Democratic backsliding, on the independent indices
Three institutions grade every country's democracy each year: Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the V-Dem Institute in Sweden. They use different methods and different scales, and they disagree about the exact number for the United States. They do not disagree about the direction. Each index is rescaled to 0–100 below so the three can be read together; the story is the shared slope, and the cliff at the end.
▬ V-Dem Liberal Democracy▬ Freedom House▬ EIU Democracy Index
What each index says now
Index
Peak
2025
The 2025 verdict
Freedom House (/100)
94
81
Still “Free”; down 12 points since 2005
EIU (/10)
8.22
7.65
“Flawed democracy” for the tenth year running; rank fell to 34th
V-Dem (/1)
0.85
0.571
Downgraded from “liberal” to “electoral” democracy; rank fell from 20th to 51st of 179; named an “autocratizing” country; steepest one-year fall of any democracy in modern times
The three don't move in lockstep: V-Dem, which weights checks on executive power most heavily, stepped down sharply in 2017 and again in 2025, while Freedom House and the EIU declined more gradually. But note the wider frame: the EIU reported that global democracy stabilized in 2025 after eight years of decline, calling the United States “one glaring exception.” The US is now diverging downward from the world it once anchored.
These are expert judgments, not thermometer readings. Each index is built by analysts scoring a checklist or aggregating expert surveys, and their methods are debated; they measure overlapping but different things (civil liberties, elections, checks on the executive), which is exactly why showing all three together, rather than picking one, is the honest approach. The vertical axis starts at 50, not 0, to make the changes legible; the underlying scores never fall below the 50s. The category labels (“full” vs “flawed,” “liberal” vs “electoral”) are step-functions that jump on small numeric moves, so the dramatic 2025 label change rests on a real but bounded score change. And a president does not set these scores: they reflect structural conditions built up over years, which is why this is charted as a national trajectory, not a grade for any one officeholder. Freedom House figures before 2013 are approximate (the 100-point scale was backfilled).