Auto-generated description: A diagram illustrates the transition from substantial democracy through performative and disordered stages, highlighting key processes such as verification, deliberation, and accountability alongside their relationships with different types of counterpublics.

I need to spend longer with this report for Demos by Eliot Higgins, journalist and founder of Bellingcat, Dr Natalie Martin, an academic. However, I’m sharing it both because of the framework above for understanding democratic collapse and the eight ways to systematically respond to build resilience.

Diagnosis must be matched with design. The VDA Framework makes visible how collapse unfolds, from hollow ritual to disordered simulation, but renewal requires a systemic response. Isolated reforms will not suffice. To move from collapse to resilience, democracies need a coordinated framework that strengthens verification, deliberation, and accountability across society.

The Arc of Democracy lets us understand the movement towards substantial or simulated democratic practice in terms of VDA functions, the Arc Framework allows us to design a response.

The Arc is not a single project but an organising system for rebuilding democratic resilience from the ground up. It takes the three functional minimums of democracy, verification, deliberation, and accountability, and maps them onto eight interconnected tracks of action:

  1. Education & Epistemic Capacity – building critical thinking, epistemic literacy, and resilience from primary school through lifelong learning.

  2. Civic Empowerment & Democratic Practice – equipping communities to investigate, deliberate, and act meaningfully in democratic life.

  3. Civic Trust & Value Alignment – rebuilding pluralistic norms and shared values that sustain coexistence.

  4. Investigative Infrastructure – creating resilient, distributed systems for uncovering and verifying truth.

  5. Democratic Discourse – ensuring that verified evidence and accountability shape public understanding.

  6. Institutional Integration & Policy – embedding epistemic standards and accountability into governance structures.

  7. Translation to Impact – ensuring that investigations and deliberation produce real-world outcomes in law, policy, and culture.

  8. Sustainability & Infrastructure – building long-term systems and alliances to anchor democratic resilience.

Source & diagram: Demos