Afrobarometer Global Report on Democracy Released

The Afrobarometer Secretariat has released its Round 4 Global report at a ceremony in Accra. Overall, across 19 countries surveyed in 2008, support for democracy stands at 70 percent, but there is wide variability, from 39 percent in Madagascar, to 85 percent in Botswana.

On average, 75 percent reject military rule, 73 percent reject a one-party system, and 79 percent reject strongman rule. However, only 57 percent of respondents reject all three alternatives to democracy, and fewer than half (45 percent) fully demand democracy by both rejecting the three alternatives and explicitly supporting democracy.

Across the 11 countries that we can track over at least four surveys since 1999, there is a consistent pattern in demand for democracy and its component parts. Demand for democracy started at 44 percent in the first set of surveys, then dropped to 36 and 37 percent in the next two series. It has gained 10 points since 2005, up to a high of 47 percent for these 11 countries in 2008, but it still remains a minority position.

The Afrobarometer publications report the results of national sample surveys on the attitudes

of citizens in selected African countries towards democracy, markets, civil society, and other aspects of

development. The Afrobarometer is a collaborative enterprise of the Centre for Democratic Development

(CDD, Ghana), the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), and the Institute for Empirical

Research in Political Economy (IREEP) with support from Michigan State University (MSU) and the

University of Cape Town, Center of Social Science Research (UCT/CSSR). Afrobarometer papers are

simultaneously co-published by these partner institutions and the Globalbarometer.

See www.afrobarometer .org for more