The other 120 electoral democracies represent an additional 31% of the world’s population. The remaining 49% of the world lives in non-democracies.

After initial progress, freedom and quality of democracy scores have stagnated or declined.

Their average GDP growth over the past 30 years has been consistently above the global average and until 2014 they regularly outperformed China on a per capita basis.

All five made impressive gains across multiple indicators of human development and did so in tandem with democratization, underscoring the virtuous circle of political and economic liberalization, in contrast to China’s authoritarian model.

All five democracies have performed better on this indicator than the average of all non-democracies, but China still surpasses all five in this category.

All five democracies outperform the average of non-democracies on this indicator.

All five underperform on a variety of measures of liberal order and human rights policies.