Regional Index of Democratic Resilience 2026: Findings

The Regional Index of Democratic Resilience is a structured attempt to make institutional health legible across borders. Across 14 countries in Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, the 2026 edition scores three composite dimensions — institutional trust, civic participation, and judicial independence — using a mix of representative survey data, court-performance metrics, and qualitative country panels.

The headline finding is that the region is neither uniformly fragile nor uniformly consolidating. Six of the fourteen countries scored show a clear upward trajectory on at least one dimension since the 2022 baseline; four show movement in the opposite direction; the remaining four are stable within the index's margin of error. The variation is meaningful: it suggests that resilience is being built and degraded in roughly equal measure, and that country-level political cycles still drive most of the change.

Where institutions are seen, scored, and discussed publicly, they become harder to hollow out.

Civic participation is the dimension where the regional picture diverges most sharply from common assumption. The index records sustained increases in the share of respondents who report joining at least one issue-based civic group in the previous twelve months — a pattern visible from the Western Balkans through the Eastern Mediterranean. In several countries this rise has not been matched by improvements in institutional trust, indicating that participation is being channelled around formal institutions rather than through them.

Judicial independence remains the dimension under most pressure. Two countries register declines on objective measures (case disposition rates, independence-of-appointment indices) that are not yet mirrored in public perception. The index's authors note that the lag between objective change and perceived change is approximately eighteen months in the available time series — a window within which corrective intervention is most effective.

The full Index, including country pages, methodology, and the data appendix, is published openly under a CC-BY-SA licence. The foundation invites researchers, public servants, and journalists to use, critique, and extend the data set, and will publish a methodology note responding to feedback received during the first six months of circulation.