Sarah Repucci is the Vice President of Research and Analysis at Freedom House. She coauthored (along with Amy Slipowitz) Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.
You can’t protect basic human rights if you don’t have democracy. If you’re going to protect basic human rights, you need to have things like credible institutions that hold abusers to account. You need to have opportunities for the least advantaged in a society. The people whose rights are most at risk to be able to choose their leaders and choose leaders who will represent them and serve their interests. You need leaders that serve for the common good, not for their own personal gain.
Sarah Repucci
Key Highlights
- Global freedom has declined for 16 consecutive years
- How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is part of a broader expansion of authoritarianism
- Myanmar and other countries with major declines in freedom
- Bright spots like Ecuador and Peru
- How we can support democracy in the world
Podcast Transcript
This is a special episode for me. When I first began to study democracy, I read countless reports and briefings from Freedom House, because it does such a great job of looking into democracy in every part of the world. So, every year I still look forward to their flagship report Freedom in the World.
But this year the report feels even more important than usual. It was published on February 24th while Russia was invading Ukraine. Ominously the title of the Executive Summary was “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule.” For years authoritarian rule has expanded through executive takeovers and democratic backsliding. But it feels as though Russia has brought about a new phase in the democratic recession. They have begun the expansion of authoritarian rule through conquest.
Sarah Repucci coauthored the executive summary along with Amy Slipowitz. Sarah is the Vice President of Research and Analysis at Freedom House. Our conversation touches on many of the highlights of the report from big picture topics to specific countries such as Myanmar, Afghanistan, and Ecuador.
But before we begin I want to mention Democracy Paradox is part of the Democracy Group. A similar show in the network is Democracy in Danger. Their podcast touches on democracy in different parts of the world like Cuba, Myanmar, and Ukraine. They also cover concerns specific to the United States as well as their home state of Virginia. So, check out Democracy in Danger wherever you listen to podcasts. But for now this is my conversation with Sarah Repucci…
jmk
Sarah Repucci, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Sarah Repucci
Thanks so much for having me.
jmk
Well, Sarah, it’s great to see you again and it’s exciting to talk about the Freedom in the World report once again. But Sarah, I want to confess that every year, I believe that the state of democracy cannot get worse and every year I read your report and I discover that it really can get worse. So, why does the state of democracy in the world continue to decline year after year?
Sarah Repucci
So, you’re right. It does continue to decline. 2021 was the 16th year of consecutive decline according to Freedom in the World. I think there’s a lot of factors driving the decline. It’s also interesting to think that it has evolved over those 16 years. At the beginning, we were mostly seeing autocratic regimes that were tightening their grip on their own populations. Later into the decline, we started to see more free countries dropping back. In 2021, a main driver that I’ll highlight is the increasing cooperation that we’re seeing among authoritarian regimes who are attacking rights and freedoms. These autocrats have built a system, a system of economic and political support. And that helps governments that are seeking an alternative to democratic norms. The cooperation itself isn’t new. What is new is the impacts that we’re seeing on the ground in terms of the decline.
jmk
What struck me in the report was the fact that fewer countries had positive gains than – well, the report doesn’t even show the last time it’s had this few gains. It goes back to 2005 and what’s interesting about that is that last year a similar phenomenon happened. It was 28 countries that had gains and going all the way back to 2005 you couldn’t find a year where there were fewer gains. This year it goes even lower to 25. Why is there so little forward progress for democracy?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah, I do definitely think that gap between the gains and the declines is one of the signs that it’s not just continuing. It’s not reversing. And I think what’s happened is that we’ve shifted at the beginning of the recession. I would have said all we need to do is just help those few countries that have been in decline, turn them around, and the momentum will turn. We’ve almost reached a new status quo or a new state of affairs. And it’s not going to be as easy as just flipping those countries back. Countries are adopting new systems and we’re going to have to change the way that people are thinking in order to reverse the decline.
And I’ll go back to this point about cooperation. There was a time when if you were a country in transition just after the cold war, your most viable path towards acceptance into the international community to have economic support, aid, trading partners was to adopt democratic norms. And maybe you were just going through the motions, and maybe the government didn’t really believe in what they were saying, but they did it. And they let independent media function and they let civil society function, because they knew that they would have the backing of the U.S., of European powers. Those were the major powers in the world.
