IHRD
HAKILI Democratic Resilience Index
Measuring the capacity of political systems to withstand democratic erosion, especially when it operates through law rather than by force.
Methodology established
Scoring architecture
- Erosion through law55
- Resilience factors45
The HAKILI Democratic Resilience Index starts from an observation, namely that the deepest democratic backsliding now takes place through law far more than through force. Constitutional revisions designed to extend tenure, electoral engineering, capture of the courts, shrinking civic space, information constraints and normative substitution are all techniques which, under the cover of legality, can empty institutions of their substance.
The index has two components. The “erosion through law” component, scored out of fifty-five (55) points, measures the use of these six techniques. The “resilience factors” component, scored out of forty-five (45) points, assesses five factors that enable a political system to withstand such erosion. In total, forty-four (44) indicators feed into the score.
The headline result is a single figure, the democratic balance, obtained by subtracting the observed erosion from the measured resilience (R minus E). It places each country and tracks its evolution from one edition to the next.