Pick up to three countries to plot their V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index from 1990 to 2025. The selection is saved in the page address, so a comparison can be shared as a link. The list covers every country profiled on this site plus several comparison cases. Data for all 174 countries in the dataset is on Our World in Data.
Liberal Democracy Index, 1990–2025
Scale 0 (least) to 1 (most democratic). Source: V-Dem dataset v16 via Our World in Data, retrieved November 7, 2026. Regime type uses V-Dem's Regimes of the World classification.
| Country | 2015 | 2025 | Peak (year) | Regime type, 2025 |
|---|
Suggested comparisons
- Hungary and Poland: two EU members that took similar paths after 2010 and 2015, and diverged after Poland's 2023 change of government.
- Venezuela, Nicaragua and El Salvador: three Latin American paths to near-total executive control.
- Myanmar, Mali and Burkina Faso: coups produce sudden drops rather than slow erosion.
- United States, United Kingdom and Italy: established democracies that V-Dem lists as autocratizing.
- Brazil, South Korea and Poland: declines followed by recovery.
How to read this
The index measures institutions and practices, not the popularity of a government. A country can hold regular elections and still score low if courts, media and opposition parties are constrained. See Methodology and how to read the indices for what each index measures and how they differ.