OPINION
Credibility That Erodes — When You Criticize a Democracy Without Looking at Your Own
August 3, 2026
We set out to write five glossary entries — neutral, technical definitions explaining what "democracy," "autocracy," and "hybrid regime" mean. The kind of work usually done in an afternoon and forgotten within a month. But cross-referencing the data from three independent institutes that measure these concepts — V-Dem, Freedom House, the Economist Intelligence Unit — we found ourselves facing a different scenario than expected: the very institutes that should tell us with certainty who is democratic and who isn't don't agree with each other, and when we tried to narrow the field to a single, closely-known country — Italy — that fragmentation stopped being a methodological detail and started to look like something more uncomfortable.
The fact, with a source. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, Italy in 2025 is a "Flawed Democracy" — imperfect, not full. According to V-Dem, Italy is among the countries added to the "autocratizing" list in 2025 — not yet a category change, but a direction of travel recorded alongside the United Kingdom and the United States. According to Freedom House, Italy is among the three countries with the sharpest drop in freedom score in 2025, together with the United States and Bulgaria — not because of a single event, but because of the weakening of anticorruption safeguards explicitly flagged in the report.
This isn't an isolated case that concerns only us. We had already documented it in Abstention as Diagnosis: the capture of politics by constraints and interests external to the ballot box, a public debate reduced to clickbait on social media, an electoral-accountability crisis that makes it increasingly hard for a citizen to connect a vote to a real consequence. Abstention wasn't the disease, we said: it was the symptom. The picture that has emerged from this table confirms the same diagnosis from a different angle — that of external measurement, not internal perception.
The point that matters. When a Western government — Italian, European, American — condemns another country as "not a real democracy," it almost always does so as if its own classification were a settled, closed, non-negotiable fact. It isn't. The same tools we would use to judge a third country, applied to ourselves, return a picture that is imperfect, deteriorating, and measured by sources that don't even agree with each other on how severe the decline is. This doesn't mean the judgment on others is false or unjustified — the data in this same table shows that none of the three institutes has any doubt that North Korea or Saudi Arabia are not democracies in any meaningful sense of the term. It means the right to pronounce that judgment erodes every time whoever pronounces it fails to apply the same standard of verification to themselves.
The other side. This isn't only self-criticism from within. Since 2021, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has published an annual report titled "The State of Democracy in the United States" — the most recent edition verifiable in this session dates to 2022 (published March 20, 2023) — which cites real data (the US Gini coefficient, which rose to 0.48 in 2021; Pew Research polling on political polarization) alongside an explicit accusation: that the West uses the word "democracy" as a diplomatic weapon against those who don't fall in line, rather than as a standard applied consistently. It has to be said plainly what this is and isn't: it is not an independent analysis — it is the declared countermove of a state that has every interest in delegitimizing its critics, and the three institutes cited in this piece grant it no measurement authority comparable to their own. But ignoring that such a critique exists, is documented, and is partly grounded in real data would mean applying the symmetry test selectively — exactly the flaw this piece is calling out in how the word "democracy" gets used.
What this piece is not. It is not an equivalence between an Italy with an elected parliament, a legal opposition, and the possibility of a change of government, and a regime where a change of power is not provided for by the constitution. The systemic distinction remains real and remains relevant — we already wrote as much about abstention, and it's worth repeating here: a system that allows those in power to be legally removed is not the same thing as one that doesn't allow it by definition. But the distinction between "an open system in erosion" and "a closed system" is not a license to ignore the erosion. It is the opposite: the more open a system is, and the more vulnerable to its own internal erosion, the greater the responsibility — and the real possibility, through the vote — of those who live in it to reverse it.
The close. Credibility that erodes doesn't vanish overnight, and it never fully vanishes as long as the system stays open. But it really does erode, measurably, every time three independent institutes measure it and find deterioration instead of confirmation.
There is one thing that, as the author of this piece, I openly admit I cannot fully assess. I know how to read a lobbying figure, an Oxfam report, a Freedom House score: these are verifiable facts, with a source and a date. But the real complexity of the systems that decide a country's priorities — financial, geopolitical, security-related — probably exceeds the competence of whoever is writing this, and I suspect it exceeds that of most people reading it too. This isn't an elegant way of insinuating that there's a hidden design at work: it's the honest admission that there is a zone — not documented here because it cannot be documented with the tools this site has — where informed judgment becomes as difficult as judging the physics of nuclear fission without having studied it. Admitting that is more honest than pretending to know.
The question that remains open, the one with its feet on solid ground, isn't whether the West still has the right to judge — it's how much longer it can keep doing so without looking, with the same rigor, inward as well.
Sources: V-Dem Institute — Democracy Report 2026 · Freedom House — Freedom in the World 2026 · Economist Intelligence Unit — Democracy Index 2025 · World Justice Project — Rule of Law Index 2025 · Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China — "The State of Democracy in the United States: 2022" (March 20, 2023) · Oxfam — "Resisting the Rule of the Rich" (January 2026)