Nearly half the world's countries are seeing the level of democracy decline, according to a report by an international think tank out Thursday, with some countries with historically long democratic traditions are among them. The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) says 85 out of 173 countries surveyed had "suffered a decline in at least one key indicator of democratic performance in the past five years". "This is the longest democratic recession that we have seen in all of the years that we have been collecting data" in 1975, Michael Runey, one of the report's co-authors tells AFP. IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES