Satisfaction with democracy, according to the report, has eroded in most parts of the world, with an especially notable drop over the past decade. Public confidence in democracy is at the lowest point on record in the United States, the major democracies of Western Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America. In some countries, including the United States, this metric is now reaching an important threshold: The number of people who are dissatisfied with democracy is greater than the number of people who are satisfied with it.

Three findings are particularly noteworthy. First, over the past quarter century, satisfaction with democracy has fallen across the democratic world as a whole. In the mid-1990s, citizens in a majority of countries for which there are data felt satisfied with the performance of their democracies. Except for a brief dip in the ’90s following the Asian and Latin American financial crises, this remained true until 2015, when a majority of citizens turned negative in their evaluation of democratic performance. Since then, dissatisfaction has continued to grow.

Overall, the report estimates that the number of individuals who are “dissatisfied” with the condition of democracy in their country has risen by 10 percentage points, from 48 percent to 58 percent. (This observation is based on a constant-country, population-weighted sample of 77 democracies for which relatively complete data exist from the mid-’90s to today. This represents 2.4 billion individuals across the span of Europe, Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North America, East Asia, and Australasia.)

The second noteworthy finding is that the fall in democratic satisfaction has been especially pronounced in those countries that were supposed to be especially stable: high-income, developed democracies. During the ’90s, about two out of every three citizens of democracies in Europe, North America, Northeast Asia, and Australasia felt satisfied with the way their country was run. Today, a majority is, for the first time, dissatisfied.

Graphic by David H. Montgomery; Source: University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Future of Democracy

But dissatisfaction with democracy is not evenly distributed across countries of different sizes. While the citizens of many small democracies, such as Switzerland and Luxembourg, have become more satisfied with their political system, the world’s most populous democracies, including France, Japan, and the United Kingdom, have moved in the opposite direction.

Finally, the drop in satisfaction with democracy is both especially rapid and especially consequential in the United States. For much of its modern history, America has viewed itself as a model democracy that could serve as an example to countries that wished to emulate its success. Survey data show that there was a little substance to this hubris: as recently as 10 years ago, three out of every four Americans said that they were satisfied with the state of their democratic system.