Skip to content
Status: activeType: 🔬 researchCountry: United Kingdom Website: www.eiu.com
Status active
Type 🔬 research
Country United Kingdom
Website www.eiu.com
Contact london@eiu.com
+44 (0) 20 7576 8181
Concepts Democracy Liberal Democracy Representative Democracy
Last activity 2026-09-16 dod
Site live; Democracy Index 2025 campaign page current as of September 2026

Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU)

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is the research and analysis division of The Economist Group, the British media company that also publishes The Economist newspaper. EIU provides country, industry, and political-risk analysis to corporate, financial, academic, and government clients from offices in London, New York, Hong Kong, and Dubai.1

Democracy Index

Since 2006, EIU has published the Democracy Index annually (every two years from 2006–2010, yearly since), assessing 167 countries and territories across five categories — electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties — and classifying each as a full democracy, flawed democracy, hybrid regime, or authoritarian regime.1 Alongside the V-Dem Democracy Indices, it is one of the two most widely cited measures of democratic health worldwide.1

Democracy Index 2025

Where V-Dem's 2026 Democracy Report described accelerating backsliding, EIU's Democracy Index 2025 struck a more cautiously optimistic note: "Following eight years of decline, 2025 marks a stabilisation of democracy scores that suggests an end to the global democratic recession."2 Almost 75% of countries either improved their score or held steady over the year — though the United States was flagged as "one glaring exception," falling from 28th to 34th in the global ranking as its score continued to decline following Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration.2

Why it's on our radar

EIU's Democracy Index and V-Dem's Democracy Report are the two measurement projects DOD sees cited most often by other organisations in the landscape when framing arguments about the state of global democracy — including Folio Collective, which contrasted the two reports' 2026 findings when introducing its September 2026 event on whether to "celebrate or reimagine" democracy.3 Measurement work like EIU's doesn't design or advocate for governance reform itself, but it supplies the comparative data much of the rest of the landscape's work draws on.

See also

  1. "The Democracy Index published by the British media company the Economist Group is an index measuring the quality of democracy across the world." "The Economist Democracy Index" ✓ Verified, Wikipedia, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩↩↩

  2. "Following eight years of decline, 2025 marks a stabilisation of democracy scores that suggests an end to the global democratic recession." "EIU Democracy Index 2025: democracy stabilises after eight years of decline" ✓ Verified, PR Newswire, 7 April 2026. ↩↩

  3. "Yet, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s latest Democracy Index indicates that, ‘following 8 years of decline, 2025 marks a stabilisation of democracy scores that suggests an end to the global democratic recession’." Folio Collective's introduction to "Should we celebrate democracy today — or reimagine it for tomorrow?" ✓ Verified, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩

History