Author: Jiahang Luo
A poster that charts global liberal democracy from 1970-2024 and explores what most closely aligns with democratic quality today. Using V-Dem's country-year measures, I compare four factors-freedom of expression, rule of law, resource equality, and economic growth-via country averages and LOESS trends (2014-2024), plus regional time-series since 1970. Findings: freedom of expression and rule of law track democracy most tightly; resource equality shows a positive, threshold-like pattern at high equality; short-run GDP growth has little systematic relationship.
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V-Dem Institute. Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Staffan I. Lindberg, et al. (2024). *Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset, v14.
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World Bank — World Development Indicators (WDI). Real GDP growth, annual %, retrieved 2025.