.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Theyre supporting Russia.

LEV PARNAS: Theyre supporting Russia.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You think so?

UNIDENTIFIED 2: Oh, I think so.

LEV PARNAS: A hundred percent, 100%.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Two billion to pay Russia.

LEV PARNAS: A hundred percent, 100%.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It just makes no sense.

LEV PARNAS: It doesnt, exactly. It doesnt make sense.

UNIDENTIFIED 1: Im sure they need support from you, President.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It makes no sense.

LEV PARNAS: A lot of the exactly. A lot of the European countries, theyre backstabbing us, basically, and dealing with Russia. And thats why youre having such I think if you take a look, the biggest problem there, I think, where we need to start is, weve got to get rid of the ambassador. Shes still left over from the Clinton administration.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Where? The ambassador where? Ukraine?

LEV PARNAS: Yeah. And shes basically walking around telling everybody, Wait. Hes going to get impeached. Just wait.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Really?

LEV PARNAS: Its incredible. Its like

UNIDENTIFIED 3: Shell be gone tomorrow.

LEV PARNAS: Yeah. Well

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Whats her name?

UNIDENTIFIED 1: I dont remember the name.

LEV PARNAS: I dont have her name off back.

UNIDENTIFIED 4: So, one of the things that will be, now that we have a secretary of state thats been sworn in

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Get rid of her. Get her out tomorrow. I dont care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK?

LEV PARNAS: Excellent.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Do it.

LEV PARNAS: Excellent.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that video was obtained from Lev Parnass attorney, Joseph Bondy. It begins with Trump posing for photos, then entering a private dining room. And halfway through the recording, one of the participants suggests Yovanovitch is posing problems, and you can hear Trump saying, Get rid of her. Get her out tomorrow. I dont care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. OK? Do it. And then the video, its sort of showing the ceiling. But, Dan, just explain this whole thing.

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. I think, number one, Parnas and the guy who took the video, Igor Fruman, are associates of Rudy Giuliani, and they were kind of running around Ukraine. As Parnas claimed, he was acting as an emissary of Giuliani, and then, since Giuliani is Trumps personal lawyer, Trump emissary of Trump himself, attempting to effectuate this scheme to get Ukraine to have these investigations, and, as part of that excuse me to get Marie Yovanovitch fired, the ambassador to Ukraine. Trump, President Trump, has said that he doesnt know Lev Parnas or Igor Fruman. So, I think, quite clearly, he was lying, is lying, when he says he doesnt know them. Heres a video of them having a private meeting with him. And thats not all. Theres pictures of them together on other occasions.

I think another important point about this meeting, which occurred in May of 2018 at the Trump Hotel, is that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were there because they had pledged to give a million dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump. They wound up giving, a few weeks later, $325,000 through a shell company that they set up in Delaware. So, that is, I think, in many peoples assessment, pretty corrupt that they are able to influence U.S. policy toward Ukraine which is in a war, of course because they gave pledged a million dollars to Trumps super PAC and gave $325,000. In addition, they have been indicted in Manhattan for campaign finance violations that include allegations that they accepted money from foreign sources, including an unnamed Russian businessman, and used that money to make campaign donations in the United States to influence the U.S. political system. So, we dont know that this particular donation came from a foreign source, but we dont know that it didnt. And it certainly creates the suspicion that foreign interests, for possibly someone in Ukraine who doesnt who is concerned that Marie Yovanovitch was an ardent opponent of corruption, and therefore was making it harder to do some kind of potentially corrupt business a person like that could quite easily be influencing U.S. policy toward Ukraine, through Parnas and Fruman, in this case.

And I think one thing it shows is that there is a lot more investigation to be done, whether its by the House, by the Senate, by the Department of Justice, to figure out what was going on, particularly since these events occurred a year before, more than a little more than a year before most of the action that is at issue in the impeachment trial.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, if you can just comment quickly, in 30 seconds, on what some have called the Epstein dream team, Trumps his team defending him being Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz?

DAN FRIEDMAN: Yeah. So, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz are both, of course, very famous lawyers. And I think that, obviously, the significant thing about Starr was that he was oversaw the investigation into Bill Clintons relationship with Monica Lewinsky and related issues. And Alan Dershowitz was a member of O.J. Simpsons dream team, who helped get him acquitted for murder.

Both of them have previously made arguments that are departures from what they will presumably be arguing this afternoon. Dershowitz has said that you do not have to have committed a crime to be impeached. Today Dershowitz has indicated that he will make the opposite argument. Ken Starr, who was forced out of a job at Baylor University because the football team had a sexual harassment scandal, will be arguing against Trumps removal from office, as well. Thats obviously inconsistent with Starrs position when he was going after Clinton.

They will be, I think, really trying to make the case to the public. And I think it is worth keeping in mind that even though their legal arguments may be dubious, they are going to be trying to give Republican senators and Trump supporters something to hang their hat on in terms of saying he shouldnt be removed.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Dan Friedman, I want to thank you for being with us, reporter in Mother Jones D.C. bureau focusing on foreign policy and national security, covering Trumps impeachment trial. Well link to your piece, Trumps Legal Team Opened Their Impeachment Defense with a Blizzard of Lies.

