A chapter in Rutger Bregman’s “Utopien für Realisten” (Utopias for Realists) inspired me to dig deeper into all the statistics and numbers surrounding democracy. Since the 1900s, we have lived in a world that adores numbers almost over everything else. The specific measurement Bregman elaborates on is the GDP in the chapter “Der Maßstab schlechthin” (The Ultimate benchmark). The GDP aims to be a singular metric to define economic success; I started wondering how this idea translates to the success of a democracy and how that is currently being measured. But first, let’s take a closer look at the GDP and where my inspiration came from for this article:

“Tatsächlich gibt es im Krieg keine annähernd so nützliche Kennzahl wie das BIP.”

(Translation: “In fact, during war, there is no indicator nearly as useful as the GDP.”)

Russian-born American economist Simon Kuznets invented the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the 1930s. Kuznets’ work on this single metric system to capture all economic production by individuals, companies, and the government began in response to the Great Depression. The Great Depression was caused by a multitude of events, such as the Stock Market Crash in 1929, following bank runs, the general decline in consumer spending, the breakdown of international trades, wealth inequality, overproduction, policy mistakes, and, of course, the slow response by governments to all of it.  Context matters!

The GDP was meant as a tool that policymakers could use to navigate the economic crisis and didn’t factor in society's many other needs. To be more frank, the GDP originated at a time when survival meant everything. It was not designed to let a society thrive but survive!

While the standard for calculating the GDP has been updated several times, it is essential to take note that the first guideline for drafting the GDP contained about 50 pages, and the last manual authored by the BEA contained over 400 pages. This means there are only a few people, including economists, who genuinely understand how the numbers behind the GDP are calculated. Therefore, a clear level of transparency and accessibility are missing. These days, the GDP has become the singular most defining value of a country, yet even Kuznet warned against using the GDP in that context. He was aware of the limitations of the system he had built, as it lacked one of the most defining factors of any society: Its well-being. Bregman expresses it as follows:

“Das BIP ist kein klar definiertes Faktum, [..]. Wer das BIP misst, versucht eine Idee zu messen. [..] Es ist unbestreitbar, dass das BIP in Kriegszeiten sehr nützlich war, [...]. Im Krieg ist es sinnvoll die Umwelt zu verschmutzen und sich zu verschulden. es kann sogar richtig sein, die Familie zu vernachlässigen, die Kinder zur Arbeit in eine Fabrik zu schicken, die Freizeit zu opfern und alles zu vergessen, was das Leben eigentlich lebenswert macht.”

(Translation: “The GDP is not a clearly defined fact, [...]. Whoever measures GDP is attempting to measure an idea. [...] It is undeniable that GDP was very useful during wartime, [...]. In war, it makes sense to pollute the environment and go into debt. It can even be right to neglect the family, send children to work in a factory, sacrifice leisure time, and forget everything that actually makes life worth living.”)

This very chapter led to my investigation into the numbers and statistics surrounding democracy. If our most used economic tool exists in the wrong context yet is a priority for policymakers and alike, what about the statistics that help us inform us of our success in driving our democracies? Suppose the GDP doesn’t factor in many essential numbers to truly capture society's success on other levels than just the economic one. What is amiss when it comes to our democratic values?

So, I embarked on a journey to bring you democracy in numbers. But before we start, I want you to know why you should even care.

Knowledge is power, and an informed and involved citizen can take influence on how a system works, as systems of any kind are a work of design. If we ever want to reach the level of ‘true democracy,’ we must be in the known. We need to be! True democracy leads to more resources for all of us and a better quality of life. Understanding which systems exist to measure us and our engagement in governance enables us to recognize systemic flaws and disillusions us from ‘hypernormalization.’

Similar to everything else in our world, we have also pursued to measure our democracies. These statistics are called ‘democracy indices.’ While democracy, by its original definition, refers to a system of governance “ruled by the people,” there have been several systems to do this, yet not all of these forms do it the same way; hence, democracy doesn’t just equal democracy. According to the ‘List of Forms of Government,’ we are dealing with twelve overall and actively used forms of democracy in our world today. Interestingly, most forms of democracy seem to be representative democracies, where officials are elected to represent and execute the people's will and rule in their stead. Let’s keep the former fact in mind when looking at the democracy indices.

Several attempts exist to measure democracy with the support of ‘Democracy Indices,’ developed by various organizations. They all have in common to inform policy decisions based on quantitative and comparative research. While these indices claim transparency in their research and statistical output, transparency is primarily also connected to the accessibility of data. Accessibility here can refer to two things: firstly, the literal access to the raw data collected, and secondly, the level of understanding required to form certain conclusions over others concerning that raw data.

“An uninformed majority will always lose against an informed minority”

is a quote that comes to my mind immediately from the game Werewolf. This social game was created by Dimitry Davidoff at Moscow State University in 1986 and has sadly been proven to be very true in every possible instance.

Before we go into more detail, and without adding too much complexity, here are the three most commonly mentioned indices and their parameters of measurement on a high-level scale:

• The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)
  The index, invented by a research and analysis division of the Economist Group in 2006, measures the state of democracy in 167 countries based on just five categories: Electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

• Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Indices
  The V-Dem project, initiated by political scientists, produces a set of democracy indices based on a multidimensional conceptualization of democracy. V-Dem distinguishes again between five high-level principles of democracy: Electoral, Liberal, Participatory, Deliberative, and Egalitarian. This index has managed to capture the more nuanced and faceted nature of democracy.

• Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD)
  The International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (International IDEA) developed these indices. They aun ti measure democratic trends at the country, regional, and global levels across 29 aspects of democracy for 174 countries. The GSoD Indices are based on 165 individual indicators from various sources, including expert surveys, observational data, and composite measures. The conceptual framework of the GSoD Indices is built on two fundamental democratic principles:
  1- Popular control over public decision-making and decision-makers 2- Equality of respect and voice between citizens in the exercise of that control

All three of the indices mentioned above are widely adopted and enjoy popularity for good reasons: The V-Dem seems to offer the most detailed and granular data with about 500 indicators and a factored reach of over 200 countries, the EIU appears to be more centered around public opinion surveys and the GOsD is more nuanced with its approach in how to categorize between different systems of governance. While they all have their pros and cons, let’s get deeper into what I have promised in the title of this article: The numbers!

The EIU’s most interesting parameters are that it factors in a value declared as ‘Political Culture’ and clearly separates between ‘full democracies’ and ‘flawed democracies.’ According to the EIU, 24 countries worldwide enjoy living in full democratic systems, while 50 are subjected to flawed ones, 34 are classified as hybrid regimes, and 59 are authoritarian regimes. To go into more detail, only 7.8% of the world population currently lives in a system that is defined, according to the EIU, as a full democracy.

The V-Dem is a stack of different democracy indices combined and finally results in an official ranking. Within that ranking, Denmark enjoys first place with high stats in all six components (mentioned above). The highest scores were given in ‘Liberal’ (0.977)  and ‘Egalitarian’ (0.972). Liberal here stands for an index that factors in the rule of law, checks and balances, and civil liberties. In contrast, ‘Egalitarian’ in this context stands for equal access to resources, power, and freedoms across society as a whole. As a reference, Germany is in place 15th, and the United States is in the 20th. The lowest values for the US have been given in ‘Egalitarian’ (0.651) and ‘Participatory’ (0.657). We already know that the first value stands for equal access to resources and, therefore, a general problem of inequality. The second value measures the degree to which citizens participate in their own democracy, which brings us back to a former article of mine that mentions ‘political apathy’ and its inherent meaning.

Lastly, let’s take a closer look at the numbers of the GOsD by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). The IDEA is an intergovernmental organization that aims to support the sustainable development of democracy worldwide. The organization is based out of Stockholm, Sweden. Since 2024, 35 more member states have joined to contribute to the GOsD. The approach here is very different. Instead of sharing fixed results and their outcomes, IDEA makes the data more accessible by providing citizens with data that can be compared. In the output below, I compare Denmark with the United States (according to the comparison made with the V-Dem data). I used two parameters, Participation and Representation, to output their values. As we can observe, Participation, even in countries such as Denmark, shows a small decline from 1975 with 0.99 participation and 2023 a value of 0.96. More dramatic though is the development of the Representation value for the United States from 1975, being at 0.69 (overall not high), a consistent growth of this value to 0.8 in 2014 and a deep dip to 0.66 in 2019.

It is very important to take note of the timeline and approaches all of these different indices take into account. The biggest final question is, now that we belong to a more informed minority, what can we do with this added knowledge?

The first lesson learned should be that these indices do something very similar to what I did in this article with you: Being informative while selective.

You might feel you are now part of an informed minority when, in fact, I fed you the numbers only of what I wanted you to see. I wanted you to see that the US is defined as a ‘flawed democracy’ and doesn’t even compare to countries such as Denmark. I wanted you to know that representation doesn’t translate to a country having a political culture. Most importantly, I wanted you to understand that free access to resources is imperative to live in a more complete or ‘full democracy.’ In both of the aforementioned values, the US falls short. Numbers can be bent in the direction we need them to bend in by being highly selective while claiming to cite a balanced system. The indices are not inaccurate in themselves when viewed collectively, but they turn into the narrative of an individual when being shown selectively, which is more than often the case.

In the end, I wrote this article to inform and ask you to question if a metric or index can genuinely reflect the reality we citizens live in. Are they a tool for democracies to thrive upon, or are they designed to make us believe that our system is already the most complete version of democracy? Personally, I think that the ultimate form of democracy is what I call ‘true democracy,’ as mentioned above. Democracies, in general, are still a rare good in the world, even when flawed. They are worth fighting for, but I believe it is time to reach the next level of how democracy is being executed. True democracy might be the answer to this, where a symbiosis is reached between ‘liquid’ and ‘digital democracies’, and political theatrics belong in the trash bin. We have failed to adopt a form of democratic governance that can adapt to how the world works today and how people live in it. We can do better by envisioning true democracy together.

Written by @stellaachenbach

I would like to thank Daniele Nanni for his valuable feedback and suggestions, which significantly improved the final version of this article.

• R. Bregman, ‘Utopien für Realisten’, p. 116

• Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Simon Kuznets’, Wikipedia (2025) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Kuznets accessed 27 January 2025

• Wikipedia Contributors, ‘Great Depression’, Wikipedia (2025) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression accessed 27 January 2025

• Bureau of Economic Analysis, ‘NIPA Handbook’, BEA (December 2024)https://www.bea.gov/resources/methodologies/nipa-handbook/pdf/all-chapters.pdf accessed 27 January 2025

• True democracy is true to the original definition of democracy that aims for the ‘rule of the people.’ This format of democracy avoids a representative democracy and aims for a direct one by informed citizens. It deploys assisting technologies that guarantee transparency over processes in a decentralized and secure format. True democracy doesn’t need politics to succeed in performing democratic governance. (Definition by Stella Achenbach, 2023)

• flybrand1976, ‘Definitions: Hypernormalization & Hypernormal’, https://fredlybrand.com/ (2023) https://fredlybrand.com/2023/02/16/definitions-hypernormalization-hypernormal/ accessed 27 January 2025

• Wikipedia Contributors, ‘List of Forms of Government’, Wikipedia (2025)