Universal Suffrage: The Final Years?

Let me preface this by saying the topics I'm talking about here, and the direction they're headed, genuinely terrify me. I'm not pretending to be a news source, so I can say things like that, right?

The Liberal Democracy Index, 2025 is a number between 0 and 1 that estimates the extent of voting rights, election fairness, freedoms, and such. Looking at the data and comparing it with other datasets concerns me greatly.

Defining a Liberal Democracy

I'm going to define this for myself here to ensure countries in South America get a fair shot. The way that I'm doing this is by taking the top 25 highest recorded Index values for countries that still exist.

That gives us the following list of Liberal Democracies, in order of highest ever Index value.

Why 25, you ask? Because otherwise, my country, the UK, would not appear. Sigh.

If you're interested, the largest drop from maximum is Venezuela, which peaked in 1991 at 0.618 and which in 2025 scored 0.042, a drop of 0.576.

The highest score ever was Denmark in 2006, at 0.896. Still, that has dropped0.012 to 0.884 in 2025.

The UK peaked with a score of 0.811 in 2018, which surprised me. It now languishes at 0.689, a drop of 0.122.

The recent history of Hungary and Belarus presumably explains their drops of over 0.4, though Belarus was never peaked very high.

The Problem

There's a growing contingent of rich people who think that democracy is incompatible with their ability to grow their wealth in the ways they would like. To be fair to them, they are probably correct, which is, I suspect, one reason the Liberal Democracy Index has been declining nearly across the board.

When Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke advocates for rich people getting more votes than poor people, when you can be sentenced as a terrorist when you weren't tried as one, when your lawyer faces jail over a speech made in a trial, when Peter Thiel says he "[...] no longer believe[s] that freedom and democracy are compatible.", when climate protestors are sentenced to insane jail time, I find it difficult to believe that things aren't regressing significantly. It is abundantly obvious that there is too much money swaying our institutions, and it's easy to see the routes at least some of this money must have taken, but there's a lot of possible ones. Mostly it just seems to be that the rich and supposedly powerful are ethically bankrupt.

Given how many of these rich people seem to be pushing a far-right agenda in Europe now, and how well that seems to be working, it's no wonder scores are declining.

The Decline

The average drop of the Liberal Democracy Index for the 25 countries that are part of my Liberal Democracy cohort is about -0.08. Not that bad, perhaps, but there are some big names dragging the average down.

The biggest single drop there is the United States, which can't come as as surprise to anyone. The US has a huge influence over its allies and, as I mentioned, is funding the kind of far right politics that drives a decline in these scores, so I expect the US will start to pull others down with it before too much longer.

Greece, Poland and Slovakia aren't that far behind the US. The UK and Portugal aren't that far behind them. If we exclude these big drops, the average is -0.04, roughly half. That's still bad, but it's far less bad.

Universal Suffrage

Then I started to wonder what data I could get from combining the Liberal Democracy Index and data about universal suffrage.

On average, universal suffrage was achieved in about 1931 across our cohort of 25. The mean Index score at the time suffrage was achieved was 0.41 while the median was 0.46.

I expected the Index score would improve dramatically in the years after universal suffrage, but that doesn't seem to be the case. After five years, the average across our 25 countries was 0.56. It's a big jump, sure, but not as big as I was expecting. One of the reasons for that is Chile, which dropped from 0.453 at the point of universal suffrage to just 0.03 five years after, but excluding Chile only bumps the average up to 0.58

What I'm looking for is the point we're in trouble. We already have the inexplicably powerful saying the poor shouldn't be able to vote, and in comparison to these people, we are all poor.

Doing a very simple trajectory extrapolation for the next 20 years, based on the last 20 years, Estonia tops the list with a Liberal Democracy Index score of 0.88, just ahead of Denmark on 0.87.

If we compare the 20 year extrapolation to the Index at the time each country achieved universal suffrage, we get a table like this.

This is specifically the countries on a downward trajectory whose 20 year extrapolation is within 0.2 of the Index at Suffrage value. There's no mathematical or statistical rigour to this, so it's likely you can't draw any conclusions from it. The extrapolation is just a straight continuation of the last 20 years. On the other hand, maybe it does say something interesting.

Honestly, I think the real situation may be much worse than indicated here when you factor in the climate collapse. Of course, the Index at Suffrage value isn't anything special, and it's not like universal suffrage will be taken away as soon as it's reached, but moving closer to that value cannot be a good thing.

Given how the US tends to drag other countries along in its cultural and political wake, I do think one thing is clear: we need to cut as many ties as we can with the United States, as soon as we can.