V-Dem Institute Democracy Report: Armenia Has Progressed From “Electoral Autocracy” to “Electoral Democracy”

GOTHENBURG –The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute released its Autocratization Changing Nature: Democracy Report 2022 where Armenia improved its ranking from “electoral autocracy” to “electoral democracy”.

“Two countries – Armenia and Bolivia – made democratic transitions from electoral autocracy to electoral democracy in 2021”, V-Dem said in the report.

The report noted Armenia, Georgia and Uzbekistan as “three advancing countries” in Eastern Europe and Central Asia undergoing democratization. V-Dem also noted that globally “In Armenia, Malaysia, and Seychelles for instance, there was significant improvement in autonomy of electoral management bodies in the last 10 years.”

“Zooming in on the last three years makes it possible to identify the countries that started to change only recently. Only three out of the top ten democratizers since 2011 are among the top democratizers in the past three years – Armenia, Dominican Republic, and Seychelles,” V-Dem further noted in the report.

The Democracy Report 2022 analyzes the evidence from three perspectives. The first part examines the state of the world in 2021 based on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI) and the Regimes of the World (RoW) Index. The second part of the report focuses on countries that are in a process of changing. The third part presents data on coups, polarization, and disinformation, all of which signal that the fundamental dynamics of the current wave of autocratization may be changing