Measuring Democratic Erosion

Publicly available data measuring democracy and democratic erosion abounds, but it can be difficult to understand how datasets and measures differ, their relative advantages and disadvantages, and the types of questions that each dataset is best positioned to answer.

This brief aims to help policymakers, practitioners, and researchers make sense of existing approaches to measuring democratic resilience and decline. It also highlights the Democratic Erosion Consortium’s event dataset, which measures the concrete events associated with democratic backsliding and resilience.

Using the cases of Turkey and Brazil, this brief illustrates how event-based data can help reconcile discrepancies between different approaches to measuring democratic erosion and provide nuanced insights into the trajectory of democratic backsliding across and within countries.