> is currently the best empirical source? Yes: a lot of academic research on the topic. > I've been about for a few decades and I'm a fan of large helicopter

> is currently the best empirical source? Yes: a lot of academic research on the topic. > I've been about for a few decades and I'm a fan of large helicopter views of > global parameters, resource | energy use | trade movements | political trends | > comparative intra country wealth distribution | etc. You can do that with V-Dem too. > I can see it's a decent enough project, albeit influenced by both the University of Notre Dame and the Kellogg Institute, but I see no compelling reason to rank it as "the best" of it's kind and a few flags that suggest potential bias in viewpoint. These are the same people; V-Dem was built upon the foundation done at the Kelogg Institute. Since then, V-Dem covers over ten universities and over two thousand academics. > Err... I did look through the V-Dem 2023 Democracy report (56 pages), read several parts at length and looked at the four (4) mentions of Australia and while I agree that many parts of the world are backsliding to what is described > as 1985 global democracy levels ... there is no mention there that Australia is one of those parts sliding back and indeed is rated there as on the world's more democratic nations (#11 of 190+ countries) I just briefly looked at the chart about liberal democracy rights; a slight downward trend from the late 2000s. You'd need to do a thorough analysis for a definite conclusion, of course.