Spanish political system ranks 19th in global democracy index

SPAIN has come 19^th in a British current affairs magazine’s ranking of how democratic the political system of countries globally are.

Spain scored 8.08 out of 10 in The Economist’s Index of Democracies. Its place in the top 20 means the country is still considered among the world’s ‘full’ democracies along with Britain, Canada, Denmark, Germany and others.

Spain ranked ahead of countries including France, Italy, Japan and the US which were deemed to be ‘democracies with failures’, according to the index.

The index scores countries based on five indicators including electoral processes and pluralism, civil liberties, political participation, political culture and government operation.

Spain’s ranking at 19^th comes after the country’s score was cut from 8.3 to 8.08 last year. The fall followed Spain’s handling of the Catalan independence referendum, with The Economist calling the deploying of riot police to stop the vote and the arrest of pro-independence politicians “regressive”.