Today, we have a multipolar world and we have other powers that countries can look to for support. If you think about the Chinese Communist Party or Putin’s Russia, they’re providing economic support. They’re providing support for each other at the United Nations and in other international bodies. They give political support. Sometimes they give actual mercenaries on the ground and other autocratic regimes are doing this as well, not just China and Russia. The impact is that countries have this alternative that they can try out. And they are unlikely to ever be as successful as China, but they can strive for it and that is accelerating this tendency towards turning away from democracy.
jmk
So, Sarah, we’re recording today on February 22nd. And I’m saying that out loud, because I plan to publish on March 1st during the normal schedule for this podcast. And a lot is going to happen in the next week because Russia is invading Ukraine. I hope a lot does not happen, but it looks like this is going to be a week full of bad news. So, your report is called “The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule” and I think that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine symbolizes that it’s literally Russia expanding out its boundaries, expanding out its sphere of influence through military power in a way that we haven’t seen so aggressively in a very long time, at least not in Europe.
Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is that a consequence of the global decline in democracy? Is this one of the results? Is this a trend that we’re going to start to see more because we’ve done so little to defend democracy globally?
Sarah Repucci
I definitely think it’s intimately related as democracy has become less dominant as an ideology in the world. We are seeing these shifting norms and we’re seeing norms change in international institutions, norms change in diplomacy. The way that diplomats are talking, the responses that they give when certain things happen and if you think about when Russia first annexed Crimea in 2014 or even when there was an invasion in Georgia in 2008, the response from the, what we’ll call the international community, major democratic powers was somewhat muted. Those democracies had decided that they were going to take a step back and not be so involved in what was happening globally. And I think you are seeing the consequences of that today.
We don’t know, you and I today do not know, what is going to happen in Ukraine. We may know by the time we’re listening to this, but what we do know is that Russia feels much bolder than it did last time. It’s not just threatening the edges of Ukrainian territory it’s threatening the capital and ordinary people’s lives are being upended. It’s a very dangerous situation. That’s the most extreme. There are other consequences of the democratic decline. There’s economic instability. There’s an uncertainty about markets and we’re seeing that related to Ukraine as well. There’s a higher level of corruption.
When you don’t have as much democracy, you don’t have as much accountability for abuse. That means that leaders can get away with a lot more. And corruption is one of those impacts. we are seeing the impacts today across the front pages of the web, but I expect that we will continue to feel them in our everyday lives.
jmk
Now, you mentioned the lack of action when Russia annexed Crimea, when Russia invaded Georgia, even when Russia kind of did a stealth war within the Donbas region within Ukraine. Those are obviously precursors that deal directly with Russia itself, but a more recent event that happened that produced a real decline within that country’s Freedom House rating was in Afghanistan where the United States chose to withdraw. And there’s a strong argument to be made that we shouldn’t have engaged in the way that we did within Afghanistan. But the truth is that we did and our withdrawal had devastating consequences on the state of freedom within that country. It’s the second largest decline within your entire report.
Do you feel that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan sent a signal to authoritarian leaders about the United States’ and even just the West’s lack of interest in protecting democracies or maintaining its international commitments?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. So, as you said, the U.S. withdrawal sparked a massive decline in our ratings in Afghanistan, second largest after Myanmar. When the Taliban regained control, I’ll just remind everyone some of the impacts on our scores: the elimination of representative rule, the demolishment of constitutional rights for women and for minority groups, persecution of human rights defenders and independent journalists. I think a lot of people saw this as a sign that the United States wouldn’t have their back and there were other people who claimed that this was a sign that democracy is not possible in a country like Afghanistan.
And I would say that’s absolutely not true. Democracy has thrived in all sorts of cultures, all sorts of contexts. People are demanding it right now all over the world. The U.S. withdrawal wasn’t about democracy. It shouldn’t be confused with that. There are Afghans fighting for democracy in our country right now against even greater odds than they were before. What they need is technical support, resources, and they need to know that they have the faith of democracies advocates behind them.
jmk
Yeah, and let me emphasize that your report doesn’t take a stand in terms of foreign policy decisions. Your report just notes the facts that when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan there was a decline in freedom. And I think that that is, you know, indisputable. The rise of the Taliban taking over in governing over if not the entirety of the country, the vast majority of the country definitely has a negative impact on their political freedom. I mean, again, your report goes through the details of how you assess that.
