Democracy Report 2024

• V-Dem Institute has released the Democracy Report 2024: Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot that tracks democratic freedoms worldwide.
• The report classifies countries into four regime types based on their score in the Liberal Democratic Index (LDI): Liberal Democracy, Electoral Democracy, Electoral Autocracy, and Closed Autocracy.
• The report is published every year in March.

ABOUT THE INSTITUTE

• The V-Dem Institute, led by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, is an independent research institute and the Headquarters of the V-Dem project.
  • Staffan Lindberg is a Swedish political scientist.
• The institute is based at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

FINDINGS ABOUT INDIA

• The V-Dem (or Varieties of Democracy) report finds India to be in the bottom 40-50% of the 179 countries reviewed, and now situated between Niger (better) and Ivory Coast (worse).
• It calls out the sharp autocratisation in India from 2013, putting it at one of the top ten autocratisers in recent times, with pulling down democracy at levels as it was in 1975.
• India also accounts for “about half of the population living in autocratising countries.”
• It notes that India is no longer termed a democracy, but “dropped down to electoral autocracy in 2018” and remains there at the end of 2023.