Focus areas
Each organization in the dataset is categorized by its predominant work within one or more of the following focus areas.
Citizens are the foundation of democratic accountability, but only if they can meaningfully participate. This focus area covers organizations that expand voter participation, support civic education, create structured spaces for citizens to shape policy decisions directly, and lower barriers to civic engagement through technology and accessibility tools.
Organizations in this space
Free and fair elections are essential to democratic legitimacy. This focus area covers organizations that safeguard the mechanics of elections, from secure voting systems and transparent administration to legal protection of voting rights. It also includes work to detect AI-generated disinformation and synthetic media in electoral contexts, and to ensure voters have access to accurate, reliable information.
Organizations in this space
Accountability depends on the ability to monitor, expose, and measure. This focus area covers organizations that track government conduct and ensure public institutions remain accountable to the people they serve, through investigative journalism, litigation, open-data infrastructure, and public records advocacy. It also includes organizations that produce longitudinal data on democratic health, making the state of democratic institutions legible to researchers, policymakers, and civil society.
Organizations in this space
A healthy democracy depends on citizens being able to form accurate beliefs about the world. This focus area covers organizations that support the conditions for shared public discourse, from media literacy and platform governance to local news capacity and tools that help citizens identify synthetic content. It also includes work addressing polarization and epistemic fragmentation.
Organizations in this space
A resilient democracy depends on an ecosystem of independent organizations that can organize, advocate, and serve communities. This focus area covers organizations that build the capacity of civil society, such as equipping advocacy groups with new tools, connecting democracy movements with technical expertise, and supporting effective coordination even in restricted or high-pressure environments.
Organizations in this space
The rules and norms governing AI and democratic institutions are in flux. This focus area covers organizations that shape those rules through policy research, legal and regulatory advocacy, and standard-setting. It also includes organizations whose primary lever is producing knowledge — indices, reports, and policy analysis — that informs how democratic institutions are understood, defended, and reformed.
Organizations in this space
Key terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Democracy | A system of governance in which political power is derived from and accountable to the people it governs, maintained through free and fair elections, the rule of law, civil liberties, and institutional constraints on power that operate independently of electoral outcomes (Dahl, 1989). |
| Liberal democracy | A form of democracy that goes beyond free and fair elections, also requiring rule of law, civil liberties, and institutional constraints on power that operate independently of electoral outcomes. Distinct from electoral democracy, which refers to free and fair elections alone. This project uses liberal democracy as its baseline. |
| Democratic resilience | The capacity of a democracy to maintain its core functions under stress and recover when those functions are threatened. This extends beyond formal institutions like courts and legislatures to the informal norms governing how leaders use power, civil society’s ability to organize and apply pressure, and a reliable and independent information ecosystem that allows citizens to recognize and push back against democratic backsliding (Merkel & Lührmann, 2021). |
| Autocratization | The process by which a country moves from more democratic toward more authoritarian rule, typically through gradual, incremental steps that maintain the appearance of democratic governance (Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). |
| Democratic backsliding | The gradual weakening of democratic functions — typically through legal means — as actors manipulate elections, undermine courts, or silence opposition and civil society, so that leaders become less accountable and governance more concentrated (Bermeo, 2016; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019). Backsliding is a form of autocratization. |