But again, this is about just whether or not there was an impact on the rights and freedom in Afghanistan. We were going to have to admit that regardless if you think it was right or wrong to pull out, it’s going to have terrible consequences on the ground for a country like Afghanistan and the Afghan people.
Sarah Repucci
Yeah, exactly. We’re rating the state of freedom within certain borders for the purpose of this report. It’s not important to us whether that is caused by the government, whether that’s caused by a foreign power, non-state actors within the country. It’s how freedom is experienced by the people who are there.
jmk
Now something that you just mentioned was the fact that people in Afghanistan as well as throughout the world want democracy, believe in democracy. And I think that there’s no stronger evidence of that than the fact that autocratic leaders try to refer themselves as democratic. China, for instance, scores nine on the Freedom House rating, which is among the worst of the worst, but at the same time try to refer to themselves as a democracy with Chinese characteristics. In the report you write, “Misappropriation of the word is a testament to democracy’s widespread appeal. Yet this unfortunate practice has generated confusion, allowing opponents to simultaneously claim democratic credentials and argue that actual democracies are ineffective or hypocritical.” Sarah, how do autocrats claim that they have democratic legitimacy?
Sarah Repucci
So, democracy has been a word that’s been used by regimes of all types for decades. I think you can think of the German Democratic Republic which was East, not West, Germany. And governments are still doing this. Just this past December, the Russian and Chinese ambassadors to the United States wrote a joint op ed and they called both of their dictatorships democratic. So, this goes on. I’ll highlight two main ways that autocratic regimes lend themselves this kind of quote democratic legitimacy. Since the most obvious part of democracy is elections, almost every regime in the world goes through the motions of holding elections. What we have seen is that elections have been increasingly controlled. So, it used to be that voting day was the important day. As long as you could make sure that everybody voted for the ruling party, it would be okay.
Nowadays elections are controlled through the media. They’re controlled by jailing opposition activists. They are controlled through the campaign period and the way that that is managed. But still elections give a regime a certain kind of credibility. They are a powerful way for autocrats to claim legitimacy. ‘I was elected,’ even if that was a completely unfair race. Another way I’ll highlight is propaganda. It continues to be a major tool for lending credibility. Most citizens don’t bother to seek out news like this podcast. Most citizens are happy to just take what comes to them on TV.
And in many societies that is state controlled media delivering government messages and that’s an opportunity for machines like the Chinese Communist Party and the Iranian authorities and Saudi Arabia to deliver whichever message to their people they would like to deliver. And when you hear it over and over and it’s quite sophisticated – It’s not hit you over the head propaganda. It’s subtle and nuanced and it sounds convincing and people believe it. So, unfortunately, these regimes that we think of as autocratic because we have independent news sources, the populations in these countries frequently find legitimate.
jmk
So, Sarah, I thought it was kind of neat that you had z little section that was called, ‘What is Democracy,’ that just kind of walked through some of the basic ideas and some of the bigger picture concepts behind your report. It’s something I might’ve asked you this last year, but I really think that it’s important and that’s that Freedom House – you have two sides to it. One is to talk about political rights and the other one is to talk about civil liberties. And I think that’s great because it implies that they reinforce one another. So, why don’t you explain to us, how does respect for human rights really reinforce democracy?
Sarah Repucci
So, I would actually turn it around. I’d say that respect for democracy reinforces human rights and this is why you can’t protect basic human rights if you don’t have democracy. If you’re going to protect basic human rights, you need to have things like credible institutions that hold abusers to account. You need to have opportunities for the least advantaged in a society. The people whose rights are most at risk to be able to choose their leaders and choose leaders who will represent them and serve their interests. You need leaders that serve for the common good, not for their own personal gain. These are all things that you gain from having a democracy and that you don’t have in a dictatorship. And if you don’t have these democratic institutions and checks and balances in place, basic human rights are going to constantly be under threat.
jmk
I love how you explained it as democracy reinforcing human rights. I just think of those as two sides of the same coin, because leaders like Viktor Orbán try to pretend that they don’t necessarily go together or that liberalism and democracy don’t belong together. And as a result, we found that Hungary is turning into a country with neither liberal rights nor democracy. It’s not a choice between the two. It’s not something that you can take à la carte. I mean, eventually you’re going to have to find that they belong together. And if you don’t have one, it’s going to be difficult to have the other.
