predictor of support for authoritarian modes of governance. Overall Despite the number of democratic states has continued to grow since 2006, the share of weaker electoral democracies has grown significantly. This is the strongest causal factor behind fragile democracies. As of 2020, authoritarianism and populism are on the rise around the world, with the number of people living in democracies less than the end of the Cold War. "Democratic backsliding" in the 2010s were attributed to economic inequality and social discontent, personalism, poor management of COVID-19 pandemic, as well as other factors such as government manipulation of civil society, "toxic polarization," foreign disinformation campaigns, racism and nativism, excessive executive power, and decreased power of the opposition. Large parts of the world, such as China, Russia, Central and South East Asia, the Middle East and much of Africa have consolidated authoritarian rule rather seeing it weaken. Determining the continuity and age of independent democracies depends on the criteria applied, but generally the United States is identified as the oldest democracy, while the country with longest history of universal suffrage is New Zealand. Contemporary innovations Under the influence of the theory of deliberative democracy, there have been several experiments since the start of the new millennium with what are called deliberative fora, places (in real life or in cyber space) where citizens and their representatives assemble to exchange reasons. One type of deliberative forum is called a minpublic: a body of randomly chosen or actively selected citizens that represents the whole population. The use of random selection to form a representative deliberative body is known as citizens' assembly. Citizens' assemblies have been used in Canada (2004, 2006) and the Netherlands (2006) to debate electoral reform, and in Iceland (2009 and 2010) for broader constitutional change. See also Important documents and milestones include Magna Carta Sweden's Age of Liberty Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1968 Important figures in the history of democracy include Abraham Lincoln Alexis de Tocqueville Amartya Sen Anders Chydenius Andrew Jackson Aristotle B. R. Ambedkar Cleisthenes Cola di Rienzo Corazon Aquino Cornelius Castoriadis Edmund Burke Hugo Kołłątaj James Madison Jawaharlal Nehru Jean-Jacques Rousseau John Locke John Stuart Mill John Wilkes Maximilien Robespierre Montesquieu Nelson Mandela Niccolò Machiavelli Oliver Cromwell Pasquale Paoli Pericles Plato Samuel P. Huntington Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester Spinoza Solon Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine Walking