The word democracy comes from the ancient Greek dēmokratia, combining dēmos, meaning the people, and kratos, meaning power or rule, so it literally means rule by the people.

The term first appeared in Athens around the 5th century BCE, after Cleisthenes’s reforms in 508 BCE, often credited with establishing the first true democracy, in which citizens participated directly in decision-making.

Athenian democracy was far more limited than the modern idea.

Only adult male citizens could take part, excluding women, enslaved people, and foreigners, so out of a total population of perhaps 250,000 to 300,000, only about 30,000 men actually held political rights.

Even among those citizens, participation was uneven, since wealthy men had the free time to attend the assembly and hold office while poorer citizens often couldn’t afford to leave their work.

Some offices were filled by lot rather than election, which sometimes put inexperienced people in important positions, and the assembly itself could be swayed by powerful speakers and crowd emotion, leading to rash decisions like the execution of Socrates in 399 BCE and the massacre of the Melians during the Peloponnesian War.

Because it was a direct rather than representative system, it only really worked at the scale of a small city-state, and it proved unstable, collapsing briefly twice due to oligarchic coups.

For all its influence, Athenian democracy was exclusive, vulnerable to demagogues, and capable of majority tyranny.

Democracy wasn’t unique to Athens or to Europe.

Many societies developed their own forms of popular governance independently, including ancient India, Phoenicia, city-states in Mesopotamia, tribal democracies in parts of Africa, and systems among Indigenous peoples in North America and Australia.

The Igbo people of southern Nigeria practiced a form of village democracy in which any adult male could speak in the assembly.

Later, the medieval Icelandic Commonwealth and its Althing, established in 930, became one of the oldest surviving parliamentary institutions, while the early Venetian Republic and San Marino, founded in 301 CE and often cited as the world’s oldest surviving republic with a constitution dating to 1600, carried the idea forward in their own ways.

Still, for most of history these were isolated experiments rather than any kind of global norm.

For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, democracy remained the exception rather than the rule.

In 1900, barely twenty countries could be considered democracies, and by the mid-1970s that number had only grown to about 40.

The real turning point was the so called Third Wave of Democratisation, which began in 1974 and accelerated sharply after the Cold War ended in 1989.

By the late 1990s, for the first time in human history, a majority of the world’s population lived under some form of democracy.

In the modern era, the United States is often called the world’s oldest continuous democracy, having sustained a democratic system for more than 200 years, alongside other long-standing democracies like Canada, which dates to 1867, New Zealand, and various European countries that gradually expanded voting rights over the 19th and 20th centuries.

Which country truly counts as “oldest” depends on whether one measures by continuous governance, universal suffrage, or the founding of parliamentary institutions.

Today democracies outnumber autocracies worldwide on paper, though many face real challenges, and the exact count depends heavily on which organization is doing the counting and how strictly it defines democracy.

The V-Dem Institute found that as of late 2025, there were 92 autocracies out of 179 countries analyzed, against 87 democracies, meaning autocracies narrowly outnumber democracies by its measure.

The Economist Intelligence Unit applies a stricter standard, counting 61 authoritarian regimes out of 167 countries, and when its 32 hybrid regimes blending democratic and authoritarian features are added in, 93 countries in total fall short of being a full or flawed democracy; by this measure, the EIU classifies the United States itself as only a flawed democracy.

Where the best and worst ratings land varies somewhat by index, but the extremes are fairly consistent.

The EIU Democracy Index 2025 ranks Norway first, followed by New Zealand and Denmark, with Iceland and Finland close behind, while the V-Dem Institute similarly places Denmark, Sweden, and Norway at the top, with these nations scoring near-perfect marks for civil liberties, governance, and political culture.

At the other end, Afghanistan ranks lowest among countries measured, scoring just 0.25 out of 10, with Myanmar, North Korea, and Turkmenistan also consistently near the bottom due to total institutional collapse or severe repression and a near-total absence of electoral processes and civil liberties.