Polity Atlas
Report

Democracy Report 2026: Unraveling the Democratic Era?

V-Dem Institute · V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · 2026

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Type
Report
Author
V-Dem Institute
Accessed
2026-09-01
Reliability notes
Table 1 (p. 15), Regimes of the World 2025: Russia, Rwanda and Iran (Iran marked 'EA-') are electoral autocracies; Saudi Arabia and the UAE are closed autocracies.

Claims citing this source

6 claims
EstablishedThe V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 counts 92 autocracies and 87 democracies at the end of 2025, and estimates that 74% of the world's population (about 6 billion people) lives in autocracies and only 7% in liberal democracies.EstablishedAccording to the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, liberal democracies fell from a peak of 45 in 2009 to 31 in 2025, electoral democracies rose from 46 to 56, closed autocracies rose from 22 in 2019 to 35 in 2025, and electoral autocracy (57 countries) remains the most common regime type.EstablishedThe V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 identifies 44 countries as autocratizing at the end of 2025, including ten new cases, among them Croatia, Italy, Slovakia, Slovenia and the United Kingdom, and reports that the United States lost its status as a liberal democracy for the first time in over 50 years.EstablishedThe V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 finds that, weighting countries by population, the level of democracy enjoyed by the average person in the world in 2025 is back to 1978 levels.DisputedSince 2022 Russia has shifted from a 'spin dictatorship' based mainly on information control towards a 'fear dictatorship' based on open, large-scale repression.EstablishedPaul Kagame was officially re-elected in July 2024 with 99.2 percent of the vote, after the prominent opposition figures Victoire Ingabire and Diane Rwigara were barred from standing.