V-Dem · 178 countries · score /100 · 1945-2025
Liberal electoral democracy score produced by the V-Dem project (Varieties of Democracy, University of Gothenburg), rescaled from 0 to 100. It combines the holding of free and fair elections, freedom of expression and association, equality before the law, and the existence of effective checks on the executive.
V-Dem data, 178 countries, from 1945 to 2025. The method rests on country-by-country expert coding — several thousand contributors — aggregated by a statistical model that weights disagreement and publishes confidence intervals. That is the limit to keep in mind: these are calibrated expert judgements, not physical measurements.
Six bands, from under 20 (authoritarian) to 80 and above (established democracy). The value of this map lies less in the level for any given year than in the TRAJECTORY: the slider goes back to 1945, and it is by replaying the series that the three waves of democratisation, and the current reversal, become visible.
V-Dem dates the start of a global democratic recession to around 2012, the first since 1945: since then, more countries have been autocratising than democratising. This decline rarely comes by coup — it proceeds by erosion, keeping elections in place while narrowing the press, the courts and the opposition.