We often take many things for granted.
Democracy is one of these.

Many of us grew up in a political context with press freedom, where citizens can freely express their opinions, they can organize multiple parties and elect their representatives.
But how long all this has been possible?

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The aim of this visualization is not to represent when and where democracy was born for the first time but to demonstrate that many people, like our parents or grandparents, did experience non-democratic rules in their lifetimes and 
many others are doing it right now.

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This data viz shows that just over half of countries are democracies today, and among these just a few are older than two generations. For other 90 countries, authoritarian government is not a memory, it is a reality.

Source: OWID based on Luhrmann et al. (2018), V-Dem (v12)- Ourworldindata.org