this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2026
515 points (95.3% liked)

Mildly Interesting

27214 readers
1221 users here now

This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.

This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?

Just post some stuff and don't spam.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] huppakee@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

How are we even defining democracy anymore?

There are multiple organisations invested in rating democracies worldwide, the main one is from The Economist EIU ,(https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2025/, there are numerous places where the raw data is published more accessible such as here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/democracy-index-eiu).

I personally prefer the index made by Freedom House (https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world) because it includes what a regular citizen experiences:

For each country and territory, Freedom in the World analyzes the electoral process, political pluralism and participation, the functioning of the government, freedom of expression and of belief, associational and organizational rights, the rule of law, and personal autonomy and individual rights.

Their assessment of the US democracy:

EIU (2024): 7.85/10, "flawed democracy" Freedom in the world score (2025): 81/100

These scores obviously are not about other things that matter, like economic stability or access to healthcare.