Democracy vs. Freedom

How many people in the world have the vote? How many people are free? We crunch the numbers in this graphic.

By: /
12 May, 2014

Today is the 9th and final day of polling in India’s general election. 814 million people were eligible to vote in the election, making it the world’s biggest by a good margin. That got us thinking about the current state of democracy and freedom in the world today. This is often measured by country – how many democracies, how many dictatorships – but if the true basis of democracy is the individual, we wanted to consider things at that level. In the graphic below, we used data from Freedom House’s 2014 Freedom in the World report, to consider how many people have the vote and how many people have political rights and civil liberties.

Democracy

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