Sarah Repucci
Yeah, definitely. And I would certainly say a regime like Orbán’s Hungary is really just engaging in self-serving rhetoric. Right? They are doing the same thing that we were talking about. They’re taking the word democracy, because that’s considered a positive word and they’re giving it its own quote characteristics that are of course completely undemocratic, but that fit this narrative of we’re doing the right thing and, ‘Oh yeah, it just so happens it serves us.’
jmk
Speaking of Victor Orbán, he is somebody who has clearly adopted what you refer to in the report as autocratic norms. So, in the report you write, “The alternative order is not based on a unifying ideology or personal affinity among leaders. It is not designed to serve the best interests of populations or to enable people to improve their own lives. Instead, it is grounded in autocrats’ shared interest in minimizing checks on their abuses and maintaining their grip on power.” Sarah, can you tell us a little bit more about what you mean when you refer to autocratic norms?
Sarah Repucci
So, I’ll just push on that point about the desire to stay in power. And the desire to stay in power, regardless of whether that is what’s best for their country or for their population, there are many ways that you can stay in power. You can lock up your opponents, so there’s no viable alternatives. You can change the law, so that rotation of power is no longer required. You can declare a national emergency so that elections are delayed. But regardless of the methods, there are these common elements of maintaining rule. When autocrats commit abuses, which I think is inevitable, if they’re going to maintain power, any kind of internal or external attempts to hold them accountable will threaten their tenure.
So, finding ways to minimize the accountability is another characteristic of autocrats. What we have found is that today authoritarians are feeling emboldened to support each other in these attempts to circumvent their accountability. And as I was mentioning before this pops up in a lot of different forms and the results that we have been noting at least in 2021 have been a higher number of coups than we’ve seen in the last 10 years, increasingly stage managed elections and also violence. So, I think if the democratic decline isn’t reversed, we can expect more of this.
jmk
So, you mentioned about coups and executive takeovers. One democratic near miss, if you will, to kind of steal a phrase from Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Huq, was the assault on the capital. And many on the right try to describe that as just being normal political protest, typical political speech. But in your report, you obviously see a clear difference between that and moments where we see real political protest that actually spark democratic change and that are inherently democratic. Can you just take a moment and explain how the assault on the Capitol was different from other political protests that we think of more positively?
Sarah Repucci
Absolutely. So, on January 6th thousands of Americans violently attacked the seat of government in an attempt to overturn the election results. We had policemen killed and wounded. There were credible threats against the lives of elected officials, congressional staff, and journalists. And this happened at the provocation of the sitting President at the time. There were certainly some people who may have been there out of a genuine though I would say misguided belief that the election had been fraudulent. But January 6th was not normal and it was by no means a mere political protest.
jmk
Yeah. And it’s important to emphasize too that just the amount of violence that occurred in it just sets it apart. But the secondary thing is that the purpose of the protest and the reason why they went into the Capitol was to overturn an election as well. I mean, it was inherently undemocratic in its own nature.
Sarah Repucci
Yes, absolutely. And unfortunately, we continue to see the effects of it today. Faith in our electoral process has been shaken in a way that will probably continue for years to come. And that is going to have an impact on the upcoming midterm elections, on the presidential elections in 2024. It’s really a quite serious concern for our democracy.
jmk
So, I want to turn to another country and that’s one that we’ve already mentioned, but we didn’t really go into and that’s Myanmar. It was the country that had the largest decline, an even larger decline than Afghanistan. It had a 19-point decline in the report. Can you explain a little bit about what stood out about Myanmar’s coup?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. So, this is a 19-point drop on a hundred-point scale. There are very few countries that even changed by three points in a given year. 19 points is a huge decline in one year. The coup took place a year ago. It was just before a new parliament was going to be sworn in. The elections that had taken place the previous November were flawed, but they were credible. And the military’s preferred party had been defeated. The size of the decline was due in large part to the significant gains that Myanmar had made previously in our scores. Myanmar had had a democratic opening in 2008 when a new constitution was drafted and the country at that time began offering more space for independent media, civil society, political opposition, all the groups that we’ve been talking about.
