DPI 2019
Democracy Perception Index 2019
The Democracy Perception Index (DPI) is the world’s largest annual study on democracy, conducted by Latana in collaboration with the Alliance of Democracies, to monitor attitudes towards democracy from around the world. This study focuses specifically on public perception, motivated by the premise that democracy’s survival depends primarily on how citizens perceive it. Results for the DPI are based on nationally representative interviews with 177,870 respondents from 54 countries conducted between April 18th and June 6th 2019.
Key insights
79 %
of people around the world say that democracy is important to have in their country. This is a majority opinion in each country surveyed, ranging from 92% in Greece to 55% in Iran.
45 %
of all people living in democracies think their countries are not actually democratic. Globally, 41% say they do not have enough democracy in their country – in democracies 38% say the same.
Explore the data
To better capture the public dissatisfaction with the state of democracy, the study measured the gap between how important people think democracy is and how democratic they think their country currently is. This gap is called the Perceived Democratic Deficit: the larger the gap, the more dissatisfied people are with the current level of democracy in their country.
The countries with the smallest Perceived Democratic Deficit – where people feel like their governments are providing the level of democracy that they think is important to have – are Switzerland, Norway and Denmark.
The countries with the largest gap in democratic expectations are Venezuela, Algeria, Venezuela and Poland.
Overall, there is no country without a gap, meaning there is no country where people think that the level of democracy they have is as high or higher than what they think is important.
Methodology
This report presents an overview of a study conducted by Rasmussen Global and Dalia Research in the Spring of 2019. The sample of n=177,870 online-connected respondents was drawn across 54 countries, with country sample sizes ranging from 1,000 to 4,000. Nationally representative results were calculated based on the official distribution of age, gender and education for each country’s population, sourced from most recent and available data from Barro Lee & UNStat, and census.gov. The average margin of error across all countries sampled is (+/-) 2.77%.
In collaboration with
