 Hello everyone, very welcome to this session. I hope you still have energy after a long day but this is definitely going to be an interesting session so hopefully the conversation will wake you up. The purpose of this conversation is to discuss the global state of democracy and I'm Annika Silvaliander, Head of North America and Permanent Observer of International Idea to the United Nations. For those of you who don't know, International Idea is an intergovernmental organization with the mandate to strengthen and advance democracy worldwide. We're thinking and do tanks so we conduct research on different aspects of democracy and we provide technical assistance to democratic stakeholders in new and emerging democracies. And we are very, very happy to be here today at the Third Global Summit for Democracy, to reflect on the state of democracy and how it has evolved over the past three years since the first summit was launched in 2021. And the objective of this discussion is to have a joint reflection on the state of democracy globally among leading experts in the field of democracy assessments, drawing on both expert opinions and public opinion data. And the idea is that each one of us that assesses the state of democracy using slightly different methodologies and approaches that we can present the results of our research and our key findings but that we can, after each of the presentations, also draw some joint conclusions and to provide really a comprehensive, holistic picture both from the point of view of experts and from the point of view of citizens on the challenges and opportunities that democracy is facing globally and also across different regions of the world and also how specifically how they have evolved in the past three years since the first summit was launched. The idea of this discussion is also to inform the conversation that will be held tomorrow on day three of the summit. And beyond the joint reflections, this is also an opportunity for us to collaborate. We're all operating in the democracy assessment space and we don't have enough opportunities to work together towards common goals and to share our work with each other. So I'm really looking forward to sharing this conversation and having this conversation with esteemed colleagues that are working on these issues alongside us. So we have with us, of course, international idea and it's not myself. I have a colleague that is going to present online. She wasn't able to join us in Seoul, Sima Shah. She will present the results from the Global State of Democracy report that the international idea puts out every year based on our data set of democratic quality that covers 173 countries, the Global State of Democracy indices. But we also have colleagues from Freedom House, from the Vietnam Institute and from the Pew Research Center. So let me turn to the first panelist and we're going to start hearing from my colleague Sima Shah who will present the findings from the Global State of Democracy report. Then we will hear from Freedom House, we will hear from Vietnam, we will hear from the Pew Research Center and then we'll have a conversation about what we discussed. But the first part of the panel is going to be to just hear what the key findings of the reports are and many of the democracy reports that will be discussed today actually they are fresh off the press, both Freedom House launched their report last month I think and Vietnam published theirs I think last week and Pew I think you have recently published over the course of February and March two relevant reports that you will be presenting. Our report from International Idea is a little bit older, we're working on the next one, so our came out a few months ago at the end of last year but we'll also be sharing some highlights of another research project that we are working on that hasn't been launched yet but we'll give you some highlights. Let me just introduce also who else is going to be on the panel, apart from Sima Shah who is my colleague she's the head of the Democracy Assessment Unit joining us from Stockholm and she leads the Global State of Democracy report. We also have Katie Larouk from Freedom House, Deputy Director for Policy and Advocacy. We also have with us Richard White, Director of Global Attitudes Research, a Pew Research Center and we also have Stefan Lindbergh, Professor and Director of the Vedem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. So let's start with Sima Shah and who will provide us with an overview of the key findings of the Global State of Democracy report. Over to you Sima. Okay, thank you so much Anika. Good afternoon everyone, thank you so much for being here and allowing us to share the findings from our latest Global State of Democracy report. The report is entitled The New Checks and Valences and it provides an overview of global and regional trends related to democratization and it dives deep into the role of countervailing institutions in bolstering and protecting democracy even in the most challenging of contexts. So before I tell you the findings it's helpful and important to understand the conceptual framework that underpins all the analysis that we do and that's up here on the screen. This is our definition of democracy, this is what we use as an international idea. As you can see we divide the concept into four broad categories. Those are representation, rights, rule of law and participation. Each of those has several associated factors and underneath all those factors are all the source indicators that we use. Altogether we measure 157 individual indicators of democratic quality and performance across 173 countries starting in 1975 and ending at the end of 2022. This is an annually updated quantitative data set so the new data set will be coming up in just a couple of months. Our report is also based on a relatively new tool co-funded by the EU called the Democracy Tracker. This tool is qualitative and it is updated on a monthly basis also covering those 173 countries and it uses the same conceptual framework and now for the findings. First across every region of the world, democracy has contracted with declines in at least one indicator in half of the countries in our data set. Examples include freedom of religion in Nicaragua, freedom of association and assembly in Italy and civil society in Sri Lanka but these are just of course a handful of examples. Second, net declines at the country level outnumber net advances for the sixth consecutive year. This is the longest period in which we have seen this pattern since we began collecting data. Third, three areas where we see some of the most widespread declines include the bedrock institutions of democracy. Those are credible elections, effective parliament and access to justice. What you see on the screen are several boxes. Each box represents all the countries in our data set, all 173. And then the gray shows you the number of countries that have not shown any significant change in the last five years. Red indicates the number of countries that have declined in that period and blue indicates the number of countries that have advanced in that period. So as you can see there's been a lot of stagnation but where there has been movement most of it unfortunately has been in declines. In addition to the concerns regarding elections, legislatures and the courts you can also see that states are struggling to respect people's civil liberties and to guarantee independent judges that can deliver objective verdicts. In order to understand what is happening in a more in depth way we devoted the report to a concept of countervailing institutions. That means the set of governmental and non-governmental institutions that balance the distribution of power within the formal structures of government but also ensure that people's priorities are regularly featured in decision making. They encompass what we all traditionally understand as checks and balances. But they also include organizations and bodies that keep that public perception, public set of priorities in decision makers' minds and actions. So these include popular movements, they include civil society, ombuds offices, anti-corruption commissions, election management bodies, ethics bodies, etc. The graphic that you see on the screen illustrates the roles and relative strengths of these institutions emphasizing the importance of their independence as well as the importance of cross-institutional collaboration. When we dig into the data we see that in the area of representation, credible elections and effective parliament were two of the most widely affected aspects of democratic performance. COOS in western Africa especially account for some of these issues but there are also problems in less severe contexts including things like polling station irregularities, skewed playing fields and media pies. These problems have been compounded by weak parliaments that struggle to contain executive overreach. One interesting new finding related to new research that international idea is about to launch is that the public is also doubtful about credible elections. So in 11 of 19 countries surveyed in a pilot study we found that less than half of respondents had faith in the credibility of their last elections. This is something really important that we need to think about going forward. At the same time it is important to remember that there are positive examples. For example, Malaysia and Latvia stood out in our data set for having experienced advances in the credibility of their recent elections. Second, in 2022 no country experienced a significant