I decided to dig into the raw data. What I could find was the country by country narrative for 2018 which has each country ranked on a bunch of metrics out of a

I decided to dig into the raw data. What I could find was the country by country narrative for 2018 which has each country ranked on a bunch of metrics out of a total score and then those scores are combined via some weighting into an aggregate scores. These component scores are entirely subjective and have no ground truth - worse than college or hospital rankings. College rankings have some quantitative basis - average starting offer for college graduates and hospitals have risk of death or readmittance for hospitals. Freedom house metrics have no quantitative basis (see below). The country narratives are not available for 2019 or 2020. I can assure you that if you dig into the raw data you will most certainly find it rife with ad-hoc assumptions to justify their conclusions. The fact that they have a magical threshold of 1 million for a country and that country get a weight of 1 and India with a population of 1.4 billion gets a a weight of 1 which leads to this gem: "From 2006 to 2020, the number of democracies contracted to 108 and the percentage of democracies to 55%. Among states over one million population, the decline in the number of democracies was more dramatic, from 86 to 75, a drop from 57% to 48% (Table 4)." I can tell from a fairly informed perspective that the quality of the process of voting in elections in India over the past decade has gone up significantly due to tamper-proof EVMs and the fact that India's voting commission is an independent constitutional body. Just that gain alone should make India's ranking move up in the Democracy index. India has added ~100 million people over that time. So the sheer number of people being able to exercise that vote freely and have it be counted dwarfs the population of countries who have become undemocratic. To quote Charlie Munger, incentives matter and to quote Taleb - always always ask what they are selling. Freedom house is selling their rankings to Donors. Press like this gives them the ability to show donors the PR and raise more dollars. Freedom House rankings are optimized to raise the $30,000,000 they need every year from Donors. They are incentivized to say - Democracy is in Danger - for it raises more dollars. Dem are there incentives. Even better when you can demonize the countries whose governments are of the opposite ideological strain than that of the donors. India's rating has cratered since 2014 since Modi got elected. Incentives matter and always always ask what they are selling and why.