Varieties of Democracy:

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with some 28 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2019. Involving over 3,000 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures hundreds of different attributes of democracy. V-Dem enables new ways to study the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy embracing its multiple meanings.

For the first time since 2001, there are more autocracies than democracies in the world. Hungary is no longer a democracy, leaving the EU with its first non-democratic Member State. India has continued on a path of steep decline, to the extent it has almost lost its status as a democracy. The United States – former vanguard of liberal democracy – has lost its way.

We have observed rising numbers of pro-democracy protests demonstrating that those living in autocratizing and autocratic regimes are continuing to fight for rights and freedoms. These rays of hope are countries such as Armenia, Tunisia and Sudan, where we have observed substantial democratic progress.


By the population-weighted measure, Latin America has been thrown back to a level of democracy last recorded around 1992; the Asia-Pacific and MENA regions have reverted to situations last experienced in the mid to late 1980s; and Eastern Europe and Central Asia has fallen to a record-low since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. While the magnitude of autocratization is less pronounced in Western Europe and North America, the declining average suggests that the West has regressed to a situation with regard to electoral and liberal rights not recorded since 1980.

The United States of America is the only country in Western Europe and North America suffering from substantial autocratization.

The Varieties of Democracy report is based on data through 2019, so before Covid.

Not a ray of hope like Armenia, Tunisia or Sudan, but still, according to Varieties of Democracy, as a liberal democracy the USA is not declining as substantially as Poland or Hungary. In both 2009 and 2019 it was on a par with Czech Republic.

🇺🇸 USA: „Democracy you might experience in Prague“ 🇨🇿

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