TIRANA, Jan. 9 – British renowned magazine The Economist ranked Albania among the last in Europe in its 2018 Democracy Index, stating the country’s political system is a mixture between democracy and autocracy, without making any steps towards a full-functioning democracy.
The Democracy Index of the Economist’s Intelligence Unit observes 165 independent states and two territories, in five categories: election process and pluralism; civil liberties; the government functionality; political participation; and political culture.
Based on the results of each category, countries are then categorized into four types of regimes: full democracy, troubled democracy, hybrid regime – between autocracy and democracy, and authoritarian regimes.
Amongst these indicators, Albania’s lowest rating goes for goverment functionality, with a grade of 4.71 (in a 0-10 rating system), while the highest grade rating of 7.65 was awarded to its civil liberties. The electoral process and pluralism in Albania for 2018 is rated at grade 7, political participation is estimated at 5.56, while political culture is rated at grade 5. The overall score for Albania is 5.98.
The results for Albania have not changed over the last three years. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, it was again government functionality that received the lowest grade.
Evaluation as a country with a hybrid regime comes as a result of government non-functionality, electoral irregularities, spread of corruption, weak rule of law and the lack of an independent judicial system.
The report particularly highlights the country’s main parties’ inability to cooperate, thus becoming a democracy stagnation factor.
At international level, Norway ranks first as the country with the highest rating in all observed indicators. Then rank Iceland and Sweden. In fourth place is New Zealand, while in fifth place comes Denmark.
North Korea remains at the end of the classification with a score of 1.08 out of 10 points in total.
Costa Rica is the only country that climbed up the rank in 2018, moving from a country with troubled democracy to a country with full democracy.
The report notes that over the last decade, among the 60 indexes that value the index in total, the most significant improvement occurred in the participation of women in politics. This progress can be easily illustrated by the percentage of women in the US Congress, which this year reached the highest level so far, at 20.3 percent.
