Democracy Trajectory Simulator

This simulator lets you explore “what-if” questions about democracy: how changes in economic growth and key institutions might affect a country’s democracy level over the next 10 years. It is not a precise forecast, but a way to see plausible ranges and compare different scenarios.

Start your simulation

Welcome to the Democracy Trajectory Simulator. Follow the steps below to predict future democracy levels based on economic and institutional changes.

1

Pick a country to set the baseline democracy score.

2

Click a button to instantly apply historical parameters, or manually adjust sliders below.

For all sliders, moving right means improving conditions (higher growth, stronger rule of law, more freedom), and moving left means deterioration relative to today.

Tip: Lock current view to compare changes overlay.

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Simulated level of democracy over the next 10 years
10–90% interval 25–75% interval Median path Locked Scenario (Comparison)

Understanding the Graph

The vertical axis shows the democracy score from 0 (Authoritarian) to 1 (Liberal Democracy).

This chart displays the result of 1,000 simulations. The Purple Line represents the median (most central) outcome. The Pink Band captures the middle 50% of possibilities, while the wider Orange Band covers 80% of all potential trajectories.
Note: Wider bands indicate higher uncertainty about the future.

How this prototype works

We estimate a simple dynamic panel model on V-Dem data: libdem_t = α + ρ·libdem_{t-1} + β_gdp·gdp_growth_t + β_eq·Δeq_t + β_rule·Δrule_t + β_poly·Δpoly_t + ε_t . Here Δeq, Δrule and Δpoly are year-to-year changes in V-Dem’s equality, rule of law, and freedom of experssion indices. The estimated coefficients are exported from Python as data/coeffs.json and loaded into this page. For each scenario, the simulator runs 1,000 Monte Carlo paths over 10 years and plots the median and 10/25/75/90 percentile bands as a fan chart.

Data Sources