improvement in the performance related to rights compared with its own performance five years prior. You can see this here if you look at the bar for 2022 at the end where you see only red showing only declines. Performance regarding civil liberties was a specially warning with notable drops in core democratic rights like freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of the press impacting every region of the world. Again, some of our new research shows that people around the world struggle to feel safe in the expression of free speech. This is especially the case for minority groups and low income groups. When we compare those groups to a representative population we find that low income groups and self-identified minorities feel even more restricted in their ability to freely speak. At the same time there have been encouraging developments. In Slovenia the public voted in reforms to strengthen the country's independent broadcaster and we have seen several instances in which rights related to gender and sexuality were expanded. This happened in a diverse set of countries including Mexico, India, Finland and Spain. In all of these cases countervailing institutions played key roles. The collaboration and cooperation between parliaments, courts, the public and the media were key to bringing these victories to reality. We have also seen dynamic movement with regard to participation. Here you can see that there are several countries that score relatively well with regard to participation even though their performance in rights is pretty average. We've circled Indonesia where you can see that it scores in the high range for participation. Even though it's score for rights is what we would consider to be on the lower end of mid-range. This is the case not just for Indonesia but for many countries and we believe that it's maybe one of the best testaments to people's enduring commitment to engagement. And now what should we do? First, it is clear that we need to refocus on the basics of innovation around strong legitimate elections and effective legislatures. To promote and protect credible elections, we need to encourage and facilitate EMBs to work together with other countervailing institutions. For example, the media and the courts to facilitate easy public access to the entire electoral cycle. This must come together with more transparency in parliaments and more concerted efforts by parliaments to communicate with the public and make their proceedings open, make parliamentary questioning open and we need to encourage parliaments to engage in peer-to-peer lessons learned as well as cooperation and collaboration with other countervailing institutions. With regard to rights, civil society organizations are critical and must continue to lead in producing data as well as reporting disaggregated statistics that show the world where progress and declines are happening. We also need strong independent and impartial mechanisms that can protect the activists at the front lines. With regard to rule of law, it's important to consult with judiciary and judicial service bodies to make them part of the conversation and to co-create mechanisms with them that allow for the reporting, investigation, and sanctioning if necessary of actions that harm judicial integrity. And then finally with regard to participation, cross-institutional collaboration is critical. Actors like the media, the courts, the legislatures, and independent agencies must make civil society groups priority partners. It was, as you will see if you read the report, in several examples that these group working together is what was key to success. I'm going to leave you now with just some snippets from the latest set of updates in our democracy tracker. What you can see here is that there seems to be a trend in the month of February, unfortunately related to repression. We see that through laws targeting civil society, targeting opposition political parties, free media, and it's clear the freedom of association and the freedom of expression continue to be at risk. I just want to emphasize what I've said here is very, very high level. I haven't been able to go into any level of detail. I hope you will read our report and engage with us if you have questions. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Sima, for this excellent overview. And it was also really interesting to hear some highlights from our latest research project that is going to be published in a few months. So basically what Sima and her team have been doing, we have for a couple of years now produced the global state of democracy report, which compiles data from 12 different data sets that we aggregate into a conceptual framework of democracy. Most of the data from these 12 data sets and a large portion of them come from freedom, actually, but also from freedom house, it's expert opinions generally. So what we piloted this year was in 19 countries we piloted public opinion surveys, but using our same conceptual framework because we know there is a lot of public opinion research out there, both by Pew and the barometers, for example, or the World Value Survey. But what we try to do is to assess along the same dimensions as in our conceptual framework what the views were of experts and comparing the views with citizens, with the public at large. But I think what was really interesting in this project also is that we also looked at the views of self-identified minority groups within countries to see if their perceptions change from the public at large and from the experts. So there were really interesting findings coming out of that report. And Seema gave some highlights, but I'm really looking forward to seeing the full report once it's out and I hope you will read it too. So now we'll turn over to Freedom House. Katie Larouk, Deputy Director for Policy and Advocacy. We want to hear from you what's the latest findings of your Freedom in the World report that is entitled, The Mounting Damage of Flawed Elections and Armed Conflict. Over to you, Katie. Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Thank you for bearing with us for a long day and rooms without windows. I appreciate you all coming to our session. I think it's arguably one of the most important sessions, and so we're grateful to have you here. As Anika said, my name is Katie Larouk. I'm Deputy Director of our Policy and Advocacy team. Freedom House has three different teams. We have a research arm and I'll be sharing the findings of our research team's Freedom in the World report, which we published on February 29th. So just a couple weeks ago. And we have a robust programmatic team, actually. So we also work in countries all over the world, including by providing emergency assistance to human rights defenders that are facing threats by authoritarian regimes. Freedom House was founded in 1941. We're quite old in the United States. And our Freedom in the World report specifically is in its 51st year. So we have quite a bit of trend data to be looking at. We examine the state of political rights and civil liberties in 210 countries and territories around the world. We use a 100 point scale to do this. And we base our methodology largely on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And so it's quite actually interesting today to hear all these different methodologies online and kind of see where all of our different research overlaps and where we might disagree on some points. Last year, we were hopeful at Freedom House and perhaps we were hopeful more broadly in the community that we would see in 2023 the net positives outweigh the net negatives in terms of how freedom fared. 2022 was a hopeful year where the margin was just one point difference. And so we entered 2023 with a great sense of hope. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but 2023 was a tough year for our friends in democracies and in non-democracies. So unfortunately, 2023 saw the 18th consecutive year of democratic decline. Political rights and civil liberties worsened in 52 countries. 22% of the world's population, so quite a significant figure. Only 21 countries or 7% of the world's population saw any improvement according to our methodology. Today, only 20% of the world's people live in what we consider to be free countries. The top five declines, according to our findings, were in the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, Niger, Tunisia, Peru, and Sudan. The greatest improvements were in Fiji, Thailand, Nepal, and Liberia. As Anika said, the title of our report, there were really two major things that in our view drove the decline in 2023. That was election manipulation and armed conflict. I'll start with elections very briefly, and I'll try to keep my remarks short, perhaps to save some time for questions and more of a discussion with the audience. But as I said, 52 countries declined in 2023. Elections and performance around the elections drove down half of those scores, so the elections were the reason why half of the 52 countries declined. So that's pretty staggering as we enter 2024, the year of elections. Unfortunately, this is a growing trend, so according to our research now, there's 35 countries around the world that do not have free and fair executive or legislative elections, 35 countries. 