Kaushik Basu: Democratic decline may be worse than what existing measures capture

Democracy is inherently fraught. At its core lies the difficulty of translating individual preferences into a coherent social choice, a problem famously captured by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem and later developed by another Nobel laureate Amartya Sen in his 1970 book Collective Choice and Social Welfare.

Just as Euclid did for geometry long before them, Arrow and Sen gave political economy a rigorous axiomatic framework, in the process revealing the limits of collective decision-making.Yet, even as the theoretical understanding of democracy has advanced, empirical analysis has lagged behind. In the absence of consistent data, our views on why certain democracies thrive or falter are often driven by prejudice rather than by evidence.

To address this gap, the V-Dem Institute publishes its annual Democracy Reports, among the first systematic efforts to measure and compare democratic health across countries and over time. The Institute’s latest report offers a stark assessment of the US’s current trajectory.

The “speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled,” it warns, “is unprecedented in modern history.” Given America’s position as the world’s leading democracy, such rapid deterioration has implications far beyond its borders.While countries like Turkey and India have experienced democratic erosion in recent years, the report points to sharper declines across Western Europe, where populist leaders are increasingly taking cues from US President Donald Trump.Of course, any effort to measure democracy is open to criticism, not least because democracy has no single, universally accepted definition. Still, the V-Dem report represents one of the most rigorous efforts possible