Democracy is easily taken for granted. In Western democracies especially, freedoms that took decades to establish are often treated as a permanent condition rather than an achievement that has to be maintained. There is always room for improvement, but this complacency has become deeply entrenched in how we think about and engage with democratic institutions.
The evidence suggests it is unwarranted. Freedom House reports that global freedom declined for the twentieth consecutive year in 2025, with media freedom, freedom of personal expression and due process suffering the heaviest impacts. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, for its part, documents backsliding even in well-established Western democracies. Countries that democratised are reverting to earlier practices, while established autocracies are consolidating their position.
How can democratic systems retain public trust when authoritarian regimes appear to outperform them?
In a recent essay, Steffen Mau, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Political and Social Science, writes that “democracy may still have strong normative appeal. However, there is waning confidence that the model is, overall, more effective or that it has something of an ‘evolutionary superiority’.” This points to a question of legitimacy. How can democratic systems retain public trust when authoritarian regimes appear to outperform them on economic growth and security?
This question is the motivation for the Civic Atlas Project. It does not seek to understate the shortcomings of democratic systems, nor to defend democracy on principle alone. Its aim is to examine the pressures reshaping the global political landscape, including artificial intelligence, polarisation and security concerns, and to assess how they affect democratic institutions in different contexts. I hold that democracy remains one of the most valuable principles in society, and I remain open to evidence to the contrary.
The question first took shape during a course on democracy and authoritarianism in my first year of university, where the indicators and qualitative evidence pointed to a new period of democratic decline. It also reflects a generational observation. Earlier generations lived through an era of institution-building; ours is characterised by massification, simplification and efficiency. This need not be read pessimistically, but as social life becomes more mediated, we risk distancing ourselves from the practices on which democratic life depends.
Habermas’s A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics offers one account of this shift. The relocation of public discourse from physical to digital spaces has changed how democracy operates. According to the Pew Research Center, one in five Americans now regularly get news on TikTok, including 43 per cent of adults under 30, and no social media platform it has studied has seen faster growth in news consumption. As a result, the pace at which citizens assess, judge and criticise the institutions that govern them has accelerated. Wide access to information is a genuine benefit, but these channels raise questions about validity and instrumentalisation.
The Civic Atlas Project does not aim to be another outlet tracking events as they happen. It treats these developments as connected questions that merit analysis over a longer period than a news cycle allows. Its work is organised around three themes: how institutions, including courts, electoral systems and the architecture of checks and balances, withstand sustained pressure and adapt to artificial intelligence and rapid transformation; how information ecosystems shape what citizens are able to know about their own politics; and how populist and anti-pluralist movements exploit the space that opens up when the first two begin to fail.
The project publishes in two forms. Blog pieces offer commentary shortly after events occur, and research briefs, developed over several weeks, offer more rigorous analysis. Over time, the project will also build an Atlas of case studies from a range of national contexts, beyond the familiar European examples, to show how these pressures operate in practice rather than in the abstract.
The project is currently run independently, and briefs will take time to complete. I appreciate readers’ patience as the work develops and as I look to expand the team.