Time to look at the Democracy Indices again. In particular the EIU are suggesting that democracy is making a comeback. They say, “democracy stabilises after eight years of decline”. Here are my notes and links …
LInks
- The EIU’s annoucment page for its 2025 report with a tag line, “democracy-stabilises-after-eight-years-of-decline“, although the numbers are marginal over the last 10 years and “We’re doing better than Afghanistan” is not a compelling argument. They have another page, called EIU Democracy Index 2025, which hosts the full report , but its behind an identity wall.
- The World Bank data set also points to the EIU index, as does, Our World in Data
- https://www.v-dem.net/ are the alternative index. When I started this, I found their methodology more opaque.
- Chat GPT comment on the fall in V-Dem scores, this is worth a read as it explores some often unexplored issues, relating to “winner take all”, conventions and constitutions, power of the executive, ministerial accountability but not the role & power of local government & the devolved assemblies.
I wanted to see if specific events were reflected in the indices, I found these,
- The Prorogue Crisis, https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2019/08/29/boris-johnsons-prorogation-of-parliament-a-challenge-to-the-uks-constitutional-democracy/
- The Covid lockdowns, https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/timeline-lockdown-web.pdf
- https://www.bestforbritain.org/international_community_condemned_uk_in_past_year, mainly the 2023 Asylum bill
- Today, in their Human Rights report on the UK, Amnesty talk about freedom of expression and assembly, including comments about attacks on places of worship of many faiths, refugee and migrant’s rights, and noting that, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights concluded that the UK had failed to comply with its international obligations, including to ensure the rights to food, housing and adequate social security.
This is one of a series, see also,
- https://davelevy.info/wiki/uk-democracy-in-2022/
- https://davelevy.info/how-democratic-is-the-uk/, where I looked in detail at the EIU scheme, and tried to use their method to score the UK. My scores were lower. Wht might be interesting is that
- https://davelevy.info/wiki/measuring-democracy/
I note the V-DEm scores are very similar and show a similar dip and recovery. Here’s a chart showing the scores
Amusingly the picture, which is used under Parliament’s Open licence is not of 2025.