People hold signs calling for the immediate ouster of President Yoon Suk Yeol during a rally near Gyeongbok Palace in central Seoul, Saturday. Yonhap

Korea's democracy is backsliding after President Yoon Suk Yeol's Dec. 3 martial law declaration, according to a Swedish political science research institute. The regression is attributed to government disinformation, political polarization and a loss of freedom of expression.

The Democracy Report 2025 released by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at the University of Gothenburg stated that Korea scored 0.63 on the Liberal Democracy Index (LDI), ranking 41st among 179 countries for its level of democracy.

V-Dem's LDI utilizes a scale from zero to one to assess both the electoral and liberal aspects of democracy. It considers factors such as voting rights, the freedom and fairness of elections, civil liberties, freedoms of association and expression and social equality.

Among the indicators, Korea performed the worst in the Deliberative Component Index (DCI), ranking 48th. The DCI measures aspects such as the inclusivity of public reasoning, as well as the government's respect for opposition, pluralism and counterarguments.

In the 2025 report, Korea was classified as an electoral democracy, after having been categorized as a liberal democracy a year ago. Liberal democracies meet the requirements of electoral democracies but also include judicial and legislative constraints on the executive, along with the protection of civil liberties and equality before the law.

The annual report listed Korea among five Asian countries experiencing a substantial decline in democratization, alongside Hong Kong, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines.

“Korea, Hungary, Moldova and Romania are examples where media bias and self-censorship are becoming increasingly more common,” the report said.

“The autocratization of regional powers that have large populations, such as Korea, Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico and India, adds to the heft of the current wave of autocratization.”

However, it pointed out that almost 40 percent of the world's population resided in autocratizing countries as of 2024. Over the last 25 years, that share has risen steeply and steadily to engulf an ever-larger proportion of people in the world, according to the institute.

“The world has fewer democracies than autocracies for the first time in over 20 years. Liberal democracies have become the least common regime type in the world, a total of 29 in 2024,” the report said.

In February, the Economist Intelligence Unit's "Democracy Index 2024," an annual assessment of countries' democracy levels, ranked Korea 32nd out of 167 countries, down from 22nd in 2022. The downgrade was attributed to political instability linked to Yoon's martial law fiasco and the resulting political deadlock.