18 years ago, that was 21 countries, so we're seeing this growing number of countries that in our view no longer have free and fair elections. The irony, and I think Doug Retson shared this at the lunch session, is that authoritarians still go through the ritual of holding elections. There's still quite a lot of value in the perceived legitimacy of electoral performance, and they are resorting to a range of methods to try to skew the outcomes in their favor. Thankfully, those methods do not always work. But in 2023, we found five types of electoral manipulation that took place, and we are watching for these again, unfortunately, in 2024. The first one is controlling the competition. Second is changing the rules. Third is leveraging state resources. The fourth, challenging the outcome. And the fifth, interference by foreign and non-state actors. I won't go through all of these just for the sake of time, but I do wanna highlight a few examples. The most widespread tactic that we see, and we often see this in democracies, relates to the use of state resources and institutions to tilt the playing field. A classic example of this from last year was the Polish elections, whereby the ruling law and justice party scheduled a parallel referendum to try to drive voter turnout, and thankfully a coalition of opposition parties was able to generate sufficient turnout to sort of counterbalance these efforts by the peace party to skew the playing field. The most alarming, again, speaking about the topic of elections and things that we're watching, the most alarming tactic is one that's rising in prominence, and that's attempting to overturn voting results or preventing elected officials from taking office. I think, unfortunately, many of us saw what happened in Guatemala last year with President-elect Bernardo Arevalo, who clearly won the presidential election, and the corrupt political establishment tried to prevent him from taking office. There was a widespread response to that, and he ultimately was successful, but there was certainly this attempt. We're also concerned about non-state actors and, of course, foreign autocrats that are undermining elections as well. So, as I said, elections were a driving factor of decline in 2023. Unfortunately, armed conflict was as well. So you may recall from our methodology, we score 210 countries and territories, so we're also looking quite carefully at what's happened in Nagorno-Karabakh this past year. This is a region between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The Azerbaijan military entered Nagorno-Karabakh and ultimately dislodged the local government and forcibly displaced 120,000 ethnic Armenians. As a result, this territory lost a total of 40 points in our scoring, again, out of 100, so it was a quite significant decline. Of course, many of us are probably thinking about what's happening in Gaza, and that's no exception. So we are concerned about those indisputed territories around the world as they often don't have the same rights and representation as others in recognized territories, and therefore their ability to articulate and defend themselves amidst these sort of foreign threats is challenged. Lastly, I think it's important to note the Kremlin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, right, which is another act of authoritarian armed conflict which is continuing to threaten freedom and democracy in Ukraine. We've also seen that civilians bore the brunt of a civil war stemming from the 2021 military coup in Myanmar and brutal fighting between rival military and paramilitary factions in Sudan, which continues. I'll stop there with that hopeful presentation about armed conflict and elections and look forward to the discussion. Thank you so much, Katie. Really interesting to hear it. Of course, I read the report, but it's really good to hear from you the key highlights of it. Really good report. If you haven't read it, please do. And as you can see, there were some parallels already with what SEMA presented, the concerns with the decline in elections. We'll see what the other presenters see in their data as well. But I think something very unique that Freedom House's report provides is this perspective of the contested territories. I think you cover 15 in your report and you dedicated a whole section to conflicts in those territories. So I think that is something that stands out that's very unique and that we're really grateful for you to highlight those conflicts that are many of them ongoing and very severe. We'll turn to our next speaker, Stefan Lindberg, Professor and Director of the Wiedem Institute of the University of Gothenburg. Wiedem produces the largest data set on democratic quality, I think, in the world in terms of the numbers of indicators. And those, that data, I mean all of our data is publicly available, including Wiedem's. And it provides lots of inputs for other research that is done in the area of democracy and for other indices. And as I said, we are drawing a number of our indicators both from Freedom House and from Wiedem. So thank you for making that accessible. And you also produce a democracy report each year that builds on your data and you just produced one last week. So now we wanna hear all about the key findings from that report. Over to you, Stefan. Thank you, Annika. I'm gonna, where do I turn this on? Hello? It's on, good. Very good, all right. So the Wiedem data set is 31 million data on democracy, 600 indicators, 70 indices. We use that among other things to produce the annual democracy report. This is the last one, one and a half weeks old at this time. Democracy winning and losing at the ballot. Winning because there are cases like Brazil where democracy is winning at the ballot. But as already alluded to and you guys know, there are also places where democracy is losing or autocracy is being reinforced solidified as last weekend in Russia. I'm just gonna give a few highlights here in a few minutes. So some of the main findings from this report and you guys in the back, I didn't bring binoculars to hand out but feel free to move forward if you want. So here's our liberal democracy index. Brownsville's zero to one, the average in the world. And here you have the mean development of the third way of democratization and then sort of a little sliding back here. This is based on country average use, right? Where you weigh on just having a government over a certain territory. Which means that a country like the seashells with 90,000 inhabitants weigh as much as India. With 1.4 billion people. But democracy is ruled by the people. So we think it matters how many people are affected by a certain level of democracy. So here is the population weighted and there you can see that the sliding back is much, much greater. And it actually goes back to 1985 in terms of world average. And here is them weighing by territory. So how much democracy there is sort of in the world in terms of territory. Again, the sliding back is greater. And here is by GDP. Just to give you a sense of like how much democracy is losing in the world in terms of economic power. We put a lot of weight on the weight. We focus a lot on the population weighted measures. And by that count we have now, I know Freedom House, you talk about 18 years of consecutive declines. By this, at least 15 years where the countries autocratizing their share of the world population has greatly overshadowed the share in democratizing countries. So you can look at this. You can slice the data and analyze it in different ways. Here is one sort of important metric here, I think. So if you look at the countries that are democratic or there are autocratic, the share of the world population that live in non-democracies, if you like, has gone up quite dramatically in the last 20 years, up to 71% now. And just like Freedom House found the idea I talked about, others have talked about, we also see now that elections, this core institution of democracy is being undermined, attacked in more and more countries. So here's a graph, not at the liberal democracy index, but the components of democracy, right? Different indices for them. And here, this is 2013, only 10 years ago, and clean elections was getting better in 23 countries at the time, and getting worse in only 10. And these are all statistically significant and substantial changes. We only talk about changes and differences that are statistically significant. So 10 years ago, clean elections was improving still in many more countries than it was declining. If you're above this diagonal line, like most of the components are there, then you're getting better in more countries than it's getting worse. Now compare this to 2023, boom. And worst of all out here, Freedom of Expression, we know that, that's been going on for a long while with media freedom and so on, but now also clean elections have been moving down and out here, getting worse in 23 countries, getting better in only 12. So it's been reversed in 10 years. And this is a new trend that is very marked this year, and we haven't seen this in previous years' reports. We have now this year 60 countries that are in change, episode of change, going up or going down. 42 of those are autocritizing countries, countries that are sliding back if you like. And meanwhile, the number of countries democratizing only 18. You see the difference here over the last 30 years. If you look at it from this perspective, at least the last 20 years, you've had a marked steep increase in the number of countries autocritizing and the democratizing countries going down. So by that metric, it's at least 20 years. You could even argue that it's maybe 30 years ago started to see this increase, the wave of autocritization. Now, over a third of the world's population live in these countries that are sliding back on democracy. And quite radical change. Here's another way of looking upon it. Okay, so that 42 