Projections for the future of electoral democracy across the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways

The future of climate change and sustainable development will be shaped by future patterns of, among other things, democratic governance. However, while an important factor determining future patterns of mitigation and adaptation, projections of democracy remain largely missing from long-term quantitative projections that are used to inform a wide range of integrated assessment modeling. We introduce projections of long-term levels of democracy across the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSP) in the International Futures model by creating a historical model of electoral democracy from macro-level structural correlates of democracy and then adjusting to meet the SSP narratives. We find that, through the end of the century, worlds of few challenges to adaptation are associated with substantial growth in electoral democracy. Alternatively, worlds of high challenges to both adaptation and mitigation see reductions in the average country level of electoral democracy by the year 2100 to levels last seen in the 1980s.