Citizen-Weighted Expert-Coded Democratic Indices

The measurement of democracy has traditionally been dominated by indices built on expert evaluations. While these indices offer methodological rigor, they often exclude citizens’ perceptions of what it means to live in a democracy. This study proposes the Citizen-Weighted Liberal Democracy Index, which weighs the different (sub-)components of V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index according to the importance attributed by citizens, using data from over 85K responses from 58 countries included in the World Value Survey Round Seven. This methodology reveals that established democracies’ performance aligns well with citizens’ prioritized democratic features. Instead, countries with lower democratic performance tend to experience declines when citizen priorities are incorporated, generally speaking, due to a relative overweight on the importance of electoral institutions. This approach challenges the empirical assumption of a universal democratic understanding and adds evidence to a growing literature on the health of our democratic systems.