countries autocritizing, 28 of them were democracies when this sliding back happened. Autocracies, electoral autocracies can also get worse. Like Russia has gotten a lot worse since it was when Putin came into power in the late 1990s. But 28 of the 42 were democracies when they started. Only half are still democracies. The fatality rate is high. And the number of countries going up, the share of the world population going up, so it's no matter how we slice the data, things are getting worse if I put it that way. And quite dramatically so. Now, we have learned more about autocritization in the last few years. And there are at least two types. They're sort of the standalone, think India, stable democracy for a long time, and then it starts to decline. But then you have these guys. You think of it as failed democratization. They were going up and then start to go down, or failed. We call them bell turn. So in the interest of time here, just look at the top 10 of the bell turn autocritizers in terms of magnitude of change. Now you really need binoculars out there. So where we are here, South Korea, Armenia, Indonesia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, El Salvador, Libya, Haiti and Myanmar. So you see they start at very different levels and they also end up at very different levels. So they come in very different contexts. But eight of the 10, sorry, seven out of the 10 are no longer democracies. And we think these are important cases to compare for the policy practitioner community, compare these with successful democratization where they went up and stayed there. And then these guys had started the same journey but then dropped down. Why? I don't have the answer but we need to find out that answer. And they're similar with the democratizing countries. There's another group among the democratizing countries that are U-turns, right? That were actually autocritizing, right? So you have Brazil, Lesotho, Maldivesambia, North Macedonia, Bolivia, Benin, Tunisia, Thailand, sort of kind of borderline cases but okay. And these are interesting because they were autocritizing and then something happened and they turned around. Again, should compare them with those that went down like Turkey and then stayed down there, right? Then we can get clues to what can we do in terms of programming and interventions to support developments where you stop the autocritization and turn it around. Okay, just this final note here on the 2024 year of elections. Everybody knows now here in here, record number of countries, record share of the world population. It's never been that much. Okay, so it's worrying. It's a make or break year for democracy. I'll show you something here that makes that even more worrying. We have, of the countries holding national elections this year, we have 60 of them in our data set. 31 are in countries that are in decline where this year election this year can really be a make or break because the critical elections as Annika also talked about, I think the elections can really be used by autocritizing incumbents to break democracy and really speed up the process of autocritization but it can also be used to turn it around like it was done in Zambia not long ago. And there are very few countries, only three that are in democratizing country contexts. So I think that puts another perspective on this year of election and how worrying it is. Thank you for a few minutes of giving some highlights from the report. Everything is available on our website of course, including the data and thank you for listening. Thank you so much Stefan for this really interesting presentation and for walking around and energizing us now when it's late in the day. Also thanks for all these new concept that you've introduced to help understand the phenomena that we are observing and also differentiate and nuance some of the developments that we're seeing. So just have to remember the U-turns and the bell turns and all of that but once I get the grasp I think they are very useful concepts. So we'll turn now to our last presentation and then we'll have an interactive discussion. We're now gonna turn over to Richard White, Director of Global Attitudes Research at the Pew Research Center. If you don't know Pew and Richard will talk more about it. They produce public opinion data and so Richard and his team have been looking at how people perceive democracy and if that will figure out for ourselves is that aligns with what has been shared in terms of the expert opinion on this. You have come out recently with two reports so we're looking forward to hearing some findings from both of them. Over to you, Richard. Great, thanks so much, Annika and thanks to all of you for being here. It's great to be a part of this session. Great to have a chance to share with you some of these findings from the two reports as you mentioned, Annika. The team I directed at the Pew Research Center is the Global Attitudes team and what we do is we study public opinion around the world on a variety of different issues including a lot about democracy. So these two reports that we've released over the past few weeks, look at attitudes towards democracy and in particular a lot of it focuses on the concept of representation. And broadly speaking what we see is that people continue to endorse representative democracy as an ideal but they're often pretty frustrated with how it's working and they don't feel like they're being represented the way they want to be. So we'll walk through a few slides here that highlight some of those key findings from those recent reports. First, just a little bit of background on the survey. As you can see here, it was conducted last year in 24 countries around the world. We always want to do more countries. We're doing a 36 country survey right now and then pursuing some of these same issues in that research. The main thing I wanna emphasize right now about the methodology is that in every country where we work, we get a representative sample of that country's adult population. So in terms of age, gender, education, income, other demographic factors, our sample very much reflects a country's adult population. And I'm happy to talk more if you have questions later about the methods, about how we go about doing this kind of work around the world. So I'll start off with a set of questions that we and other survey researchers have asked over the years. We basically read people a list of five different kinds of government and we asked them for each one, would this be a good way or a bad way to govern our country? And these numbers you see here, are all median percentages across the 24 nations that we polled. So as you can see, representative democracy is a pretty popular idea. Median of 77% across these nations say it's a good way to govern. Although that number is actually down a bit from the last time we asked these questions back in 2017. So we've seen support ebb a little bit for representative democracy. Direct democracy is also a popular idea. Support for expert rule where experts make key decisions has actually increased since 2017. I think there's probably something at least to do with the pandemic and the role that experts played during the pandemic in many countries. Less support for rule by a strong leader who doesn't have to bother with courts or a parliament. But you still see on the whole over a quarter saying that could be a good way to govern. That is higher in many of the countries that we surveyed. It tends to be higher on the right side of the ideological spectrum and that has increased in many countries since we last asked that question in 2017. Less support for the idea of military rule although even there you see pockets of support. So overall democracy is a popular idea but often people aren't as committed to it as we might think or we might hope. And many, perhaps too many in many places are open to more authoritarian approaches. And they tend to be especially open to authoritarian approaches when they are unhappy with the way their democracy is functioning. And what we see in this survey is that a lot of people are unhappy with elements of their democracy on these two charts. Each circle essentially represents one of the 24 countries that we surveyed. So across the 24 nations, a median of only 40% say they're satisfied with the way democracy is working in their country. You can see not many countries beyond that 50 percentage point line, right? So not many places where a majority say, I'm happy with the way our democracy is functioning. We also ask about national leaders. On the whole, again, not many of them getting majority support, especially in high income nations included in the study. So on these questions, on lots of questions that we ask, we see a lot of frustration with the way democracy is actually functioning, a lot of frustration with political leaders. So why is that? Well, it's probably a lot of things, right? But part of the issue is that people don't feel represented. The top one here you can see is a question where we find that 74% across the nations in the study say that elected officials in their country, excuse me, don't care what people like them think. And I think this is kind of finding that it's easy to dismiss, it's easy to say, well, people have never liked politicians, right? But I've increasingly come to believe that we should listen to people when they say things like this. Because what they're telling us is that a key component of the way representation should work isn't working, right? This connection with their leaders is not as strong as it should be and people don't