Liberal democracy index (V-Dem)

scale 0–1 (1 = full liberal democracy)

volatile recent trend, computed over 2018–2025

: rank 26 of 27 in the EU (2025)

The most extensive academic democracy-measurement project (University of Gothenburg, thousands of expert coders). For Romania: a sustained climb into the mid-2000s, then a plateau with large year-to-year swings and, in recent years, values ever further below the peak levels.

Source: V-Dem (via Our World in Data) · Dataset: liberal-democracy-index · Open source

Where Romania stands in the EU (2025)

This is one of the most uncomfortable positions on this site: in the latest edition, only Hungary sits lower. Romania's slide toward the bottom of the ranking is recent and fast.

Compared with Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria

Here the divergence between neighbours is the most telling: Hungary slid year after year to the Union's last place, Poland fell and then recovered after the 2023 change of government, while Romania, after its peak around 2020, has slipped steadily — ending up closer to Hungary than to Poland. Democracy can be lost both quickly and slowly.

Source and method

Across the period shown: from 0.30 0–1 in 1990 to 0.46 0–1 in 2025.

Source: V-Dem (via Our World in Data)
Dataset: liberal-democracy-index — Liberal democracy index
API address: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/liberal-democracy-index.csv
Retrieved on: 2026-07-08

Download the data: v-dem.json · detail/v-dem.json