DEMOCRACY REPORT 2024 | Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot

THE DEMOCRACY REPORT is an endeavor by the Institute and only the author group at the Institute is responsible for its contents. We hope that you will find the Democracy Report 2024 useful. Later this year, both Spanish and Portuguese editions are planned to be released, thanks to Professor David Altman, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and the Regional Center for Latin America, and Professor Tiago Fernandes, University Institute of Lisbon (ISCTE) and the Regional Center for Southern Europe.

THE 2024 REPORT shows that autocratization continues to be the dominant trend, as we have reported in previous Democracy Reports. New for this year is a systematic look at more fine-grained regime changes – countries that are experiencing democratic declines despite having recently improved (what we call Bell-turns), and inversely countries that are improving despite having recently been in a period of decline (what we call U-turns). This volatility is often masked when simply taking the difference between countries’ present democracy levels and ten years ago, as done in previous Democracy Reports. Yet, countries’ democratic volatility is of substantial interest. Not least, examples of countries that have stopped and reversed autocratization are critical for pro-democratic actors to learn from. Likewise, examples of countries where democratization has in short order been reversed are tales of caution in how democratization can fail to take a permanent foothold. We think this new analysis provides a more nuanced depiction of trends of regime change and informs the reader on how both democratization and autocratization can be stopped and reversed.

SINCE 2019, the V-Dem Institute has also been the host of the newly established (inter)national infrastructure DEMSCORE, which brings together some of the world’s leading research infrastructures and contextual databases. More information can be found at https://www.demscore.se. Additionally, over the past year, V-Dem has continued to expand on existing collaborations and entered new ones.

VARIETIES OF DEMOCRACY is an international collaboration involving more than 4,200 scholars from over 180 countries. Including the tremendous support and contributions of Country Experts, Country Coordinators, Regional Managers, and Project Managers. Without all of you, V-Dem would not be possible. The new version 14 of the V-Dem dataset contains 31 million data points and covers 202 countries from 1789 to 2023.