Jan 22, 2020 (LBO) – Sri Lanka’s democracy as measured by the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index has been slightly improved to 6.27 (overall score on a 0-10 scale) in 2019 against 6.19 reported in the previous year.
According to their latest report, Sri Lanka’s global rank is 69 with a regional rank of 13 that takes into account the countries in Asia and Australasia. However, the country’s democracy index reported an overall score of 6.
48 in 2016 and 2017.
In 2019, the country scored 7.00 from the subcategory of the electoral process and pluralism while scoring 6.07 from the functioning of government.
Sri Lanka scored 5.56 from the subcategory of political participation while scoring 6.
25 from political culture. The country scored 6.47 from civil liberties.
Meanwhile, in 2019 the average global score fell from 5.48 in 2018 to 5.44, the worst result since the Democracy Index began in 2006.
The decline in the global democracy score was driven by sharp regressions in the average regional scores in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Only one region, North America, registered an improvement in its average score in 2019, and this was due to a modest improvement in Canada’s score. The average regional scores for Asia and eastern and western Europe stagnated in 2019.
Four out of five subcategories of the Democracy Index also deteriorated in 2019. The exception was political participation, for which the average global score went up.