WHAT WE COVER
WHat we cover
Our focus is on what are generally considered to be ‘consolidated’ democracies. These are states where the key elements of a functioning democracy have been in place for at least 2 decades, especially free and fair elections, rights protections, and meaningful constraints on government.
This is a broad category that includes both longstanding democracies (e.g. USA, UK, Germany, Japan, Costa Rica) and younger democracies (e.g. Poland, Hungary, Brazil, Chile, South Korea, Indonesia). However, it is less inclusive than many other projects focused on democracy.
As a quick rule of thumb these generally equate to Freedom House’s ‘free’ and ‘partly free’ categories and V-Dem’s ‘liberal democracy’, ‘electoral democracy’, and ‘electoral autocracy’ categories.
what we don’t COVER
Unlike the main democracy assessment organisations (Freedom House, V-Dem, IDEA, POLITY, EIU) we do not aim to cover every democracy worldwide.
For instance, we generally do not focus on states that are still in a process of democratic transition from authoritarianism (e.g. Gambia), cycling between civilian and military power (e.g. Thailand, Myanmar), or which claim to be democratic but have never been considered to be a functioning liberal democracy (e.g. Turkey).
However, especially in the focus area of Redesign, there are key lessons drawn from constitution-building in such states.
OUR 5-DIMENSIONAL APPROACH
We divide analysis of challenges facing democracies into 5 focus areas:
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how is democracy eroded and dismantled worldwide?
This is the starting point for analysis in the Demoptimism Project.
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CONNECTING THE 5 CHALLENGES
Our roadmap below indicates the connections between the 5 focus areas. Evidently, there will always be some overlap and these are not rigidly separate categories, but this aims to assist in achieving clarity.