The Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index for 2025 recorded a 0.02-point increase in its global score, marking the first rebound in nearly nine years after a prolonged decline in democratic measures worldwide.
Scores for almost three-quarters of the 167 countries tracked by the index either improved or remained flat over the past year, according to the EIU's annual assessment published in The Economist.
The index measures democracy using 60 indicators across five categories, assigning each country a score from 0 to 10 in each category. The average of these five scores determines the overall ranking, which classifies states into four categories: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, or authoritarian regimes.
Latin America and the Caribbean showed the strongest regional improvement. More than half of the region's countries improved their scores, often driven by increased political participation.
In Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, youth-led mass mobilizations contributed to democratic engagement. Protests in Nepal, Kenya, and Madagascar drew large segments of the population into political participation.
Several advanced democracies also recorded gains. Canada rose five places to ninth globally, a shift the EIU attributed partly to increased electoral participation.
The EIU's methodology has drawn criticism for lack of transparency, the anonymity of its experts, and the absence of detailed publication of scores by individual indicators, according to analysis by the Canadian Parliament. The EIU acknowledges that no universal consensus exists on measuring democracy and states that its criteria reflect a dominant analytical tradition.
