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Arch Puddington is distinguished fellow for democracy studies at Freedom House. Tyler Roylance is staff editor at Freedom House. For more information on on the survey, see the box on p. 106. For the rankings of individual countries in 2016, see the Table on pp. 108-109. Elen Aghekyan, Jennifer Dunham, Shannon O'Toole, Sarah Repucci, and Vanessa Tucker also made significant contributions to this essay.
In 2016, populist and nationalist political forces made astonishing gains in democratic states, while authoritarian powers engaged in brazen acts of aggression and grave atrocities went unanswered in war zones across two continents. All these developments point to a growing danger that the international order of the past quarter-century-rooted in the principles of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law-will give way to a world in which individual leaders and nations pursue their own narrow interests without meaningful constraints, and without regard for the shared benefits of global peace, freedom, and prosperity. The latest findings of Freedom House's annual Freedom in the World report reinforce the troubling impression produced by the year's headline events. A total of 64 countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties in 2016, compared with 35 that registered gains. This marked the eleventh consecutive year in which declines outnumbered improvements.
While in past years the declines in freedom were generally concentrated among autocracies and dictatorships that simply went from bad to worse, in 2016 it was established democracies-countries rated Free in the report's ranking system-that dominated the list of countries suffering setbacks. In fact, Free countries accounted for a larger share of the countries with declines than at any time in the past decade, and fully a quarter of the countries registering declines in 2016 were in Europe.
The year's end saw the major democracies mired in anxiety and indecision after a series of destabilizing events. In the United States, the presidential victory of Donald Trump, a mercurial figure with uncon- ventional views on foreign policy and other matters, raised questions about the country's future role in the world. Britain's vote to leave the European Union, the collapse of the Italian government after a failed referendum on constitutional reform, a series of antidemocratic moves by the new government in Poland, and gains...