When we come back, basketball legend Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter crash with his 13-year-old daughter and seven others. Well speak with The Nations Dave Zirin and Fatima Goss Graves. Stay with us.

More:
Explosive Bolton Book Allegations Spark New Calls for Witnesses to Testify at Impeachment Trial - Democracy Now!

British Columbias Grade 12 History curriculum covers a lot of territory, much of it relevant to an understanding of todays news: The perils of nationalism, authoritarian regimes, Indigenous peoples movements and migrations.

These topics are not only part of history, but are also topics du jour.

Much of the value of history is not the names, dates and places students are required to memorize, but the light it shines on the otherwise baffling politics of current events around the globe.

The challenge for teachers is that teaching anything that touches upon politics, in our system at least, can be professionally perilous.

Teaching history and its relationship to the now requires maintaining an impartial point of view and a deft hand on the whiteboard.

Reassuringly for B.C. history teachers, one of the expected outcomes for Grade 12 students is to learn how to make reasoned ethical judgments about controversial actions in the past or present, and assess whether there is a responsibility to respond, especially for those now moving toward eligibility to participate in the electoral process.

A potentially contentious topic that struggles more and more to the surface of media coverage of world events is Democracy and, as history relates, its rise, fall and fragility.

As a theme, most of the history of the western worlds great events have occurred in pursuit of Democracy. Thats capital D Democracy undefined but nonetheless regarded as the sacrosanct objective of western governments.

As Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt explain in their scholarly analysis of the subject, How Democracies Die, Democracy means far more than simply majority rule: It involves constraints and delays on majority rule, protection for minority rights, diffusion of power, free speech, free assembly and accountability for elected officials.

Democracies, say the authors, can and do erode slowly in barely visible steps: Damage to a Democracy extends beyond policy differences into an existential conflict over race and culture ... and it is clear from studying breakdowns throughout history, that extreme political polarization can kill Democracies.

Levitsky and Zinblatt provide compelling examples, down through the centuries, of how elected demagogic leaders can gradually subvert the democratic process to increase their power.

Demagogues have always thrived in democracies and have always been able strike a note that resonates with a sector of the population to the extent that they gain power.

Julius Caesar was a charismatic and unconventional politician who knew what the masses wanted to hear. He used his immense wealth to fight his way to the highest ranks of political power.

He promised to shake things up and he did, but it wasnt long before he proclaimed himself dictator for life.

Demagogues play to popular prejudices and misinformation. The greatest danger to Democracy, suggest Levitsky and Ziblatt, is a struggling population in search of easy answers.

More recently, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Batista and Somoza, Diaz, Pinochet and now Putin all deserve a mention, and a brief look at the role they played in the decline of democracy in their own nation states.

Back in 1838, author and sociopolitical commentator James Fenimore Cooper identified fundamental characteristics of demagogues: They fashion themselves as a member of the common people, opposed to the elites. Their politics depend on a visceral connection with the people, which greatly exceeds ordinary political popularity.

Demagogues, wrote Cooper, manipulate this connection, and the raging, almost mindless popularity it affords, for their own benefit and ambition.

Part of the demagogues attraction to those believing themselves disenfranchised by the elite is that he/she threatens or simply breaks established rules of conduct, institutions and even the law. Not surprisingly, history identifies that it is usually the narcissistically damaged actors who become political performers.

Other historians have identified four other behavioural warning signs of an emerging authoritarian demagogue: He/she

1. rejects, in words or action, the democratic rules of the game,

2. denies the legitimacy of opponents,

3. tolerates or encourages violence,

4. indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.

In some democracies, political leaders heed these warning signs and, when faced with the rise of extremists or demagogues, make a concerted effort to isolate and defeat them.

In other circumstances, as Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution senior fellow wrote in National Affairs (Rethinking Polarization), there is a vast emptiness at the core of politics [that] eases the way for faith to be placed in the promises of the demagogue.

That thought alone makes a study of Democracies and their rise and fall a significant topic at the Grade 12 level, especially for those whose future involves the responsibility of understanding what Democracy really means and voting for it.

Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.

gfjohnson4@shaw.ca

Follow this link:
Geoff Johnson: The fragility of big-'D' Democracy, and how to protect it - Times Colonist

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan

All eyes are on the U.S. Senate this week for the impeachment trial of President Donald J. Trump, only the third presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. But another important trial is happening at the same time, far from the eyes of the public, at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Behind the razor-wire fencing of Camp Justice, five of the remaining 41 Guantanamo prisoners sit through more pretrial hearings, almost 20 years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks they are charged with perpetrating.

One witness this week is Dr. James E. Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist who, with his partner, psychologist John Bruce Jessen, developed and then implemented the CIAs post-9/11 torture program. Mitchell and Jessen actively participated in torture sessions at CIA black sites. Both have long maintained that they were only contractors, taking orders from the CIA. Despite having no prior experience with interrogation, they were paid handsomely, receiving at least $81 million in taxpayer dollars from the U.S. government for their work on the torture program. Torture is a war crime, and those who torture should be prosecuted. But Mitchell is not the one on trial this week. Indeed, he defiantly said in court this week, Id get up today and do it again. Mitchell was sitting in the courtroom, not far from his torture victims.