feel heard. Down to the bottom question about political parties, is there at least one political party in your country that represents your views? Across the countries in the study, 42% say no, there's no political party in my country that really represents me. That's less than half, but that's still a pretty large number of people who feel unrepresented by a single party in their country. So a lot of frustration here, again, pops up in lots of questions that we ask, with leaders, a lot of frustration with parties and other institutions that ideally should be representing the views of citizens in the political space. We wanted to also see not only what people's complaints were about the way democracy is working, but get it some ideas that might improve things. So this is a set of questions where we gave people several different backgrounds of elected officials and say, would it improve policies in our country, make them worse, or would things stay about the same if we elected more people like this? So I think here what you really wanna look at is the balance between get worse and improve. So overall, what we see is that there's a lot of interest in electing more women, more people from poor backgrounds, and then maybe especially relevant to the themes of this summit, electing more young people to political office. More mixed views about electing more business people and more union members, and then on the whole less enthusiasm for electing more people with strong religious beliefs. Now, something that you see is that there are pretty big ideological and partisan differences when it comes to what kinds of representatives would improve the way politics is working in various countries. And I pulled out the United States as an example, the place where we see a lot of partisan differences on this set of questions. So if you look at Democrats, they're much more likely to wanna see more women, more young people, more people from poor backgrounds, and more union members elected to public office. Republicans on the other hand wanna see more religious leaders, more business people elected. And I pulled out the US as an example, but you see similar ideological divisions on these questions across most of the countries where we conducted the survey. So when it comes to what would improve things, what kinds of diversity do we need, there are some ideological differences. But I think the main takeaway really is that people do wanna see a different mix of backgrounds represented among elected officials. They wanna see more diversity in a number of different ways among elected officials in their country. And then one other thing we did to try to get ideas about what might improve things in the countries in the study was we asked people an open-ended question where in their own words, they can answer the question about, what do you think would help improve the way democracy is working in our country? And they had a lot to say. They had a lot to say about what might make things better. First and foremost, improving political leadership, having leaders who are more accountable, more competent, more attentive, less corrupt. That was kind of the top answer in most places. But people also talk about government reform. They talk about changing institutions, things like term limits. Ideas about direct democracy came up in this set of responses that people wanna see. Institutional reforms of various sorts. And people also think that citizens have a role to play, right? We need to expect more from citizens. We need to have more informed, engaged, tolerant citizens who are also more respectful of one another. And then finally, people also mentioned the economy. In many places, especially the middle-income nations in the study, people say that in order to have a healthy democracy, we need to have a strong economy. We need to deal with problems like having enough jobs. We need to deal with inflation. We need to invest more in infrastructure and other various economic factors. So people do have some ideas about the kinds of things they wanna see happen in their country. So that's a very quick run-through of the findings. But again, I think both studies point to these criticisms that people have about the way democracy is working, but they still value democracy. And they still have ideas about the kind of things they would like to see change in their country so democracy does function better. Thanks. Can you hear me? Oh yeah, perfect. Okay, very, very interesting presentations all of you. Some similarities in terms of the findings, especially when it came to the key declines that we are seeing in the expert opinion data, the electoral declines that we have seen in recent years. And then Richard coming in with the very interesting perspective of, what do people think? That there is still quite significant support for the idea of democracy, but declining support for the delivery of democracy. So what I wanted to do before we open up for questions, I'm sure you all have a lot of questions in the audience. I just wanted to pick up on some of the things that you described and dig a little bit deeper. I think this is the third summit for democracy that is held, the first one was held at the end of 2021. You all come out with, well, at least Freedom House and Freedom Come and Idea comes out with reports on democracy every year. Pew, it's not periodic like that, but frequently. So the first thing I wanted to ask is, when you look at the past three years since the first summit for democracy, what do you see are sort of the main changes that have happened since then? Are there some challenges and, but also let's remember there's some positive advances as well, maybe they're not as many quantitatively as the declines, but there's some advances. So what are the key challenges and opportunities that you think have changed to the global democracy landscape since the first summit? And what are some of them that persist? I'll start off with Stefan who's next to me. Okay, one, the number of countries autocratizing is in steep incline. And it's just the wave of autocratization is, if you like, accelerating. Two, which I already mentioned that you talked about is that the core institution of elections is now being undermined to much greater extent than we used to see two, three years ago. Three, I think we have learned how vicious the enormous increase in spread of disinformation and misinformation is for democracy, driving polarization that is being used to undermine democracy. And that's why we've campaigned your opponents as enemies, enemies of the nation that can legitimize that we attack their civil society organizations, their media, and so on, and eventually put them in jail, or worse. So those would be my three things that we have seen in the world, but we also learned these three years. I totally agree with what Stefan has said, and I'll add perhaps four more variables or sort of threats to freedom that Freedom House is tracking. Partly based on what happened in 2023, but these are also sort of nascent issues that have had an impact over the last couple of years, but we're watching them with some concern that they might actually get some legs and do more damage. The first is the role of organized crime and gang violence. So we're looking in Ecuador, for example, a presidential candidate was assassinated this past year after leaving a campaign rally. We're looking at, in Mexico, we're seeing widespread violent crime, kidnapping and extortion, gang violence in Haiti, of course, is in the news again for important reasons, concerning reasons. And so this is an area where we see, one of the things that I should stress is that freedom in the world measures not so much a government's performance, but how people live their day-to-day life, how they experience freedom, so that is impacted not just by the government's performance, but by external variables as well. So when you see this sort of destabilizing force within a country, we're quite concerned about it, and we think this is on the rise. The second issue is the freedom to practice a chosen religion being suppressed. We think that this is probably going to get worse before it gets better, and we're keeping an eye on it. In fact, we saw this in the United States this past year. There have been a number of attacks against Muslim Americans in the aftermath of what's happened between Israel and Gaza, and so it's a space that we're watching closely. The third is a crackdown that's been quite devastating, actually, on LGBT rights around the world. There's been a number of restrictive laws, frankly, through many different regions around the world. I'll highlight Russia, which is a country that I work on quite a bit. They passed extensive anti-LGBT policies already, but this past year, they banned the quote-unquote international LGBT movement, whatever that means, as extremist. So we continue to see a growing amount of repression against our friends in the LGBT space. The fourth and final sort of threat to add to this already perhaps a bit gloomy discussion is the treatment of migrants and refugees. I think we're seeing them being arbitrarily deported and detained. We can look at what happened in Pakistan last year, where the Pakistani government rounded up about, I think it was half a million Afghan refugees that had fled since the Taliban came back and they were pushed back into Afghanistan. So these are four areas that I think we need to add to the mix and keep an eye on. Thanks, yeah, I mean, in terms of our data, I think it's been a fairly negative trend as well. That question that we ask about how satisfied