Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to talk about one of our favourite subjects, or maybe I should say one of my favourite subjects.

Are people really losing faith in democracy? And if so, why?

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Helen Thompson, an expert in political economy and many other things, is here with me and also Roberto Foea, who is the author of a new report, which gathers the biggest ever data set looking at people's responses in surveys when they're asked, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with democracy from all over the world from the last 30 plus years?

So this information has never been gathered in this form before and it shows some really interesting patterns and the news is broadly not good.

Before we start, I should say we're recording this at lunchtime rather than early in the morning and because this is a working university people are outside having their lunch if you hear some noises, that's what it is in the background.

This report is launched today and at the end we'll tell you how you can read it, it's available for free, it's got some really good charts in it too, which capture the picture of global satisfaction with democracy and we're going to tweet some of those during the week.

Roberto, let's start with the global picture, get a sense of what the headline story is here, as I said it's broadly speaking not good, people seem less happy with democracy and then we're going to come on to talk about Europe and I'm sure Helen will have views on this too because there's some really interesting trends in Europe.

If you had to sum up the global picture, how does it look for democracy, what's the health?

Not great, there are about 77 countries for which we have a fairly complete time series data set from 19, for the mid 1990s up until the present day with the most recent survey coming in just in the last month.

And essentially what we find is that when we add the 77 countries together, we population weight them together, sort of aggregate for how democracy is varying or public opinion about democracy is varying across the world.

Since the mid 1990s, what we find is that dissatisfaction has gone up by around about 10 percentage points, so one in every 10 people.

So it's kind of hard to know 10 percentage points, is that a lot is that a lot? It's like it depends on how you map it in these charts, but basically it is a lot, right?

That's a sizable decline in people's satisfaction with democracy.

It's a lot, I mean that's just a sort of average figure, so within that sort of conceals different trends in different parts of the world and many countries where the picture is actually much more negative, as well as of course some positive stories which we also try to highlight in the report.

So one of the countries where the picture is broadly negative is the United States. We're not actually going to talk about that today, we're going to talk about America next week in the context of the Iowa caucus.

There's lots to be said about America, but maybe people are more familiar with some of that and there's a Trump effect and other things going on there too.

We're going to talk about some of the countries where you could say the news is good, but then when you try and unpack why the news is good, it may not be good news for democracy.

But within Europe there are big variations, there are some catastrophic declines in places you would expect like Greece.

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