how many dictators are there in the world

January 4, 2026

There is no single agreed-on “official” number of dictators in the world, because it depends on how dictator is defined and which data set you use. Most democracy and human-rights researchers talk instead about “authoritarian” or “non-democratic” regimes and their leaders, and those counts vary over time.

What “dictator” usually means

In modern political science, someone is often called a dictator if:

They hold concentrated power with very weak or no constitutional limits.

Elections (if they exist) are not free and fair, and opposition parties face repression.

Courts, media, and civil society lack real independence, so there are no effective checks on the ruler.

Different organizations use different labels—“closed autocracy,” “electoral autocracy,” “authoritarian regime”—but they all point to leaders who rule with highly concentrated, unaccountable power.

Estimates from common data sources

Because there is no universal, legal list of “dictators,” researchers estimate by counting authoritarian regimes and then looking at who rules them.

One widely cited compilation (using Freedom House’s “Not Free” ratings) once identified about 49 countries as dictatorships or authoritarian regimes, but this list and number are now outdated.

A more recent country-ranking site using similar logic notes that there were around 50+ states with dictators or authoritarian regimes as of the early 2020s.

Large democracy-data projects such as V‑Dem emphasize that about 70% of the world’s population—well over 5 billion people—live in some form of dictatorship or autocracy, even though the number of such regimes is much smaller than the number of democracies.

Put simply: there are a few dozen regimes that scholars would classify as dictatorships, but they govern the majority of the world’s population.

Why the exact number is fuzzy

There are several reasons no one can honestly give a single precise number like “32” or “47” and be done with it:

Definitions differ : Some lists include any “Not Free” regime; others include only one‑person strongman systems and exclude one‑party states or absolute monarchies.

Grey-zone regimes : Hybrid governments hold elections but tilt the field so heavily that experts disagree on whether they are still democracies or already dictatorships.

Constant change : Coups, civil wars, constitutional changes, and competitive elections regularly move countries in and out of authoritarian categories.

So when you see a precise global count of “dictators,” it always rests on a particular set of choices about who qualifies.

A rough, honest answer for today

Taking together:

Academic democracy indices (like V‑Dem and others that track “autocracies”),

Public lists that estimate roughly 50 or so authoritarian regimes,

a reasonable 2020s-era ballpark is:

Around 50–55 national leaders could fairly be described as dictators in the sense of heading authoritarian regimes with severely restricted political freedoms.

This is an approximation, not a hard legal count, and different lists might vary by a dozen countries or so depending on where they draw the line.

Mini “Quick Scoop” takeaways

There is no official global register of dictators, only research-based lists using different definitions.

Most serious data sets point to dozens of dictatorships, not hundreds—on the order of 50‑ish regimes.

Despite that modest number, those regimes govern most of the world’s population, over 5 billion people.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.