The backbone of the whole page: all 54 institutional indicators, from high court independence to journalist harassment. The EU-27 average, the world median, the quartile bands and the best and worst lines are all computed from V-Dem country series, 1900 to 2025.
v-dem.net ↗Metric titles follow the codebook's indicator names, shortened to fit the page, and the one line subtitles paraphrase its measurement questions. The conditions metrics keep their providers' indicator names. The eight topic groups and their titles (Elections and suffrage, Courts and rule of law and so on) are our own arrangement, not V-Dem's.
the codebook ↗GDP growth, inflation, unemployment, net migration, population over 65 and fertility. Several of these are UN or ILO estimates republished through the World Bank API.
data.worldbank.org ↗House prices, housing cost overburden and adult learning. EU members only, so these charts have no world lines.
ec.europa.eu/eurostat ↗Interpersonal trust (from the European and World Values Surveys), years of schooling (from UNDP), political polarization, engaged society and civil society participation (the latter three ultimately from V-Dem).
ourworldindata.org ↗Hand-coded democratic erosion and consolidation events, 2000 to 2023, with narrative descriptions. The largest share of the dated event dots.
democratic-erosion.org ↗Monthly analyst reports since August 2022, impact-coded per democracy factor. Used here with attribution, for noncommercial purposes.
idea.int/democracytracker ↗Autocratization and democratization episode spans, drawn as shaded periods behind the lines rather than as dots.
github.com/vdeminstitute/ERT ↗Every national parliamentary election with its winning party, shown as a quiet marker layer along the time axis.
parlgov.org ↗The EU picks and world picks layers are hand-picked catalogs of dated events Claude judged relevant. Selection is Claude's call: the datasets above did not choose them and do not endorse them.
Opinion, not data: Claude's critical running commentary on EU integration, wins and costs both. Argue with Claude, not with V-Dem.
Shrikhand by Jonny Pinhorn, Anton by Vernon Adams and Lora by Cyreal. All open source under the SIL Open Font License.
fonts.google.com ↗The four ink palette, the boxed masthead and the flat press look tip their hat to the Polish monthly Ty i Ja and its cover designers.
The small print. The charts, the aggregations (EU-27 averages, world medians and extremes) and all the words around them are ours, not the data providers'. None of the institutions above endorse this page, and any errors of processing or interpretation are ours alone. Raw data is rebuilt from the original sources by scripts in the open repository; nothing is hand-edited. If you spot a mistake, we genuinely want to know.