Why We Need New Tools to Measure Democracy

The European Democracy Hub (EDH) recently published an important analysis, Are Democratic Space Assessment Tools Fit for Purpose in a Time of Repression? The authors pose a hard but necessary question: Can our current democracy-monitoring tools detect the forms of disruption, polarisation, and civic pressure reshaping democratic life today?

Their conclusion is clear. While widely used frameworks—V-Dem, GSoD, CIVICUS Monitor and others—remain indispensable, they contain a critical blind spot. Most tools measure institutions, laws, and expert-coded events. These matter. But they do not capture where democratic erosion often begins: in the way citizens speak, argue, empathise, dehumanise, and reason with one another in public discourse.

In short: we have robust tools to measure democratic structures, but almost none to measure democratic culture.

The Missing Metric: Democracy’s Discursive Pulse

One of the most striking insights of the EDH article is its recognition that existing tools do not track “negative public discourse on civil society” or early signs of narrative-level civic fragmentation. Yet today, a single viral conspiracy theory can destabilise public trust far more quickly than any institutional safeguard can respond.

This is precisely the space where the Democracy Discourse Index (DDI)—developed by the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy (GCRD) with Sensika Technologies and a growing international university network—introduces something new.

DDI measures democracy’s discursive pulse, including the following dimensions:

• empathy index
• deliberative depth
• trust language index
• information integrity
• civility index
• curiosity index

across various topical issues ranging from immigration to civil society, climate change etc.

These discursive signals often emerge long before democratic decline becomes visible in formal institutions. Monitoring them in real time offers policymakers, researchers, and civil society a new lens for identifying where democracy is strengthening—or weakening.

New Evidence: Linguistic Shifts predict Democratic Stress

A recent study published in Nature Human Behaviour provides powerful empirical validation for the DDI’s core premise. Analysing 8 million US congressional speeches (1879–2022), the authors document a long-term shift from evidence-based to intuition-based rhetoric—one that strongly correlates with rising political polarisation, growing inequality, and declining legislative productivity.

The study shows that democratic erosion is measurable in discourse itself, and that linguistic shifts can predict institutional dysfunction before it becomes visible through conventional indicators. These findings confirm what the DDI seeks to measure across society: the cultural health of democracy as expressed through everyday language, not only through formal governance performance.

Crucially, the study finds that declining evidence-based communication accompanies increasing partisanship and reduced legislative effectiveness. This aligns with the DDI’s broader framework linking discourse quality to social cohesion, institutional trust, and civic agency. When evidence can no longer adjudicate between competing claims, democratic deliberation collapses into intuition, identity, and emotion.

By combining AI-powered analysis with human-coded cultural interpretation, the DDI extends this insight to the wider public sphere, offering researchers and policymakers a real-time tool for identifying early signals of democratic stress.

A Human–AI Collaboration for Democratic Renewal

DDI combines AI-powered media analytics with human-coded discourse analysis and cultural interpretation by faculty and students across partner universities. This hybrid model delivers scale and speed while preserving the contextual sensitivity no algorithm can fully replicate.

Classrooms become democracy observatories—spaces where students classify narratives, validate meaning, and surface cultural signals embedded in language. This directly answers one of the recommendations in the EDH article: future monitoring tools must be both real-time and contextually grounded.

Why This Matters Now

The EDH article ends with a sober warning: funding cuts—especially recent US reductions—are undermining the sustainability of existing democracy-monitoring tools. Civil society organisations face political pressure and are increasingly labelled “foreign agents” for conducting monitoring work. Geopolitical tensions make honest assessment more difficult.

This environment makes the DDI approach especially important.
By:

• measuring public discourse in real time rather than relying on institutional opinion and expert analysis,
• distributing research across a global academic network,
• combining AI with human interpretation, and
• empowering students and faculty with lasting research skills,

The DDI builds resilience into democracy measurement. It is less exposed to political interference, less dependent on government cooperation, and more adaptable in fragile contexts.

Most importantly, it builds capacity. Every student trained in discourse analysis becomes part of a global ecosystem of democratic renewal. Every faculty partner strengthens local interpretive power. This distributed expertise outlasts any funding cycle. 

The Opportunity

Democracy’s crisis is fundamentally a crisis of discourse. We have built democratic institutions without sufficiently cultivating the democratic culture that sustains them. The DDI does not replace existing monitoring tools—it complements them by adding the missing layer: the lived experience of democracy as expressed in everyday language.

And it offers faculty and students a unique opportunity to help build this new metric:

• shaping the methodology,
• contributing cultural expertise,
• participating in cross-country research, and
• training the next generation of democracy scholars.

How to Join Us

We invite faculty and students to take part in building the first global, real-time discourse-based measure of democratic health.

Faculty Information Session

📅 3 December 2025 | Event Details
🕒 3:00 PM GMT

Topics covered will include:

• What participation looks like
• Time commitments and curriculum integration
• Student training and research opportunities
• Benefits of joining a global research network

This is an invitation to help build what’s missing—to measure what matters—to combine human insight with AI capability in service of democracy’s renewal. To register

Learn more:

🌐 www.gcrd.org.uk/ddi 
✉️ [email protected]
📄 Apply to become a partner university (deadline: 5 Dec 2025):