The EIU has published its Democracy Index annually since 2006. The index ranks 167 countries based on an overall score from 0 to 10 and classifies them into four categories: Full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, and authoritarian regime. The institute suggests that democratic decline has leveled off, with nearly 75 percent of countries either improving or maintaining their score.
The report has received considerable attention and is often used uncritically as a reference in analyses of global democratic development. Oagal has reviewed several previous editions. Ahead of the release of the EIU Democracy Index 2025, Oagal asked whether we can trust the EIU Democracy Index and whether the Economist Democracy Index actually misses the mark.
The summary Democracy Index report for 2025 is only 36 pages long, compared to 98 pages in the main report for 2024. This represents a clear break from previous years, although further analyses may still be published later, including in The Economist magazine itself.
As presented, the report does not include the consolidated table of all countries and their rankings—the Democracy Index itself. An index without an index.
Yet the text still refers to individual countries with both scores and rankings. This gives the reader the impression of a complete index without direct access to the underlying data from the source. Wikipedia has been updated with 2025 scores, though not at the same level of detail as in previous years.
The rankings are available in The Economist through an interactive version of the article Global democracy is in better shape than you think. Even here, the full tabular index we know from previous years is not presented. Individual countries can be searched via an interactive map and table, where rankings appear on hover. As a result, media outlets, World Population Review, the Norwegian UN Association, and others must extract the figures themselves, gain direct access, or rely on secondary sources such as Wikipedia, which has likely already done the work.
The table shows that Norway continues to rank as the world’s most democratic country. For the fourth consecutive year, it receives a score of 9.81. The score remains unchanged to two decimal places. It thus appears unaffected by the introduction of the closed party list system, which eliminates personal voting in national elections, and by the exposure of extensive political corruption—although other positive factors may have offset this. Norway has virtually no direct democracy at the national level, and parliament regularly blocks citizen-initiated referendums and proposals.
Among the countries classified as full democracies are Norway (1, also in 2024), followed by New Zealand (2), Sweden (3), Iceland (4), Switzerland (5), Finland (6), and Denmark (7). These are followed by countries such as Ireland (8), Luxembourg (10), and Canada (14), before additional Western European and other established democracies complete the category.
France is ranked 26th. The Economist’s analytical unit classifies the country as a full democracy in 2025, albeit at the bottom of this category.
France’s upgrade stands out as one of the most notable single shifts this year and offers insight into how the EIU’s expert panel operates. The specific justification for the previous classification of France as a flawed democracy is described as temporary restrictions on personal freedoms during the pandemic.
When temporary measures can produce such significant effects, this suggests that classifications for other countries may also reflect model thresholds rather than clearly documented structural changes. Was France truly so much less free in 2024 due to these temporary restrictions that it warranted classification as a flawed democracy?
The United States continues to fall in the rankings but remains in the category of flawed democracy. The federation is described in the report with emphasis on political polarization, institutional challenges, and issues related to electoral processes and civil rights. Democracy in the United States is clearly moving in the wrong direction, writes chief economist Constance Hunter, according to the report.
The assessment of the United States raises a more fundamental question: To what extent does the index capture long-term institutional developments, and to what extent does it reflect shorter-term political conditions? Is the conduct of the current administration in itself disqualifying in a democracy ranking, or is it rather a symptom of long-standing challenges? When scores change from year to year, it is not necessarily clear whether this reflects a real weakening of democracy as a system, or whether it reveals the consequences of developments over a longer period.
When the report’s conclusions are presented with the same level of certainty as before, but without the main table of the index, a tension arises between authority and verifiability.
Another central question is what the index actually measures. The Democracy Index is largely based on representative governance, with emphasis on electoral processes, institutions, and political participation. Elements of direct democracy play a limited role. Switzerland, where direct democratic mechanisms are significant, receives limited credit for this. One could imagine indices where countries without direct democracy automatically received a substantial deduction. In that case, Switzerland would likely rank at the top.
This raises the question of whether the index in practice measures the quality of representative systems rather than democracy in a broader sense. If direct participation and institutional balance of power are only weakly reflected in the assessment, the result may be a ranking that reflects a particular model rather than a comprehensive picture of democratic systems.
The EIU is not alone in measuring democracy. Other indices, such as V-Dem Institute and Freedom House, use different methodological approaches and weightings. The differences between them illustrate that measuring democracy largely depends on which criteria are applied and how they are interpreted.
The Democracy Index 2025, in its summary format, appears as a report with clear conclusions but a more limited basis for understanding how those conclusions have been reached. When the ranking itself is no longer presented in full, the question becomes not only what the index shows, but how well it can be verified.
At the same time, it can be argued that downplaying the ranking itself is not necessarily negative. A linear ranking from top to bottom may give an impression of precision that does not fully reflect the complexity of political systems. Such rankings can also create an oversimplified picture of nations—of which countries are considered good or bad.
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