Michael Gilleland believes it was coined by Ezra Pound (“It occurs in one of the Pisan Cantos, dated 1948”). I wonder if the Spanish-speaking peoples, who have considerable experience in the field, may not have been first. José Ortega Munilla’s Chispas del yunque were published in ABC 1920-2, and in GBS’ useless snippet view he has someone “ensayando el dominio de la PEORCRACIA”. Re the query in Michael’s penultimate para: it makes some kind of sense to suppose that Pound took the word from Spanish and then Latinised it rather than getting confused, or feigning confusion, in his Latin–peor is both comparative and superlative in Spanish.
(Porfirio Cristaldo Ayala says that the Argentine Jorge Luis García Venturini invented kakistocracia directly from the Greek (in a 1975 piece), so without assistance from the English-speaking world, which, however, according to the etymologists, has known government of the worst since at least 1641.)
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