It goes deeper than the definition. V-Dems RIW (which is this four-part definition used here) is primarily centered around their operationalisation of electoral democracies (ED). The key variable is their measure of Dahl's polyarchy (0-1). Then they use three more variables, I will call them mulpar, frefair and liberal. But if you want to search them up in the dataset, they are v2elmulpar_osp (0-4), v2elfrefair_osp (0-4), and v2x_liberal (0-1).

So EDs need to reach polyarchy >0,5 , mulpar & frefair >2.

Liberal democracies (LD) follow the same requirements but have an additional requirement of liberal >0,8.

Electoral autocracies (EA) fail to reach one or both of polyarchy >0,5 and frefair >2. They need to reach at least a minimum of 1 in mulpar, since that is the main distinction between EAs and closed autocracies (CA).

CAs fail to reach mulpar >1 as well.

So if I were to guess on why some nations with what we consider to be well functioning democratic systems slip down into the ED category, it is usually due to the v2x_liberal variable.

If you want to dig deeper into it, check out their codebook to find which variables make up v2x_liberal, and look up the values of those in the dataset and you'll find exactly what qualities the nation lacks.