V-Dem Democracy Indices

By country

The authors of the V-Dem Institute's "Democracy Report 2026" state that the views and opinions expressed in the report are their own and do not reflect an official position of the larger V-Dem Project, the V-Dem Steering Committee, or the V-Dem Institute.

The table below shows 2026 V-Dem Democracy indices describing the year 2025.

The V-Dem dataset does not cover some countries, including Andorra, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Belize, Brunei, Dominica, the Federated States of Micronesia, Grenada, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands, Monaco, Nauru, Palau, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, San Marino, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vatican City.

Regimes of the World

V-Dem maintains the Regimes of the World index, which classifies governments using data from its other indices as either a closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, or liberal democracy. It is heavily inspired by Robert Dahl's theory of polyarchy based on six institutional guarantees: elected officials, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, alternative sources of information, associational autonomy, and inclusive citizenship.

Autocracies

Regimes where leaders are not de facto accountable to citizens and may lack multiparty or free and fair elections. Dahl's institutional prerequisites are not fulfilled.

Closed Autocracy

Governments which lack multiparty elections for the chief executive or the legislature, or lack any competition such as in one-party states. Legislative institutions are de facto undermined and electoral accountability is evaded.

Electoral Autocracy

Governments where the chief executive, legislature, or both are accountable in de jure multiparty elections. They fall short of democratic standards due to irregularities, limitations on party competition, and violations of Dahl's prerequisites. They are closely related to theories of electoral authoritarianism and competitive authoritarianism.

Democracies

Regimes with de facto multiparty, free and fair elections. Dahl's institutional prerequisites are at least minimally fulfilled.

Electoral Democracy

Regimes that possess the bare minimum to be considered a democracy. They are "de-facto accountable to citizens through periodic elections", but are not liberal democracies and lack further entrenched individual and minority rights beyond the electoral sphere. Basic electoral democracies may not possess a fully developed rule of law, legislative and judicial oversight of the executive branch, protections against the "tyranny of the majority", and only minimal fulfillment of Robert Dahl's institutional prerequisites for democracy.

Liberal Democracy

Regimes that possess the rule of law and satisfy liberal principles. They provide checks and balances between legislative and judicial oversight of the executive branch, limitations on government to prevent the "tyranny of the majority", protect individual liberties, and provide equal access to and protection under the law. A fully developed rule of law is essential for liberal democracies, as it ensures decisions are implemented. It is sometimes referred to as a "Madisonian" democracy.

Digital Society Project

The Digital Society Project is a subset of indicators on V-Dem's survey that asks questions about social media's political status and the internet. Specifically, the Digital Society Project measures a range of questions related to internet censorship, misinformation online, and internet shutdowns. This annual report includes 35 indicators assessing five areas: disinformation, digital media freedom, state regulation of digital media, the polarization of online media, and online social cleavages. It has been updated each year starting in 2019, with data covering from 2000–2021. Similar to other expert analyses like Freedom House, these data are more prone to false positives when compared with remotely sensed data, such as that from Access Now or the OpenNet Initiative.

Criticisms

Data on democracy, and particularly global indices of democracy, and the data they rely on, have been the subject of scrutiny and criticized by various scholars. Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen for instance, have raised concerns about the methods used by prominent democracy indices / rankings such as Freedom House and Polity, such as the concept of democracy they measured, the design of indicators, and the aggregation rule. Political scientists Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng "highlight measurement concerns regarding time-varying bias in expert-coded data" such as Freedom House and V-Dem and encourage improving expert-coding practices. Knutsen et al. did not see evidence for time-varying bias in their expert-coded data and note the application of item response theory, factor analysis and estimates of uncertainties to limit expert biases while discussing concerns in operationalization of observer-invariant measures of democracy.

Scholarly criticism

Political scientist Jonas Wolff criticised V-Dem for moving away from its pluralist conceptualisation of democracy towards an emphasis on liberal democracy. Political scientists Andrew Little (political scientist) and Anne Meng questioned whether declines identified by expert-coded indices such as V-Dem could partly reflect systematic bias among expert coders rather than changes in democratic institutions. V-Dem researchers disputed this interpretation, finding no evidence of systematic "bad-vibes" bias in their expert assessments. Salvatore Babones has argued that "thick" democracy indices such as V-Dem may disadvantage countries in the Global South because of their conceptualisation and measurement of democracy.

External criticism

In 2022, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (EAC-PM) published a working paper by Sanjeev Sanyal and Akanksha Arora criticising V-Dem and other perception-based democracy indices. The authors argued that the indices relied on the opinions of a small number of experts, used subjective questions that were difficult to answer objectively or compare across countries, omitted some potentially relevant questions, and included measures that were not appropriate for assessing democracy across all countries. The paper also disputed V-Dem's assessment of India, arguing that it placed the country at a level comparable to the period of the Emergency and below Northern Cyprus.