But the military never stopped playing a significant role in politics. And when the opposition won the 2020 elections, the generals apparently began to prepare to use their power. They declared that fraud had rendered the elections invalid and they installed the Commander in Chief as the acting President. some of the effects that we’ve seen of this have been civil society and political leaders that have been arrested en masse. Over a thousand people killed during pro-democracy protests and thousands of others thrown in jail and tortured. I will note, however that the people in Myanmar are continuing today to fight back. Protests are taking place at great personal risk to these individuals. There’s also a very strong civic disobedience movement that at times has brought the entire economy to a halt. This resistance has denied the military regime legitimacy and it’s harmed its ability to function as a government. So, Myanmar is a story of hope for the future as well as decline.
jmk
One thing that I’ve heard about Myanmar is that before the coup they were obviously having challenges to be able to govern really as a full nation, to be able to respect minority rights. And what I’ve heard since the coup is that the pro-democracy movement has become much more inclusive of different groups, because it’s a highly diverse nation with multiple ethnic groups. And obviously there was real repression of the Rohingya people in the past. But it sounds like the pro-democracy movement today even though we don’t ever want something like what happened to Myanmar to happen, it sounds like they’re becoming even more democratic, even stronger. It sounds like they’ve learned a lot from this experience and hopefully if they can turn the tide that it becomes an even more democratic nation going forward into the future.
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. I mean the Burmese people are incredibly strong and they have really demonstrated that over these months since the coup. And I do think especially a country that has experienced freedom is that much more likely to fight for it again.
jmk
So, there are bright spots in your report. There are signs of hope and two countries, one is Ecuador, one is Peru, actually shifted from partly free to free which is a major milestone and something to be celebrated. You even have a pretty broad little excerpt about Ecuador that was really exciting and really informative. Can you tell us a little bit about Ecuador and why it was able to improve from partly free to free this past year?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. I mean Ecuador is definitely a genuine bright spot. The country started to turn around about five years ago. At that time, former president Rafael Correa’s chosen successor, who was President Moreno, he decided to make a break with his predecessor and institute a reform process. We saw things like a new process to appoint more independent judges, reduction of state control over the media, pardoning of convicted human rights activists from under the previous regime in 2021. We saw this steady improvement continue.
Moreno chose not to run in the elections that took place in February 2021. And his party’s successor lost the election. The opposition won and there was a peaceful transition of power. We’re quite hopeful that the change in Ecuador is going to continue. And we also feel that this could spark a trend more broadly in Latin America which has been a region where freedom has been quite hotly contested over the past few years
jmk
So, turning over to Peru. I’m a little bit curious on that one because Ecuador made a big gain. It actually improved by three points which again was one of the top improvers this past year. Peru seems like it was kind of on the tipping point between partly free and free and was able to kind of transition back over to free. Can you tell us a little bit about what Pru has done not just this past year, but over the past few years to kind of shift back into the classification of being a free country again?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. So, what we’ve been seeing in Peru has been quite a high degree of political instability and a very frequent change of government, many governments that have fallen, and new elections have been called. There were also clashes between the executive and legislative branches that were causing the governance system to fail to function. This year we saw less of that. So, this isn’t necessarily a strong sign of improvement as much as a lessening of a problem that we’ve been seeing for a few years. And hopefully if that continues, Peru will be able to rebuild and consolidate its democracy further.
jmk
So, to go along with that, Freedom House does provide a number of recommendations in its reports. Sarah, can you just give us one or two recommendations that really stood out to you? Something that you want to highlight that the world, different countries, even private business can do better to be able to support freedom in the world?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah. So, we divided our recommendations this year into three categories: recommendations for spreading democracy around the world; for countering the impacts of authoritarianism; and for strengthening democracy at home. But I think that the most important one to keep in mind is the support that is needed for people within a country, because it is only those people who can bring democracy. You can’t impose democracy from the outside. It needs to be homegrown, but you can foster it and support it. There are as we discussed millions of people around the world right now who are fighting and dying for democracy.
The kinds of support that they need include everything from what we would call technical support, which could be training or building bridges between them and fellow democracy advocates in other countries. Sometimes what they just need is financial resources. They may know exactly what they need to do. They may have the means, but they may not have the money to implement it. Whatever they need, those of us who value freedom and value our own freedoms should support them. We are in an interconnected world znd the more that we can do for each other, the more it will come back and benefit us.
jmk
So, that’s interesting that that’s the one that you chose, because I went back to a previous Freedom. in the World report from 10 years ago and Arch Paddington in their writes, “Even by itself, support for civil society would have the practical benefit of directing attention to those who are committed to making freedom a reality in the world’s dark corners.” So, let’s dig a little deeper into this one. When we’re talking about supporting civil society in the world’s dark corners, in places like Ukraine, or even Russia, or China, Hong Kong is a perfect one, what does it mean? What is it that we’re doing? Are we providing monetary support? Are we sending in people to be able to help them on the ground? What does it mean to support civil society in the dark corners of the world?
