"Formal" does quite a lot of heavy lifting there.

Within the community of formally democratic countries, countries that democratized only very recently (last 10 years of their existence or so) form a very specific sub-club. Some of those might be autocracies by other name, some others too chaotic to be even a -cracy.

It takes some time, I would say, at least three or four full election cycles with peaceful transfer of power, before a people learns to be a democracy.