The problem of assessing democratic decline

ITHACA—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 United States’ current trajectory. The “speed with w

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