Half of the worlds population lives in a democracy of some sort, although only some 14% reside in full democracies.

Despite the advances in democracy in recent decades, more than one third the worlds population still lives under authoritarian rule.

The relationship between the level of development (income per head) and democracy is not-clear cut. There is an apparent association; the simple correlation between our democracy index for 2008 and the logarithm of GDP per head (at PPP US$) in 2007 is just under 0.6. This may look even surprisingly lowit implies that in a simple two-variable regression of the democracy index on income per head, just over one third of the inter-country variation in democracy is explained by income levels. If we also control for oil wealth (with