Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change. By Coppedge, Michael , Gerring, John , Glynn, Adam , Knutsen, Carl Henrik , Lindberg, Staffan I. , Pemstein, Daniel , Seim, Brigitte , Skaaning, Svend-Erik , and Teorell, Jan . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 226 p. $99.99 cloth.

Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change. By Coppedge Michael., Gerring John., Glynn Adam., Knutsen Carl Henrik., Lindberg Staffan I., Pemstein Daniel., Seim Brigitte., Skaaning Svend-Erik., and Teorell Jan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 226 p. $99.99 cloth.

The territorial and qualitative expansion of democracy reached its global highwater mark in 2005, and since then the world has experienced an ebb of democracy, or so claimed Larry Diamond in his 2015 article published in the famous “Is Democracy in Decline?” issue of Journal of Democracy. Although the thesis of the democratic ebb has been intensely debated, in the last couple of years there appears to be a broad consensus among democracy-measuring projects about the end and reversal of what once was called the “third wave of democratization.”

The reversal of democratization has had a true global footprint. Not only have democratization processes slowed down or remained stuck, but also hybrid regimes have devolved back into authoritarian directions and autocracies have fortified. The quality of consolidated democracies has degraded as well. EU member states and once consolidated democracies such as Hungary and Poland already appear to have left the democratic development path; the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit labels the United States as being a “flawed democracy” since 2016. V-Dem also noted in its 2020 Democracy Report that the United States suffers from substantial autocratization.

However, the democracy ebb, or “the third wave of autocratization,” did not only affect the quality of political regimes. It also had a significant transformative effect on the market of democracy measuring. It amplified already existing methodological criticisms of democracy indices that have dominated the market for a long time, like Freedom House’s Freedom in the World or Polity. Indices that were unable to track the obvious changes in the democracy landscape have lost importance. It also became obvious that there is strong demand both in the academic and policy community for a complex, multifaceted democracy-measuring project that is both devoid of the methodological and conceptual weaknesses of its predecessors and able to capture the complexity of democracy in a way that does not reflect cultural and political bias favoring Western-type liberal democracy. Among the various, complex democracy-measuring projects started between 2005 and 2010,...