From Text to Events: Turning Freedom House Reports into Evidence of Democratization and Democratic Backsliding

A key limitation in debates about democracy measurement and whether democratic backsliding is occurring is the mismatch between theoretical claims — about specific institutional actions and processes — and available data. Political events are the appropriate unit of analysis: they denote discrete actions by identifiable actors with consequences for democratic institutions, but are difficult to produce at scale. This paper presents an LLM-based pipeline that transforms Freedom House's annual country reports (1990–2024) into structured event data. Our four-stage process produces nearly 200,000 annotated events across 228 countries, each tied to textual evidence. Validation against human coders and existing datasets demonstrates high construct validity. We apply the data to compare democratic backsliding in Hungary and Poland. The primary contribution is auditable interpretation as a standard for LLM-assisted measurement — producing outputs traceable to verbatim source material. Such event-level data enables analyses of institutional sequencing where indices and case studies fall short.