Polarization – A Global Threat to Democracy?

By: Lukas Bernhard
Mar 02, 2020


In a recent article in the Journal of Democracy, Milan Svolik argues that even though ordinary people may support democracy, in highly polarized countries they are willing to “trade off democratic principles for partisan interests”. In this week’s graph, we use the V-Dem data to investigate links between polarization and democratic erosion.

The first graph illustrates recent democratic erosion in five countries: Hungary, India, Poland, Turkey, and the United States using V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index. This index emphasizes, “the importance of protecting individual and minority rights against the tyranny of the state and the tyranny of the majority”. During the past two decades, the quality of liberal democracy has declined in all five cases. This trend is most pronounced for Turkey and India.

To learn more about V-Dem indicators and our online analysis tools, visit www.v-dem.net. Also see V-Dem’s Democracy Report 2019 on “Toxic Polarization”.