In recent years, there's been growing concern over the backsliding of democracy. The world has seen a rise in authoritarianism, with China and Russia leading the charge. These two major authoritarian regimes are complicating the global landscape as they assert themselves on the world stage, intensifying geopolitical competition with the United States.

Authoritarian regimes pose a direct challenge to the liberal democratic order that the United States has long tried to preserve. The Biden administration responded by hosting a Summit for Democracy in 2021, aiming to align democracies against perceived authoritarian threats.

A Closer Look at its Geopolitical Significance

  • Closed autocracy: Citizens cannot choose the chief executive or the legislature through multi-party elections.
  • Electoral autocracy: Citizens can choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections, but lack some freedoms (e.g., freedom of association or expression) that make elections meaningful, free, and fair.
  • Electoral democracy: Citizens can choose the chief executive and the legislature in meaningful, free, and fair multi-party elections.
  • Liberal democracy: Electoral democracy where citizens also enjoy individual and minority rights, equality before the law, and executive actions are constrained by the legislature and courts.

Data shows that not all participants of the summit were democracies, and some were tenuous at best. So, if the summit wasn't about championing democracy, what was it really about?

I compiled data on the Summit for Democracy's invited participants and combined it with V-Dem’s political regime classifications to uncover its realpolitik considerations. V-Dem classifies political regimes into four categories: closed autocracies (score 0), electoral autocracies (score 1), electoral democracies (score 2), and liberal democracies (score 3). These classifications are based on expert assessments.

The data showed that many summit participants didn’t meet V-Dem’s criteria for “Electoral and Liberal Democracies.” Instead of limiting participation to established democracies, the summit included several states classified as electoral autocracies (like India, Pakistan, and Nigeria) according to V-Dem’s 2021 classification. In contrast, twelve countries ranked as “electoral democracies” were not invited to the summit.


In terms of regional representation, Europe led with thirty-nine invitees, followed by sixteen from Central and South America, twenty-one from the Asia-Pacific, and eighteen from Africa. In the Middle East, only Iraq and Israel were invited.

Despite its focus on democracy, Biden’s approach to gathering leaders from a range of political systems—liberal democracies, electoral democracies, and several electoral autocracies—wasn’t solely driven by pursuit of freedom. Instead, it served nuanced geopolitical interests, consolidating alliances and building a coalition to contain rising powers like China and Russia.

The data indicated that the attempt to cooperate with non-democratic allies failed to create a 'league of democracies'. Amid great power competition, the weight of realpolitik overshadowed the urge to create a formal alliance of democratic states to address democratic backsliding. Instead, the United States, as the supposed guardian of democracy, ended up alienating non-democratic allies in Biden’s first Summit for Democracy.

Unveiling Biden’s First Summit for Democracy | Tableau Public