Verification, Deliberation, Accountability: A new framework for tackling epistemic collapse and renewing democracy, Demos, 22 October 2025
In this guest report journalist and founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, and the academic Dr Natalie Martin, set out a new framework to help us understand how epistemic security defines the health of a democracy, and that without it, democracies hollow out and ultimately collapse.
The authors introduce the VDA Framework: a way of diagnosing when democracy is functioning, when it is hollowing, and when it has descended into simulation.
The framework rests on a simple proposition: democracy only works when verification, deliberation, and accountability are obvious to the people, and trusted by them.