Visualizations
Electoral and liberal democracy, 1975-2024
Two global series showing the third wave of autocratization and the gap between elections and liberal rights.
View data table
What it shows
The series compares the electoral democracy index (polyarchy) with the liberal democracy index. The gap between the two curves matters as much as their level: a country can hold competitive elections while losing judicial checks and civil liberties.
How it is calculated
Version 16 of the V-Dem dataset is downloaded, countries with data for each year are selected, and a population-weighted average is computed. Weighting prevents a small country from carrying the same weight as a large one in the global series.
V-Dem stops publishing e_pop after 2019. For later years the last available value is carried forward, an approximation documented in the data table and in the JSON metadata.
What it does not show
A global average hides very different national trajectories. The series cannot be used to infer the situation of a specific country or to establish causal relations between the two dimensions. Case pages and analyses are the place for that.