Bangladesh moves one notch up in democracy index

Bangladesh has moved one notch up to rank 75th among 167 countries in the democracy index 2021, improving on the indicator of civil liberties from the previous year.

The UK-based company Economist Intelligence Unit, or EIU's Democracy Index ranks nations on five parameters: electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

Based on its scores on a range of indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: “full democracy”, “flawed democracy”, “hybrid regime” or “authoritarian regime”.

Bangladesh is still a “hybrid regime”, according to the latest report published on Thursday for 2021. 

In Asia and Australia Region, it rank 16th with 7.42 points for electoral process and pluralism, 6.07 for the functioning of government, 5.56 for political participation, 5.56 for political culture, and 5.29 for civil liberties.

In South Asia, India (46th) and Sri Lanka (67th) are ahead of Bangladesh. In the 2020 index, Bangladesh gained four places on the previous year’s rankings.

At the bottom of the latest rankings, there was a dramatic change, with Afghanistan and Myanmar displacing North Korea to take the bottom two places. Two war-torn African countries, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic sit above North Korea to fill the bottom five slots. Syria, Turkmenistan, Chad, Laos and Equatorial Guinea make up the others in the bottom ten.

The Nordics -- Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark -- dominate the top tier of the Democracy Index rankings, and Norway is number one once again, thanks to its very high scores for electoral process and pluralism, political participation, and civil liberties.