are you with the way democracy is working in your country? It hasn't moved in a negative direction everywhere, but in many countries just over the past couple of years, we've seen a downward trend on that question. I mean, one thing to keep in mind when you're talking about public attitudes is that how people feel about democracy is gonna be influenced by other things too. So we've also seen some pretty negative economic ratings over the past few years of people have experienced inflation coming out of the pandemic. So that's part of the story too. And the general public mood hasn't been great in a lot of places. And that affects in lots of ways how they feel about the way democracy is working. Inflation slowing down in some countries, maybe that will lead to a bit of a rebound in the public mood. Maybe that'll lead people to feel better about the way that democracy is working too. The one other thing I would add that just to follow up on things you've said, and stuff on about polarization, is that certainly a big factor in many of the countries that we look at. We regularly see in our data on all sorts of different issues, severely polarized publics. You see it somewhat here in South Korea. You see it in particular in the United States. The United States really stands out often in our data as being the most divided, the most polarized society. There's scholars in the US who write about partisanship essentially becoming the sort of mega identity in the United States that encompasses other forms of identity and leads people to kind of otherize their political opponents. So I would totally agree that polarization is a big part of these negative trends that we see at least in a lot of places. Thank you so much for these perspectives. And let's not forget Seema, who's joining us from Stockholm. Do you wanna give some perspective on what do you see as the key evolution between the first summit for democracy and now in terms of the global democracy landscape? Sure, so instead of repeating data findings, maybe it's helpful to take a kind of step back because one of the things I did notice in the recent past is louder and more aggressive pushback against the narrative of support for democracy from countries that are powerful and continue to be democracies although they're declining in several ways like India for example. And you get this narrative that democracy is being unilaterally imposed by the West in an unfair way and that support for that idea is growing. And I think it's going to just become worse as time goes on unless we find a way to be more inclusive in the way we talk about it and the kind of support that we show for it. That's one thing. And then to pick up on some of the stuff that we saw in our own survey and what Richard pointed out in his findings is on the micro level nationally also. I think we need to think more about neglected indicators of democracy that relate to marginalization and social inequality and how certain parts of the population suffer disproportionately and don't have access in the way that your average citizen does. I think those are important points. Great, thank you so much Sima. Really interesting perspectives and if I can try to summarize there were a lot of issues and it looked like you coordinated before because you added, you didn't repeat. But clearly some of the things you said come from the first finding that you pointed out Stefan which is this increase in the scale, the scope and the speed of autocratization. And there are a number of issues that you've pointed out that come from that main issue. I mean the tax on LGBT rights, the tax on religious freedom and maybe something treatment of migrant and refugees, maybe that's more in the social sphere but clearly those are very linked to the autocratization trend. But there are other factors that have been pointed out that stem from more complex issues like the rise in organized crime and gang violence. But that impact on the perception of democracy and the public perception of democracy to deliver and also pushes people towards authoritarian leaning leaders that propose strongman solutions and authoritarian solutions to address those issues. And we've seen that in El Salvador for example. And then issues linked to disinformation and polarization which have increased in the past years and which are likely to increase further with advent of AI. I have one more question and then I'm thinking we should turn to the public to ask if you have any questions. But since we're here at the Summit for Democracy and we've assessed also how things have evolved since the first one, I wanted to ask all of you and we'll start with Sima since you're on the screen so we don't forget you. What role do you see as the Summit for Democracy playing in addressing the challenges that we have all noted but also in harnessing the opportunities? Over to you Sima. I think one of the ways the Summit is in a unique position is that it brings together not just experts but representatives of states who care about these issues. And so it is a chance, a unique chance I think to grab hold of the narrative and shift it in the direction that we want it to go by showing unity around some of the areas of democracy that have been neglected which could bring more players to the table in support of democracy. The other thing that our report found was that despite all the declines we've seen in so many different indicators we have seen continuing strong engagement at the public level. People are still participating and want to participate despite the fact that the rights that facilitate that participation are often being attacked. They still, they keep going despite that. So I think finding ways to support those enthusiastic members of the public who keep support alive is important especially in non-democratic contexts or contexts that are just challenged by conflict and some of those things. And then the final thing to watch I think is the fact that I think Katie said it migration and the way refugees are being treated. The recent deal struck between Italy and Albania which outsources migrants who land in Italy and are being shipped to detention centers outside of the EU in Albania. I think it's a dangerous thing. And I think as time goes on these cross-border issues are gonna start to become more relevant for how we think about democracy. So we need to start thinking about that now. It's not just measuring within the borders of a country. Some of these transnational issues are gonna start to become I think start to have an impact on the way we conceive of democracy and we should start being prepared for that. Thank you, Sima. Definitely very good point on migration and also how the migration agenda not just how migrants and refugees are being treated but how this is picked up and used by political parties and politicians to gain points and attract votes. So clearly a mixture of political and social issues. Stefan, do you wanna go ahead and give us your perspective on the summit for democracy and what it can do? Yeah, I wish it could do more. I think there's definitely signaling effects of things like Blinken's strong statements yesterday in sort of in support of democracy and other leaders speaking out as well. And there's certainly value in us meeting here over this day, share information and so on. But as far as I know, very few of the commitments that have been made in previous years have been met and there's no accountability mechanism for sort of keeping count on that and putting governments up there on the stage and say, why didn't you do this? I wish to summit, so I'm more expressing my frustration. I think I wish to summit did more in terms of galvanizing democracies together and on actionable items and less talk and more action. Couldn't agree more. So I think I have a number of thoughts. I've been working on the summit for democracy since the first iteration of it and I've seen it evolve over the years. I think Seema's right. I think we're losing the narrative of why democracy matters and why we need to rally around the democratic flag. I think authoritarians given the state of our information integrity, the mis and disinformation, the foreign authoritarian influence that we see in our countries, authoritarians would love us to believe and I think many of us are starting to believe if we look at Pew's data that democracy is ineffective, that maybe it would be great to have a strong man leader to rally around to fix things. It's more efficient in autocracies. I wish that, you know, sort of echoing Stefan, I wish the summit had done more to be more energetic and inspire those that were there to really see the value of democracy and that's not to say the summit can't do that. In fact, I think it has done it in a lot of different ways but to have that be the overarching narrative I think would be impactful. Another thought that I have, I agree. So the first summit for democracy required government commitments. I think this was a really unique and actually really important piece of the summit, you know, structure and what it was designed to do. To Stefan's point, you know, they've not all been followed through on and then the second and third summits, you know, didn't have this commitment feature and I think that if the summit continues we should bring that back. That's a really important way of holding governments accountable, holding ourselves accountable as watchdogs and maybe even requiring commitments of those of us in the audience and here on this stage of what is civil society committing to do but I think we need to hold each other to a higher