Sierra Leone has significantly improved in the Global State of Democracy 2023 under the Rule of Law for Absence of Corruption.
Despite the contraction of civic space noted above, the Participation category is an area of strength across the continent. In the other three categories of democratic performance, only two or three African countries are ranked among the world’s top 50.
In Participation, nine African countries are in the top 50: Mauritius, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso and Zambia. There was also a great deal of movement in the rankings between 2021 and 2022. The biggest falls were in Tunisia, Burkina Faso and Malawi.
At the same time, Kenya and Zambia rose dramatically. The improvement in Zambia is part of a larger pattern of opening up civic space, which has included legislative actions such as the repeal in 2022 of a long-abused colonial-era law criminalizing defamation of the president (Short 2022).
As shown in Figure 2.6, across a broad range of values of Representation (a baseline metric of electoral democracy), African countries have higher levels of Participation than countries in other regions with similar representation scores. This area of democratic performance appears to have some consistency over time.
