Democracy Report 2025

Context: As per the latest Democracy Report 2025 released by V Dem institute, democracies are in decline and closed autocracies are on rise, across the world.

Major Highlights of the Democracy Report 2025

• The number of closed autocracies have increased in the 2020s reversing the steady decline seen since the 1980s. The most significant rise in closed autocracies has occurred in West Asia and North Africa, as well as in South Asia.
• Liberal democracies have become the least common regime type in the world. In Europe and Central Asia: liberal democracies are rapidly shrinking, while electoral democracies are gaining ground.
• In Sub-Saharan Africa: both trends, democratic erosion and autocratic consolidation, are evident.

Classification of Countries based on LDI

• The report categorises countries into four regime types based on their score in the Liberal Democratic Index (LDI): Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy.
  • Closed autocracies are defined by the absence of multiparty elections and a lack of fundamental democratic principles such as freedom of speech and expression. 
  • Electoral autocracies, while allowing multiparty elections, fall short in upholding these core freedoms.
  • Electoral democracies offer both elections and some civil liberties, but only to a moderate degree. 
  • Liberal democracies ensure a robust balance of power between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, along with strong protections for civil liberties. 
• India has been classified as an electoral autocracy since 2017, and has remained the same since then. India, with 18% of the world's population, accounts for about half of the population living in autocratising countries.

Observations made by the Report:  

Almost all the components of democracy are deteriorating in most of the countries.

• Three worst-affected components in autocratising countries: freedom of expression, clean elections, and freedom of association/civil society.
• Freedom of Expression has seen the most significant decline owing to government censorship of the media, restrictions on academic and cultural expression, and the harassment of journalists. Additionally, India ranked 159/180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index 2024. 
• Growing use of disinformation by governments and surge in political polarisation worldwide, including in India. 
• Sharp rise in government intimidation of opposition parties during election periods, including in India.
• Support for representative democracy has declined in many countries, including India.

About V-Dem Report

• The V-Dem Democracy Report is a collaborative project involving scholars from 180 countries and is based on 31 million datasets covering 202 countries from 1789 to 2023.

According to the V-Dem classification, a liberal democracy requires robust mechanisms for judicial independence, constraints on executive overreach, rigorous protection of civil liberties, equality before the law, and regular free and fair elections.