standard given the stakes that we're dealing with and the third and final thing I'll say, you know, the summit for democracy could be a really important rallying cry for governments to act with more consistency and we need to live up to our values as Seema said. We very much, you know, toe the line and do the right thing in some instances and then democracies are completely absent when other atrocities around the world take place whether that's because of, you know, some sort of short-term perceived security or economic interest. I think that that is, I think we need to call each other out when we do that and act in accordance with our values because every time we fail to do so we embolden autocrats. They think they can get away with it in fact, very often they can and they do and so we need to be consistent. We need to work together and we need to raise our own bar and expectation. You know, this is the first summit of a summit for democracy that I've been a part of but I do think there's real value in bringing together, you know, various stakeholders working on similar issues, right? Whether it's government or NGOs, researchers to make sure we're not all, you know, talking past one another. I think sessions like this are valuable so that we're seeing what the common themes are between the various research projects we're involved in or maybe what the differences are as well, right? So we're not just putting out our reports and trying to get attention for them and not seeing what the sort of, you know, we're learning from the collective efforts of all of us. So I think there's value to those kind of things. I think there could be more stakeholders involved with the summit and I think that keeping the conversation going is always a challenge for gatherings like these, whether it's to, you know, keep commitments measured and monitored or to keep, you know, the conversations that get started from sessions like these over the course of the years, to me at least always the challenge for these kind of events. Thank you. So really good points from all of you. What I heard you saying is that summit for democracy is a valuable space bringing us all together. Government, civil society and the intergovernmental organization, academic institutions, it connects us but it needs to do more and that hopefully future summits can also bring back in the elements of commitments which was an important feature of the first summit and that we haven't seen emphasized as much in this summit and that really turns the words into action. But that this space of dialogue and meeting is valuable in and of itself as well. I think I just wanted to point out two things. One is a shout out to the Global Democracy Coalition that has been running in parallel to all the in-person sessions here in Seoul events around the world with civil society organization, private sector companies, academic institutions that were not able to make it to Seoul but that wanted to participate in this conversation and we facilitated international ideas convening the coalition but many of you here on the panel are part of the coalition. There were around 40 events that were happening virtually or hybrid in many different countries of the world. And then when it comes to the commitments we would like to have seen countries make commitments. The jury is still out on that because we tomorrow with countries will make their statements so maybe there will be some countries that will make commitments so we'll have to see what comes out of that. But also to show governments the value of commitments the partners in the Global Democracy Coalition made their own pledges and we made a total of 123 pledges. Please, Alessandra correct me if I'm wrong I think 60 organizations made pledges and we presented them on Friday last week we'll be happy to share that with you to show that the importance of everyone making commitments to protect democracy and strengthen democracy, not just governments. I wanted to see now if maybe there are some questions in the public to any of the panelists. Great and if you can give your name and the organization you represent, thanks. Hi, I'm James from the Asia Center. Hi, Seema, good to see you on the screen as well. I thought whether we could reflect on actually the status of the Summit for Democracy in the sense that this is all administration based. We have seen many versions of it come and go as different US administrations come and go, it shifts. If we look at this part of the world, whether it's the Bali Democracy Forum or the Korean Democracy Foundation or even TDF as governments come and go, that shifts. So the question here is, is a state led democratization approach useful or even working? Or do we have to flip it and give the steer to civil society because that remains a constant? So I thought it would be interesting for us to kind of think through that, thank you. Who wants to take this question? I'll take a swing at it. As someone who's spent probably too much time in my professional life thinking about the Summit for Democracy, I appreciate your question and I like your question because it is worth taking stock of where we are as we think about will there be a fourth summit? There's been a lot of incredible work, especially from the Global Democracy Coalition coming out of all of this. What do we do going forward? Where I would slightly, perhaps I don't know if I'm disagreeing with the premise of your question but one of the things that I think we need to try to save as we think about the future of the Summit for Democracy effort is the fact that it initially through the cohort process brought governments to the table with civil society in a way that I think was really valuable and unique. Where we go from here will be interesting but I don't want to lose that that equal participation in advancing these initiatives that we had through this initial Summit framework. I think the beauty of civil society and why we're all here in Seoul is because we will continue to be active and work together and share but what we always lack is sort of having the government listen and to do things with us and to respond and so that's the piece that I think we really need to fight to protect. I think civil society can and should probably offer a vision for what the fourth summit should look like. I'm not saying that we should take ourselves out of the equation but I think that to be successful we need governments at the table. Frankly, I think there's a lot more that they could do. Great, does anyone else want to answer that or? Well, I just add a little bit of a reflection on that as well I think along those lines. I mean no doubt in any democracy civil society is absolutely essential and that it's vibrant, active and can provide some what we often call diagonal accountability together with the media and civil society and sort of between elections hold leaders accountable and push for issues and so on and activate people and train people in sort of schools of democracy and all that. I mean so, but at the end of the day it's gonna be governments that provide the right to for civil society to exist or deny it, right? And the same with other, democracy is a set of institutions that we sometimes refer as rights or liberties but and procedures and in the end it's the government that either provide it or don't. So I don't see how the governments cannot be sort of centrally in the equation and what are lacking not only the commitments but maybe means to hold them accountable for those commitments. Great, yeah, go. Seema, did you wanna say something? Yeah, I was just gonna say that kind of picking up on what both speakers have already said in response to James's question was just that I also don't see a world in which we're gonna be able to make tangible progress without governments being at the center but I think civil society has a role to play in mobilizing public support for accountability for the promises made or showing focused demand for change or accountability. And so I think if we focus civil society's power on that mobilization that could have a real impact I think going forward. So I think the challenge is to connect the findings from the summit to those organizations which probably can done through the GDC. Very good. One more question over there in the back. Oh, go ahead, Danielle. Sorry, I have my reading glasses on. No worries, I'll be very brief so that we can maybe fit both questions in. So it was very helpful to hear kind of from the peer research of just kind of getting that snapshot. We conduct a yearly democracy perception index which I have to say is very much in line so this is good and bad news at the same time. One thing we've noted and Seema you've actually referred to this is we've seen economic inequality for the last two years as 69% as one of the biggest challenges to democratic satisfaction. So the issue followed by corruption was closely right after. But on the bright side and maybe this is a way we can reflect on is that satisfaction. Well at 57% which I think is where civil society can really jump in and try to help improve that faith in democracy was at 84%. So this is something where we can see yes, maybe the perception of it on the daily basis might not be there but I think the idea is still there and it's still something worth fighting for and continuing within the summit for democracy because once again if we're not doing it then who's gonna continue that torch? So I just wanted to also maybe see if you guys to the question was do you see economic equality continuing to be a challenge over the next couple of years and how