India is often understood through its elections, but democracy is not only about voting. A country can continue to hold elections while other parts of democracy, such as rights, freedoms and institutional checks, change over time. This data story uses V-Dem country-year data from 1947 to 2025 to explore India’s liberal democracy gap: the difference between electoral democracy and broader liberal democratic safeguards.
The story focuses on three connected questions. First, how has liberal democracy changed in India since independence? Second, how have rights and freedoms such as equality before the law, freedom of expression, freedom of association and civil society participation shifted over time? Third, how have courts and the legislature acted as checks on executive power?
This chart compares India’s Electoral Democracy Index and Liberal Democracy Index from 1947 to 2025. I have also added a gap line, which is calculated as Electoral Democracy minus Liberal Democracy. This helps show that democracy is not only about elections. The chart gives a starting point for looking at whether India’s election-based democracy and wider liberal democratic protections have moved in the same direction over time.
Note: V-Dem scores range from 0 to 1. Higher values generally indicate stronger democratic performance for the selected measure. The liberal democracy gap is a calculated measure used in this story: Electoral Democracy Index minus Liberal Democracy Index.
This chart looks at four V-Dem indicators linked to rights and freedoms: equality and liberty, expression and information, association freedom, and civil society participation. These indicators help explain what may sit behind the liberal democracy gap. They show how the conditions for public voice, participation and civic freedom have changed in India across the post-independence period.
Note: V-Dem scores range from 0 to 1. Higher values generally indicate stronger rights, freedoms or participation for the selected indicator.
This chart compares judicial checks, legislative checks and the liberal component index from 1947 to 2025. It focuses on the role of institutions in limiting executive power. This is useful for the overall story because a democracy needs more than elections; it also needs institutions that can place limits on power when needed.
Note: V-Dem scores range from 0 to 1. Higher values generally indicate stronger constraints or stronger liberal democratic safeguards for the selected indicator.
Together, the three visualisations show that India’s democracy is better understood as a layered system, rather than only through elections. The first chart shows a clear gap between electoral democracy and liberal democracy, which means that voting and wider democratic protections do not always move at the same level. The second chart adds more detail by looking at rights and freedoms, including equality and liberty, expression and information, association freedom, and civil society participation. The third chart then focuses on institutional checks, showing how courts, the legislature and broader liberal safeguards relate to limits on executive power.
The main result is that India’s democratic story has not followed a simple straight line. The data shows periods of stability, decline, recovery and more recent pressure. In the recent period, the rights and freedoms indicators also show stress around liberty, expression, association and civil society space, although the pattern is not exactly the same for every measure. Electoral democracy is still visible in the data, but the wider liberal democratic safeguards show more variation over time. This means the story is not that democracy has disappeared, but that its quality has become more uneven. Elections remain important, but rights, freedoms and checks on power are also needed to understand how democracy is changing in India.
The main data source used in this story is the V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16. The dataset was filtered to India only, and the visualisations use post-independence observations from 1947 to 2025. Original V-Dem values were not changed. The only calculated measure used in the story is the liberal democracy gap, calculated as Electoral Democracy Index minus Liberal Democracy Index.
I used the V-Dem Country-Year Dataset and the V-Dem Codebook v16 as the primary data sources for this story. I also used the article Why India’s Democracy Is Dying by Maya Tudor as a background source to help frame the issue of democratic change in India.
I used AI tools to assist with the topic. All data selection, interpretation, visualisation decisions and final submission choices were reviewed by me.
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Varieties of Democracy Institute. (2026). V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16. University of Gothenburg.
Tudor, M. (2023). Why India’s democracy is dying. Journal of Democracy, 34(3), 121–132.