State of the world 2024: 25 years of autocratization – democracy trumped?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset version 15, we offer six main findings about contemporary trends of regime transformations. First, the average level of liberal democracy continues to decline, and is back to 1985-level by population-weighted averages. Second, freedom of expression is worsening in nearly a quarter of all countries in the world, setting a new absolute record during the last 25 years. Third, 45 countries are in ongoing episodes of autocratization, and 19 countries are in ongoing episodes of democratization. Fourth, almost half of all <i>autocratizing</i> countries are increasingly spreading disinformation, and a quarter of <i>all</i> countries are affected by increasing political polarization. Fifth, we launch a watchlist initiative – an approach to detect early signs of autocratization and democratization. Sixth, we provide qualitative evidence of ongoing executive aggrandizement in the USA under the first two months of the second Trump administration. We argue that the USA could become the fastest autocratizing country in contemporary history that does not involve a coup d'état and that the second Trump administration has <i>already</i> taken American democracy closer to a democratic breakdown.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".