can we maybe incorporate that more into some of these themes and topics at next year's summit? Yeah, I'll just say as you said I think our findings from our surface are probably somewhat similar in that people still embrace the idea of democracy and it's more that they're frustrated with the way it's actually functioning. And I do think inequality in a variety of different ways is part of that story, part of that frustration. It sort of leads people to question the basic fairness and justice of society and it's economic inequality it's other forms of inequality in society too that lead people to think that this democracy that promises equality isn't working the way it's supposed to when people are not denied and when people are not given their fundamental rights when people aren't sort of given a fair shot in society that's the kind of thing that leads people to be frustrated with way it's working and ultimately can undercut your commitment to democracy. Great, thank you so much. The question in the back. Thanks, I just wanted to pick up this gentleman's question. I'm A.N. Walker from UDemocracy in Australia. I like the question. I just wanted to flip the other way. You said there's too much state and government involvement. Where are they? We work with 50 odd organizations like us around the world. We asked them about the summit. We can't find a politician who cares. So my provocation to the panel isn't that the problem. We've got politicians responsible for democracy. That's like putting a rabbit in charge of a lettuce. The temptation is too great. Isn't that where we need to drag them to the table? I'd love every country to have four to six politicians here. Is that what we're getting wrong? Yeah, so maybe you're saying it's like this summit for democracy that there's a day for civil society and so on, right? On its own, right? It's like, I should say, yeah. You have your day and that's not gonna be dangerous or lead to conversations. I think there have been some, not the politicians, but we have government representatives and government agency representatives. But I agree. I agree completely. Would have been much better if this room was half full of politicians and high level state agency representatives. I like your question, Ian. It's also nice to meet you in person because we've been on many a Zoom call. So I think one thing that we've touched on a little bit is I think we need to increase our collective urgency around what's happening around the world. And I think we all share this common sense of dread, looming dread about where our world is headed and what we need to do. We show up, civil society shows up. We need to translate this sense of urgency into greater political will. And I'll probably give you a little bit of a cop out answer, but it's one way that I think about it. I was struck this year by, there were not as many lowercase D Democrats from non-democracies as I was hoping. And why I care about that, there were some. So it's not an absolute criticism, but why I care about that is because they're able, in ways that none of us can, to draw that sharp contrast between what life looks like in the other kind of scenario. And I think that, at least from a Freedom House perspective, I listen to those voices first and every day because that's what we're fighting for, right? And listening to them to talk about what it's like to fight for freedom and to gain it or to lose it. I think we need to center their voices as well in this sort of global conversation because I don't know how else we can drive that urgency beyond knowing what it's like in some of these places. Thank you. If there are no more questions in the public, I think we're coming to the end of our session. And I wanted to thank all of you for all your interesting insights. But I wanted us to end on a more positive note because we've spoken about a lot of the challenges and there are real and there are many. But I wanted to hear from you what you see in each of your reports and your data. What are the key positive elements, developments that we can still hold on to and give us coming out of here as the last session of today with a sense of hope? Richard, start. Sure. I mean, I'm encouraged that in general when we ask average citizens about these kind of issues, what they tell us is they want more democracy, right? They have a lot of complaints as we looked at about the way representative democracy is working, but they generally want it to be more representative and more democratic, right? They want a stronger voice. They want more accountability from their leaders. They want to be empowered. We see some people who are telling us we want an autocrat to come along and solve our problems, right? But not most people. Most people, when we ask them what would improve things, don't say that, right? They say, we need to change things here so we have that stronger voice so that we have more accountability, that we empower citizens. So that gives me hope. When we knock on their doors or call them up at six o'clock at night during dinner time, they don't have fully worked out plans for that, but they do have some ideas about what they want to see, and I think it's up to people here at this summit to try to figure out how to kind of fulfill those hopes that people have about ways to improve their democracy. What gives me hope is, frankly, I touched on this in my last answer, but it's the fact that despite all of the setbacks that we saw in 2023 or in any other year, frankly, there are always people in every single country, no matter how repressive, how not free, how authoritarian, however you define and measure it, who are fighting every single day for this, who literally risk life and limb, their family, you know, to see a world where their country is free, and I feel as though we need, as I said, we need to listen to these voices and hear these stories more because if this, you know, if this weren't fighting for, people wouldn't be, you know, thrown in jail or murdered for their efforts. And referencing freedom in the world data, I actually, it's funny, maybe I sound a bit jaded, but I had to kind of read this twice because I was struck by it. But more countries are free today than 51 years ago when Freedom House started our Freedom in the World Report, which I, again, I kind of had to read twice, but when we started our survey in 1973, 44 of 148 countries, so 30% were free. Today, it's 83 of 195 countries, or 42%. So we've gone from 30% to 42% free according to our methodology, but yeah, so there's a glimmer of hope to end on. Okay. I think the most positive thing we have based on our data and the research in this year's report are the U-turns, right? The cases that stop, not only stop autocratization, but turn it around. And the most, or one, I think hopeful sign there is that, I don't know if you caught it on the graph, but almost all of them go down to be electoral autocracies for a couple of years. And then, despite that, managed to turn it back, like Zambia, right? And we've actually, we have now a paper on this that used this methodology and looked at all cases, not only of autocratization, but also of U-turns since 1900 to the present, and there were 98 U-turns. That's about half of all autocratization episodes are turned around relatively soon. And I think that's hopeful in this way where the number of autocratizers increase. So at least we can hope that about half of them are turned around, they become U-turns. And just because they go down there like Zambia did and our electoral autocracies for a couple of years or so, it doesn't mean all hope is lost. It can still be turned around. Great. Well, we'll end with you, Sima. What is your positive message at the end of this session? I think based on our data and also what Richard showed in his data, I think hope is people and their continued interest and engagement and resolve despite all the difficulties to keep fighting for this. And the fact that people want to be more engaged and in the public perception polls showing that they are interested in more informed citizenries, more engaged, tolerant citizenries is a really wonderful sign. I'll draw your attention to our own data. At the Democracy Tracker, the latest set of updates show that in Cyprus, the parliament has put forward a motion that would allow the public to submit proposals to parliament to consider developing into laws. As long as you have 5,000 signatures, you can submit something directly to your legislature, which is just one example of the kind of innovations that we're seeing for more engagement around the world. And I think at the end of the day, that's the thing that's gonna turn this around. Thank you so much. Thanks for ending on this positive note. I think there is some good things to hold on to. There is strong faith in democracy and the ideal of democracy. Thanks for pointing that out also as well, Danielle. And the engagement and the belief that people have in democracy. And I wanted to end this by referring back to what Katie referred to as those democracy activists that are working in authoritarian contexts inside or outside of them. Many of them couldn't come today to see all. Some of them did and were very grateful that we could hear their voices, but many of them couldn't. And so we should think about them as we end this summit for democracy because they are fighting brave battles against autocratic forces and their voices need to be heard. So thank you to all of you who have participated today and Seema for participating from Stockholm. Thanks to all of you who listened and happy summit for democracy. Bye.