Assembly Elections 2026: Wrong on Democracy

IT HAS BECOME a fashion in recent years to describe India as a ‘non-democracy’ or some similar expression among liberal political scientists who live and work in the West. The exemplar of this mis-charac­terisation of India is Sweden’s V-Dem Institute. Every year, in March, the institute releases its ‘Democracy Report’ that unfailingly labels India as an “electoral autocracy”. This year was no exception.

This one-sided characterisa­tion is changing now in a man­ner that puts a question mark over the entire enterprise of “measuring democracy” and labelling countries into neat, watertight, political categories. For some years now, political scientists who work with V-Dem have begun questioning its conceptual categories and multiple problems in aggre­gating data and conclusions based on such procedures.

These political scientists— Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen and Jan Teorell—are specialists in methodology, area studies and comparative politics with a large body of work. Their criticism is tucked away in appendices of the V-Dem reports. Given the multiple times they have pointed out the same, basic, methodological errors, it seems V-Dem remains bent on continuing with an agenda-driven ‘analysis’.

The first problem pointed out by these political scien­tists is the use of population- weighted categories in the analysis. With countries like India and the US having large weights, any ‘decrease’ in democracy in these two countries makes it seem that democracy is failing across the world, the consistent message that V-Dem has been dishing out for a long time. It may make sense to describe an “average global person” when one considers data pertain­ing to inequality, life-span, per capita income, etc. But it makes little sense to talk of an “average global democrat”. But that is what population-weighted criteria lead to in the case of political categories applied to nation states.

A problem much more germane to India is the confounding of free and fair elections—the hallmark of democracy—with other politi­cal features such as freedom of expression and organisation. The dissenting political sci­entists write, “First, the recent global decline in democracy is not about suffrage restric­tions, nor is it about a drop in electoral integrity in the places where elections are actually held. Second, the downward trend starts with a decrease in the two components of elec­toral democracy that are not directly tied to the execution of elections, that is, freedom of expression and organization.” These are distinct conceptual categories that have been bun­dled together into measures for democracy. It may sound harsh, but this particular criti­cism of democracy is ideologi­cal and has nothing to do with democracy as such.

The ‘Democracy Report’ suffers from another serious er­ror: the use of arbitrary starting points and cut-offs in consider­ing when a country became or ceased to be a democracy.The four political scientists write, “Rather than comparing all countries across a fixed time-span…it [‘Democracy Report’] identifies specific starting and ending points for each country that are in many respects arbitrary and which may also influence interpretations of, eg, recent or ongoing democratic developments.” In the case of India, this leads to a curious anomaly: India’s democracy scores begin to deteriorate almost immediately from 2014, and even more sharply, from 2019. Both dates are not accidental: they mark BJP’s victory in the two General Elec­tions held in those years. This is as ideological as a supposedly objective measure can get.

What all this leads to is an unwarranted attention on countries like India (and the US) while the actual destruction of democracy is taking place in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, Niger, Afghani­stan and Myanmar.

Conceptually, measure­ment of democracy is a flawed idea. Unlike economic ag­gregates that can be observed and measured, measures of democracy have a ‘feel-like’ quality to them, making them inherently subjective and prone to prejudices of their observers.