V-Dem Democracy Report 2025

V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · Published March 2025

Latest edition: March 2025 · Next expected: March 2027

What the report claims

The V-Dem Democracy Report ranks countries on the Liberal Democracy Index, which combines electoral democracy with judicial and legislative constraints, civil liberties, and equality. India ranks 100th of 179, with the Electoral Democracy Index at 105th and the Egalitarian Component at 134th, and V-Dem has classified India as an electoral autocracy since 2017. It is the most contested report in this set. A 2022 working paper from the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister argued that its expert-survey method produces comparisons with the Emergency era. The codebook, the Bayesian item-response model, and the dataset are published and downloadable, and releases are versioned.

The Credibility Score, dimension by dimension

Methodology transparency / replicability

12 / 20

Source verifiability + measurement integrity

8 / 25

Internal consistency of India’s place

10 / 20

Construct validity / India coverage

6 / 10

Independence and funding

8 / 20

Accountability (corrections, versioning)

3 / 5

Funding and independence: V-Dem sits in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, under academic leadership with methods open to peer review. Its main named funders are Swedish and European public research bodies, including the Swedish Research Council and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, but individual grant amounts are not itemized and funding is concentrated in Western government aid programs. The annual report takes a public position warning about autocratization and has placed India in that category, while the research team controls the country scores.

Sources: V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, V-Dem Democracy Report 2025

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Updated 9 November 2026