V-Dem Report Says Uganda Is An Autocracy

Uganda is among the worst autocratic countries in the world according to the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute’s eighth annual Democracy Report 2024.

The V-Dem Institute which is hosted by the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg in Sweden, released the report titled “Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot” this week.

It says Uganda is among the countries where electoral autocracy is downgrading democracy. Electoral autocracy is considered the most common form of dictatorship.  

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) brings together close to 4,000 country experts, researchers, and project coordinators to assess the health of democracy in almost every country and territory around the world.     V-Dem’s research findings, in both country briefs and yearly democracy reports, synthesize a staggering amount of data from around the world.   

Electoral autocracies are regimes that hold multiparty elections but their quality or conditions around them are not sufficient to be classified as an electoral democracy.

V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index measures the quality of elections; the actual degree of freedom of expression and the media; associational freedom, including civil society; suffrage; and the degree to which power is actually vested in elected political officials.

The latest report said freedom of expression was the worst affected component of democracy and worsened in 35 countries in 2023.      

It notes that almost all components of democracy are getting worse in more countries than they are getting better, compared to ten years ago. Further  , the report says elections were the second – deteriorating in 23 countries and improving in 12.     

This core institution of democracy used to be relatively unaffected. Freedom of association, including civil society, is the third most deteriorating component – 20 countries are restricting this right while only three are expanding it.               

Overall, the report said the level of democracy enjoyed by the average person in the world in 2023 is down to 1985 levels; by country-based averages, it is back to 1998.     

According to the researchers, since 2009 – almost 15 years in a row – the share of the world’s population living in autocratizing countries has overshadowed the share living in democratizing countries. 

Autocracies Vs Democracies

The report says the world is almost evenly divided between 91 democracies and 88 autocracies.  Nevertheless, 71% of the world’s population – 5.7 billion people – live in autocracies – an increase from 48% ten years ago.

Electoral autocracies have by far the most people – 44% of the world’s population, or 3.5 billion people. 29% of the world’s population – 2.3 billion people – live in liberal and electoral democracies. In East Africa, the report lists Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya as Electoral Autocracies. 

The irony is that Uganda and most of its East African counterparts have been holding regular elections under multiparty systems. South Sudan, Sudan, and Somalia were categorized among closed autocracies.  

   

In December 2022, Scholars like Sabiti Makara from Makerere University said democratization has been stalled in the period after multiparty politics was reintroduced in 2006, even when Uganda increasingly has adopted the formal trappings of liberal democracy and rule of law.

They argued that Uganda’s persistent autocratization must be understood in the context of President Museveni’s highly contested and unequivocal will to maintain power.

Sbiti Makar in a paper co-authored by Vibeke Wang said the power of the legislature and the judiciary to hold the executive to account introduced with the constitutional changes opening for multiparty rule has gradually withered in the wake of executive encroachment on their authority.   “The development has been propelled by increased use of autocratic lawfare, thus compromising the courts’ ability to safeguard opposition rights and impose accountability. Although the international community has held considerable leverage vis-à-vis the Ugandan government throughout the period, it has been both unable and unwilling to use it. Instead, Museveni has been able to strategically use international relations to his own advantage, shoring up domestic support,” read part of the paper

Sub-Saharan Africa

In Sub-Saharan Africa, most people (82%) reside in electoral and closed autocracies like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Zimbabwe. This makes it the third most autocratic region worldwide.

However, 20% reside in the four “grey zone” electoral autocracies Benin, Mauritius, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone. Most of these four, however, lean towards qualifying as certain autocracies. 

Meanwhile, 18% live in electoral democracies such as Ghana and South Africa, out of which 6% are found in three “grey zone” electoral democracies: Botswana, Kenya, and Zambia.       

The Seychelles remains the only liberal democracy in the region. Four of the region's countries have lost the status of liberal democracy in the last decade: South Africa in 2013, Mauritius in 2014, Ghana in 2015, and Botswana in 2021.   

Four countries in this region also changed regime type in 2023. Three of those –Niger, Mauritius, and Sierra Leone – from electoral democracy to electoral autocracy, and one, Burkina Faso, from electoral autocracy to closed autocracy.        

The region with the largest number of countries progressing on democracy is Sub-Saharan Africa. Five countries (or 10% of the region) are democratizing: Benin, Lesotho, The Gambia, The Seychelles, and Zambia. 

Yet, the region also has the largest number of autocracies – thirteen (25% of the region): Botswana, Burkina Faso, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Comoros, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, and Sudan.  

Electoral Autocracy The number of electoral autocracies has been growing markedly in numbers over the past 50 years, from 36 in 1973 to peak at 65 the 2012, and 55 in 2023.     Much of this upward trend is explained by many closed autocracies liberalizing in the 1980s and 1990s and starting to hold multiparty elections.         

Some became democracies, but many stalled as electoral autocracies, for example, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Mozambique, Pakistan, and Uganda. For the past 30 years, electoral autocracy has dominated as the most common regime type in the world.  The researchers said they see a possible shift in trends of regime change.    

Democracy is now at levels equivalent to around the year 2000 in Sub-Saharan Africa and there are no stark differences between the population-weighted and country-based measures of democracy.  

There were deteriorations occurring in the region during the last five years, in part due to coups d’état in Gabon and Niger in 2023 and military takeovers in five other countries in the region since 2020 – Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Sudan, and Chad.