Is Mongolia actually a democracy, or is it just performing like one?

Mongolia ranks poorly on some of the world's most cited democracy indices. But what do those rankings actually measure—and do they tell the real story of how the country operates?

In this episode, we break down how international democracy indices score Mongolia. Are those scores misleading? And whether Mongolian leaders are using these benchmarks as genuine governance tools or political cover. We try to answer all of those in this episode.

Three Universals “Three Universals of Indices“:

1. The index of the pointing variety
2. The index of the book variety
3. The index of the measuring variety

Date Recorded: Mar 25 2026

Originally Released: Apr 1 2026

Keywords: democracy | global indices | social science

Show notes:

• Julian’s recent discussion of the uptick in VDem indices for Mongolia
• Julian’s Mongolia Scorecard collecting Mongolia’s score/rank on many different indices
• V-Dem Graphing Tools
• V-Dem Methodology
• Freedom House Freedom in the World