politics

Africa’s Electoral Democracy Has Slipped Back to 2002

A decade of slippage has wiped out 14 years of gains. Forty of the continent’s 54 countries now score lower on electoral democracy than they did in 2015.

Visual Data Insights · 2026-11-10

Africa’s elections got steadily freer for a quarter of a century, and then they stopped. On V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index, the continent’s average score climbed from 0.22 in 1990 to a peak of 0.43 in 2016. By 2025 it had slid to 0.37, the same level as in 2002. Forty of the 54 countries now score lower than they did a decade ago. The rest of the world slipped too, but by less and from a higher base.

The index scores each country from 0 to 1 on whether elections are clean and whether people can vote, organise and speak freely. In the chart below, a perfect score sits at the centre, and the distance from it is the shortfall. No African country gets within 0.24 of it; Seychelles comes closest at 0.76. Only 15 countries sit inside the 0.50 ring, down from 20 in 2015, and each tail shows how far a country has drifted since then.

The biggest falls came in the Sahel. Niger lost 0.40 and Mali 0.38, and both now score below 0.25. Burkina Faso had climbed to 0.66 by 2020 before collapsing to 0.13. All three have been run by soldiers since coups between 2020 and 2023. Tunisia fell for a different reason: after its 2011 revolution it reached 0.76, among the best scores in Africa, and it has since dropped back to 0.40.

Very few countries moved the other way. Only four gained more than 0.05 over the decade. Gambia made the longest journey, up 0.40 to 0.64, after Yahya Jammeh left power in 2017. Seychelles rose from 0.52 to 0.76, its highest score on record, and climbed from 18th place in Africa to first. Lesotho and Angola made smaller gains.

Kenya ranks 13th, at 0.56. It is the only mainland East African country above 0.50: Tanzania has fallen from 0.45 to 0.36, and Uganda sits at 0.25. That leaves Kenya 0.06 above the line that six countries fell through over the past decade, with a general election due in August 2027.

Seychelles went from 18th to 1st, while the Sahel went the other way. Is your country orbiting closer, or drifting out?