Full Report (PDF)
Press Release - December 7, 1999

The Findings
Table: Tracking Polity in the 20th Century
About the Project
Table: The Fate of Empires
Methodology
Table: Democracy in the Twentieth Century

The Findings

Political scientists who point to the proliferation of democratically elected governments around the world since the mid-1970s refer to ours as the “democratic age.” But the data presented in this end-of-the-century report make clear that ours has not only been a century of bloody struggle between peoples and ideologies, but that it also has been a century of struggle for national sovereignty and for the individual’s democratic sovereignty within the state. In a very real sense, the 20th century has become the “Democratic Century.”

The findings herein are significant. They show a dramatic expansion of democratic governance over the course of the century. This political trend has been matched by significant economic progress associated with the expansion of market economies. Like economic progress, political progress has been uneven. But the general trends are hard to ignore. They reinforce the conclusion that humankind, in fits and starts, is rejecting oppression and opting for greater openness and freedom.

As depicted in the accompanying graphs and charts, the 20th century has seen a significant expansion of democratically elected governments and a dramatic expansion in the number of sovereign states. In 1900, there were no states which could be judged as electoral democracies by the standard of universal suffrage for competitive multiparty elections. The U.S., Britain, and a handful of other countries possessed the most democratic systems, but their denial of voting rights to women, and in the case of the U.S. to black Americans meant that they were countries with restricted democratic practices. The states with restricted democratic practices were 25 in number and accounted for just 12.4 percent of the world population. In 1900 monarchies and empires predominated.

By 1950, the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism, the post-war momentum toward de-colonization, and the post-war reconstruction of Europe and Japan resulted in an increase in the number of democratic states. At mid-century, there were 22 democracies accounting for 31 percent of the world population and a further 21 states with restricted democratic practices, accounting for 11.9 percent of the globe’s population.

By the close of our century liberal and electoral democracies clearly predominate, and have expanded significantly in the Third Wave, which has brought democracy to much of the post-Communist world and to Latin America and parts of Asia and Africa. Electoral democracies now represent 120 of the 192 existing countries and constitute 62.5 percent of the world’s population.

At the same time liberal democracies— i.e. countries Freedom House regards as free and respectful of basic human rights and the rule of law— are 85 in number and represent 38 percent of the global population. The growth of individual political autonomy (usually accompanied by a broader expansion of freedom) is reflected in the adoption of key post-World War II international documents, particularly the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights. A growing global human rights and democratic consciousness is reflected in the expansion of democratic practices and in the extension of the democratic franchise to all parts of the world and to all major civilizations and religions. At the same time as the individual has gained greater sovereignty, so too have many formerly disenfranchised peoples and nations attained statehood. For the second major trend of the century is the proliferation of sovereign states. In 1900, there were 55 sovereign states, 80 in 1950, and today there are 192.

In 1900, of the 55 sovereign states, 13 were extensive empires, the largest of which were the British, the Russian, the French, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Ottoman. Thirty-three of today’s countries were parts of other states and 113 were under imperial and colonial rule.

Sovereignty, of course, is no guarantee of democracy. Nor is democracy an absolute guarantee of respect for human rights. But the three trends have generally progressed together in this century. Because democracy has expanded rapidly over the last 20 years, many new democracies are fragile and the gains could well be reversed.

And while our century’s clamor for democracy and freedom has not always been peaceful (regrettably, it has frequently met with brutal repression), it has contributed to the prospect of a more peaceful world. For history indicates that stable and established democracies rarely war with one another.

DEM = Democracy
RDP = Restricted Democratic Practice
CM = Constitutional Monarchy
 TM = Traditional Monarchy
AM = Absolute Monarchy  

About the Project

This end-of-the-century project represents an institutional effort by Freedom House, the non-partisan organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties around the world, to assess trends in the political systems of the world over the course of the 20th century.

Freedom House is well suited to this task. For over forty years, Freedom House has been issuing annual reports on the state of freedom in the world. Central to that work is the yearly study Freedom in the World. We have applied the same rigorous analytic standards employed in our surveys to the compilation of this study of the state of the world’s political systems at the start of this century, in mid-century and at the 20th century’s end.

What this study is: This study examines at three equidistant points in the 20th century the kinds of political systems that have governed the world. It divides countries on the basis of their political practices into the following:

Democracies: These are political systems whose leaders are elected in competitive multi-party and multi-candidate processes in which opposition parties have a legitimate chance of attaining power or participating in power.

Restricted democratic practices: These are primarily regimes in which a dominant ruling party controls the levers of power, including access to the media, and the electoral process in ways that preclude a meaningful challenge to its political hegemony. In the first half of the century, states with restricted democratic practices included countries which denied universal franchise to women, racial minorities, and the poor and landless.

Monarchies: These are divided into three groups: constitutional monarchies, in which a constitution delineates the powers of the monarch and in which some power may have devolved to elected legislatures and other bodies; traditional monarchies; and absolute monarchies, in which monarchic power was exercised in despotic fashion.

Authoritarian regimes: These are typically one-party states and military dictatorships in which there are significant human rights violations.

Totalitarian regimes: These are the one-party systems that establish effective control over most aspects of information, engage in propaganda, control civic life, and intrude into private life. Typically, these have been the Marxist-Leninist and national socialist regimes.

Colonial and imperial dependencies: These are the territories that were under the domination of the large imperial systems that predominated in the first half of the century.

Protectorates: These are countries that have by their own initiative sought the protection of a more powerful neighboring state or are under the temporary protection and jurisdiction of the international community.

In short, this study represents an attempt to assess the organizing principles by which countries are governed and how their leaders are selected.

What this study is not: This is not a study that seeks to replicate the work of Freedom House’s annual survey. The Survey assesses not only the political system in a country, but also the country’s human rights performance, civil society, economic freedoms, and rule of law. Readers interested in these more detailed and nuanced descriptions can find them at our website: www.freedomhouse.org. They can also refer to the reliable country reports that emanate from such non-governmental human rights monitoring groups as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. And they can read the annual U.S. State Department reports on country human rights practices.

Methodology

The data for the political typology of the world in 1900 and 1950 have been assembled by Freedom House researcher Jason Muse and reviewed by Freedom House’s senior staff. The data for the year 2000 are the product of Freedom House’s annual Survey of Freedom, a major institutional research effort.

The findings were reviewed by a team of scholars that consisted of Professor Orlando Patterson of Harvard University; Professor Seymour Martin Lipset and Professor Francis Fukuyama, both of George Mason University; Dr. Fareed Zakaria, the Managing Editor of Foreign Affairs magazine; and Dr. Marc Plattner, co-director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies and the editor of the Journal of Democracy. Adrian Karatnycky, President of Freedom House, and Arch Puddington, the Vice President for Research, also took part in the review of the data.