The pretrial hearings at Guantanamo this week are an attempt by the defense attorneys for the five, all who face the death penalty, to suppress statements the defendants made to the FBI during or not long after being tortured by the CIA. Among the five prisoners is the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times some or all of which were directly conducted by Mitchell. Waterboarding is a torture technique that uses water and a wet towel over ones mouth and nose to bring a victim to the brink of suffocation, simulating drowning.

Mitchell and Jessen shun the word torture, preferring the euphemism enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. The American Civil Liberties Union sued Mitchell and Jessen on behalf of two CIA prisoners and the family of another CIA torture victim, Gul Rahman, who died during his brutal interrogation and torture at a CIA black site in Afghanistan. In the lawsuit, the ACLU summarized some of these EITs: Torture methods devised by Mitchell and Jessen and inflicted on the three men include slamming them into walls, stuffing them inside coffin-like boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures and ear-splitting levels of music, starving them, inflicting various kinds of water torture, depriving them of sleep for days, and chaining them in stress positions designed for pain and to keep them awake for days on end.

Mitchell and Jessen said they reverse-engineered techniques taught to the U.S. military to avoid capture, or, if caught, how to resist torture and interrogation. The military training is called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. In theory, SERE was developed to help people survive. Mitchell and Jessen developed techniques to harm people, not to help them. That vital distinction raised ethical concerns with members of the American Psychological Association (APA) concerns that were dismissed by the organizations leadership, eager to please the administration of President George W. Bush. Anti-torture psychologists led a multiyear campaign challenging the collusion of the APA, the worlds largest professional association of psychologists, with the Pentagon and the CIA. The APA leadership was ultimately ousted, and the organization barred its members from participating in harsh interrogations.

While he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015-16, Donald Trump frequently touted the need for torture, even though torture is almost universally acknowledged to deliver false or unreliable information. I would bring back waterboarding, and Id bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding, he bragged at one of the candidate debates.

Speaking on the Democracy Now! news hour, Baher Azmy, legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a nonprofit law organization that has represented scores of Guantanamo prisoners, reflected on the impeachment trial of Donald Trump and the Guantanamo military tribunals: They are, in a sense, both show trials. The military commissions process was generated instead of a traditional Article III criminal trial, in order to suppress the truth, in order to repress accountability for war crimes and, in the Senate trial, repress accountability for an abuse of power.

This week, the tortured logic of the U.S. system of justice is on full display, from Washington, D.C., to Guantanamo Bay.

Excerpt from:
The Tropic of Torture, from Guantanamo to Washington - Democracy Now!

But popular protests show potential for democratic renewal

DEMOCRACY IS in retreat, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on five measureselectoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil libertiesfinds that democracy has been eroded around the world in the past year. The global score of 5.44 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006. Just 22 countries, home to 430m people, were deemed full democracies by the EIU. More than a third of the worlds population, meanwhile, still live under authoritarian rule.

The sharpest decline in democratic freedoms occurred in China. There discrimination against minorities in the western region of Xinjiang and other infringements of civil liberties, such as digital surveillance, contributed to a drop in the countrys score, from 3.32 to 2.26. India, the worlds biggest democracy, also slid down the EIUs rankings after the Hindu-nationalist government stripped the Muslim-majority region of Jammu & Kashmir of its statehood in August. The decision by the Indian state of Assam to exclude nearly 2m mostly Muslim residents from a tally of native citizensin effect removing their citizenshipalso contributed to the drop. The passage by Parliament in December of the discriminatory Citizenship (Amendment) Act suggests Indias decline will continue in the 2020 index.

Even full-fledged democracies were not immune to backsliding. After alleged links were discovered between senior government figures in Malta and the murder of Daphne Caruana Galizia, an anti-corruption activist and journalist, Joseph Muscat, the prime minister, announced his resignation. The political crisis was enough to demote tiny Malta to the EIUs flawed democracy category for the first time since the index began. In sub-Saharan Africa, where half of the 44 governments included in the index are categorised as authoritarian, 23 countries saw their democracy scores decline, whereas only 11 improved. The regions deterioration can be blamed in part on undemocratic elections, such as Senegals presidential poll in February, in which rivals of Macky Sall, the incumbent, were barred from running.

Still, some silver linings can be detected among the clouds. Frances Great National Debate, a series of town-hall meetings convened by President Emmanuel Macron in response to the gilets jaunes (yellow jackets) protests, received nearly 2m online contributions from citizens. The effort helped the country regain its full democracy status. (A drop of 0.12 points had caused it to slip into the flawed category in 2015). When peaceful protests broke out in Chile, over the countrys high levels of inequality, the government responded by promising to increase the minimum wage, raise taxes on the wealthy and hold a referendum in 2020 on a new constitution. But the reforms came with a cost. The demonstrations led to more than 20 deaths and thousands of injuries.

Download the EIUs full report here.

Read more here:
Daily chart - Global democracy has another bad year | Graphic detail - The Economist