This is Brian Lair's Daily Politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Friday, January 5th.

I'm Bridget Bergen, filling in for Brian today. We all know this will be a very consequential

election year in the United States,

but as it turns out, more than 60 countries will hold national elections this year,

according to the Washington Post, affecting some 4 billion people. We're talking about major

countries in their regions like India, South Africa, the UK, Taiwan, and of course the United

States, and yet democracy itself

is considered at stake in many of these votes. The Post's Global Affairs columnist, Ishaun Thur,

who writes their newsletter called Today's World View, wrote that this year could be the

greatest rolling spectacle of democracy in human history.

Ishaan, thanks for coming on. Welcome back to WNYC.

Thanks. Good to be with you, Bridget.

Is it unusual for so many countries to hold elections in the same year?

It's unusual in the sense that the sheer scale of it, as well as the fact that the countries

we're talking about, are some of the world's biggest and most populous nations.

I think eight of the ten most populous countries in the world are having national elections

this year.

And I think based on some studies, we won't see a year like this, at least her current

trends until, say, 2048. So this is a big year in elections.

There, of course, is a profound irony that even as, you know, more adults are voting than ever

before or have the capacity to vote ever before, we feel this kind of pervasive sense that

democracy is more vulnerable than it's been in a long time.

...