Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) produces the largest global dataset on democracy with over 31 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2023. Involving over 4,200 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures over 600 different attributes of democracy.

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.

Read and download the full report