Our sourcing standard

Every factual claim on this site links to a specific, checkable source: the publication, its date where one is given, and a working URL. Before a citation is added, the page is opened to confirm that it loads and actually states the fact attributed to it. Wikipedia is not used as a citation for new material; older Wikipedia links are being replaced with primary or mainstream sources as pages are revised.

Where a claim is contested, the page names who makes it and gives the government's stated justification alongside the criticism. Characterizations such as "sham election" are attributed to whoever made them. Wire stories from AP, Reuters and AFP are sometimes cited through a newspaper or broadcaster that republished them; the original agency is named in the citation.

Scope: no country is exempt

The site covers any country showing well-documented signs of authoritarian consolidation, including established democracies such as the United States and members of the European Union. The test is the evidence, not the country. Some candidates are held back until the sourcing is balanced enough for a fair entry.

How to read the democracy indices

Four major projects measure democracy each year. They use different methods and scales, so their numbers should be compared within an index, not across indices.

V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy): Expert-coded data on hundreds of indicators for nearly every country. The Liberal Democracy Index, the main measure used in this site's charts, runs from 0 to 1. It asks "to what extent is the ideal of liberal democracy achieved?" and combines electoral democracy with constitutionally protected civil liberties, the rule of law and an independent judiciary that limit executive power (Our World in Data, V-Dem dataset v16). V-Dem's Regimes of the World scheme sorts countries into closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies and liberal democracies (Our World in Data). V-Dem publishes an annual Democracy Report.
Freedom House, Freedom in the World: Scores 25 indicators from 0 to 4: 10 on political rights (up to 40 points) and 15 on civil liberties (up to 60 points). The combined score determines whether a country is rated Free, Partly Free or Not Free (Freedom House methodology).
Economist Intelligence Unit, Democracy Index: Rates 167 countries and sorts them into full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes (EIU Democracy Index 2025).
International IDEA, Global State of Democracy: Tracks 174 countries across more than 150 indicators and reports how many countries improved or declined on each (International IDEA, 2026). IDEA also runs a monthly Democracy Tracker.

Why the indices sometimes disagree

The indices weight different things. V-Dem's liberal index puts heavy weight on constraints on the executive. Freedom House emphasizes rights and freedoms as people experience them. The EIU includes measures of political participation and culture. They also count slightly different sets of countries, which is why the main guide reports 92 autocracies from V-Dem's report but the 1990–2025 chart, built from Our World in Data's copy of the dataset, shows 88 for 2025. When the indices agree on a direction, as they currently do for most of the case studies on this site, that agreement is itself evidence.

Data used in the charts

The interactive charts, the world map and the comparison tool use V-Dem dataset v16 as published by Our World in Data, retrieved on November 7, 2026, covering 1990–2025. Each chart has a "Show the data" table or a cited caption. The figures are refreshed when a new edition of the dataset is released. The 2025 data does not yet reflect events in 2026, such as Hungary's change of government in April 2026.

Corrections

Pages are reviewed regularly, and outdated or incorrect statements are corrected as soon as better sourcing confirms the error. Each page shows the date it was last updated. Recent examples: the Serbia death toll was updated from 14 to 16, El Salvador's term-limit amendment was re-dated from August to July 31, 2025, and a Wikipedia citation in the Turkey entry was replaced with RFE/RL reporting.