Sarah Repucci
So, it means, all of those things. Again, the main point is that we can’t sit here in the United States and bring democracy to another country. That country needs to figure out where they want to focus first. The people on the ground are the ones who are going to know it best and the ones who are going to be able to navigate the structures and are going to be able to have the buy-in to make it work.
So, we did a survey about a year and a half ago of democracy advocates all over the world. And one of the questions they asked them was, ‘If you could have some kind of support, what would you want?’ And most of them asked for some kind of technical support at the time. It was the beginning of the pandemic, so a lot of them wanted training on how to use web platforms or move their work to an online environment. Some of them just need broadband access or newer computers in other countries. They may need some kind of training that they don’t have in newer democracies. They might need training on how to build institutions or how to consolidate those institutions and keep them strong.
If you think about a country we didn’t talk about, Tunisia, the only success case of the Arab spring, which this year dropped back from free to partly free, I see this as a sign that the people there did not have the support they needed in order to keep up the momentum. And there are always going to be these forces pushing the other way. These forces are there in every country. They’re here in the United States and you need strong civil society and a dynamic population to keep up the momentum.
jmk
So, Sarah, a recent article in the Journal of Democracy was by Christian Welzel and in it, he writes, “In order to be stable and liberal, democracy must be understood and appreciated by its citizens.” And I think this gets back to the section that we discussed already, where you write about ‘What is Democracy?’ But in that is also the idea that people don’t only don’t understand democracy, but it feels as if people don’t appreciate democracy. Is there a lack of appreciation that exists in today’s liberal democracies for democratic institutions? And if so, how can we reverse that?
Sarah Repucci
Yeah, unfortunately I do think that people have become complacent in a lot of democracies. I think that there’s more awareness now than I would say there was six years ago. When I first came to Freedom House eight years ago, my friends thought I was crazy to go work for an organization that was working to support democracy. That changed on a dime in 2016, but still there is a complacency. There’s also just a lack of understanding of how democracy serves your interests, why it is, and a counter narrative coming from a lot of autocratic regimes saying autocracy serves your interests. A strong leader serves your interests. There is this misunderstanding of the fact that democracy actually is the best system for serving individual interests. And this is because it is not about one person in power.
It’s about serving the population as a whole. It’s also because when one person or one party stays in power for too long, there unfortunately is just an inherent corruption that happens. The rotation of power helps and also that democracies can correct themselves in a way that autocracies don’t when democracies make mistakes. And we have made mistakes. We can learn from those mistakes and new people can come into power and open up investigations and can develop new policies and can do things differently. So, it is hard in a world where our values are not threatened in the way that they were say in World War II or during the Cuban missile crisis. Those of us who have grown up in a peaceful situation, blessed with that life may not understand the value in the same way.
And I think what needs to happen is there needs to be a lot more public education, whether that’s through the schools, but also just through leaders talking about how democracy serves the population and the benefits that they’re getting. People don’t want foreign policy. What they want is changes outside their window and in their everyday lives, they want better jobs and they want better economic opportunities and leaders need to make those links. Elected officials need to speak to the benefits of democracy more clearly.
jmk
I agree entirely. I mean I say this a lot, but if democracy is government by the people that means that in a democracy the people actually have to govern. They actually have to do things. You can’t just talk about things and just have representation or just have elections. People have to be willing to work together, come to agreements, and actually solve problems. Thank you so much for joining me, Sarah. I look forward to your report every single year. So, I’m very excited to be able to talk to you again. Thank you so much for the work that both you and your entire team, I imagine it’s a lot of people working on this report beyond just you and Amy. Thank you so much for everything that you do at Freedom House and thank the team over at Freedom House for me.
Sarah Repucci
Thank you so much for having me, Justin, and I will definitely thank them on your behalf.
Key Links
Freedom in the World 2022: The Global Expansion of Authoritarian Rule by Sarah Repucci and Amy Slipowitz
Learn more about Freedom House
Follow Freedom House on Twitter @freedomhouse
Democracy Paradox Podcast
Freedom House: Sarah Repucci Assesses Freedom in the World
Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman on Democratic Backsliding
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More Information
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