It has generated great controversy — not only externally, but also internally. Four of the five main researchers — including the project’s creator, Michael Coppedge — say they “do not endorse some of the analyzes about the extent of the recent global decline in democracy”, considered “exaggerated, not very nuanced” and marked by “inflated language”.
Here in the column, . The unreasonable downgrade of Portugal and Canada from liberal to electoral democracies now reappears in the case of the United Kingdom, as does the use of population-weighted indices. (Yes, V-Dem itself published something close to a mea culpa on the narrative of a global democratic recession!) I argued that the deterioration of the indices reflected, in part, the expansion of democracy to “difficult places” — very poor countries and/or countries without a democratic tradition, in which, by construction, it is more likely to see declines than improvements.
Still, the alarmist tone persists, and the idea of widespread global autocratization is not empirically supported. As the aforementioned researchers themselves show, the liberal democracy scores (LDI) for 175 of the 179 countries (98%) fluctuated within the margin of error. From 2024 to 2025, the global average Electoral Democracy Index (EDI) fell marginally, from 0.485 to 0.483. Furthermore, weighting by population distorts the reading of global trends: the state of democracy in the world does not change substantially because there is a setback in a very populous country, like India. From 2012 to 2022, the unweighted average of the LDI fell by 0.03 (from 0.53 to 0.50), while the population-weighted version fell by 0.13 (from 0.54 to 0.41). Excluding India, this weighted drop is 0.05.
Yes, the US case —given its importance— biases the public perception of global trends. In fact, the EDI fell from 0.84 to 0.74, and the LDI, from 0.75 to 0.57, the largest annual decline in the country’s history. This deterioration is associated with the reduction in press freedom, Congress’s reduced ability to control the Executive, the erosion of judicial independence and the weakening of the rule of law and civil liberties. Even so, indicators relating to electoral integrity, freedom of association and suffrage remained stable, which explains why the drop in the EDI was less pronounced than in the LDI. This pattern is repeated in other countries, where electoral integrity has remained relatively stable, with declines concentrated in freedom of expression and organization. The US downgrade to levels comparable to 1965 is therefore exaggerated and .
At first glance, the main focus of concern should fall on coups d’état. However, these episodes — only seven in total — are concentrated in “difficult places”, where they are recurrent (Sahel and Southeast Asia), and do not correspond to typical cases of backsliding associated with the gradual erosion promoted by incumbents, as observed in other contexts. As these are analytically distinct phenomena, it makes no sense to emphasize them to support general conclusions about democratic erosion.
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