According to the eleventh edition of The Economist´s Democracy Index, Costa Rica is one of the world´s full democracies. ¨The EIU Democracy Index provides a snapshot of the state of world democracy for 165 independent states and two territories. The Democracy Index is based on five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the functioning of government; political participation; and political culture. Based on their scores on 60 indicators within these categories, each country is then itself classified as one of four types of regime: full democracy; flawed democracy; hybrid regime; and authoritarian regime¨.

Only 20 countries (12% of the countries, representing 4.5% of the world population) were classified as full democracies: ¨The developed OECD countries of Europe and North America continue to dominate among the world’s “full democracies”; there are also the two Australasian countries (but no Asian ones), two Latin American countries (Uruguay and Costa Rica) and one African country (Mauritius)¨.

This is the first year that Costa Rica joins the ranks of ¨full democracies¨ and breaks into the top 20, rising three places from 23rd to 20th moving from flawed democracy to full democracy. The country scored 8.07 overall, made the second place in the regional ranking behind Uruguay, it´s best score was in the ¨Electoral Process and Pluralism¨ category (9.58) and Civil Liberties (9.12) while the worse score but which still had an improvement was given in Political Participation (6.67).

In the region, on the other hand, it was Nicaragua that had a considerable deterioration, going from hybrid regime to authoritarian regime, joining Venezuela and Cuba.

This edition of the Index reveals that the political participation is on the rise in almost every region of the world.

¨Whilst clearly disillusioned with formal political institutions, the population has turned anger into action, and turned out to vote, and to protest. The most striking advance has been in the participation of women – in the past decade the indicator has improved more than any other single indicator in our model. This improvement takes place amid a deterioration of trust in democracy, evident in the worsening of most categories in this year’s Index¨, states the report.