Democratic Deficit in Islamic Countries

Abstract

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) identified in 2002 three fundamental areas of human devel-opment in which the Arab world lags behind the rest of the world. One of those specified areas was the lack offreedom and democracy. To investigate the presence of the democratic deficit, the study introduces a compositedemocracy index that measures and compares countries’ performances in the democratic domains. This paperaims to define and describe the democratic deficit in the context of the Islamic world, verify its existence inthe Arab world, and determine its possible presence in other Muslim countries in various world regions. Thestudy results showed that although the deficit was formulated almost twenty years ago, it is still relevant. Ithas been observed that Muslim countries performed, on average, worse on the index score than non-Muslimcountries, which means that the Islamic countries face the democratic deficit. Moreover, the results showedthat the performance of the Arab world in the democratic index is even worse than that of the other Muslimcountries. The analysis additionally confirmed that theeconomic factor is important in verification of the deficitand its depth. On the level of individual countries, poor Muslim states often achieved the worst results, usuallyfrom the group of the least developed countries, such as Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, or Eritrea.