V-Dem US liberal democracy index
Varieties of Democracy index of US liberal-democratic institutional quality (v2x_libdem, scale 0–1).
Reading
Tracks the slope of institutional drift rather than any one event. The number to read against the trust-in-government series.
Thresholds
- watch0.7 — exits the consolidated-democracy band V-Dem uses
- alarm0.5 — boundary of V-Dem 'electoral democracy' classification
Context
Why this matters
The V-Dem liberal-democracy index aggregates over a hundred subcomponents — judicial independence, electoral integrity, media freedom, civil-society capacity — into a single 0-to-1 score. The reading is less interesting than the slope. The US has been on a downward path on the index since the mid-2010s, which puts it in a small cohort of historically consolidated democracies that have moved meaningfully toward the band of "electoral autocracy." The slope, not the level, is what reads against the federal-trust signal.
Who watches this
- V-Dem Institute (University of Gothenburg) — produces the index; the canonical source
- Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt (Harvard) — How Democracies Die and Tyranny of the Minority frame the US slope explicitly
- Larry Diamond (Stanford) — long-running comparative democracy work; uses V-Dem alongside Freedom House
- Tom Pepinsky (Cornell) — connects the index to comparative-politics research on democratic backsliding
- Anne Applebaum — Twilight of Democracy uses V-Dem-style measurement for the European comparators
Recent history
The US liberal-democracy score peaked at roughly 0.85 in 2009 and has declined unevenly since. The V-Dem 2026 release places the 2025 reading at 0.57 — a sharp drop from 0.75 in 2024 and the lowest US reading in the modern series. Downward pressure has concentrated in the subcomponents related to judicial independence and electoral integrity.
What would change my read
A reversal of the slope — two to three consecutive years of subcomponent improvement, particularly in the electoral-integrity and judicial-independence sub-indices — would signal the trajectory has stabilised. The historical comparators suggest that once a consolidated democracy starts moving on this index, the move continues for several years before stabilising.