Electoral democracy index
What you should know about this indicator
- The Electoral Democracy Index scores each country on a spectrum, with some countries being more democratic than others. It ranges from 0 to 1 (most democratic).
- It captures the extent to which political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed.
- The index is mostly based on evaluations by around 3,500 experts, which are primarily academics and members of the media and civil society, and often are nationals or residents of the country. They therefore know the country’s political system well and can evaluate aspects that are difficult to observe.
- Our World in Data expands the coverage of the original data to include more years when current countries were still non-sovereign territories. We use the index score of the historical entity that they were part of, whenever available.
The index (v2x_polyarchy) is formed by taking the average of, on the one hand, the weighted average of the indices measuring freedom of association thick (v2x_frassoc_thick), clean elections (v2xel_frefair), freedom of expression (v2x_freexp_altinf), elected officials (v2x_elecoff), and suffrage (v2x_suffr) and, on the other, the five-way multiplicative interaction between those indices. This is half way between a straight average and strict multiplication, meaning the average of the two. It is thus a compromise between the two most well known aggregation formulas in the literature, both allowing partial "compensation" in one sub-component for lack of polyarchy in the others, but also punishing countries not strong in one sub-component according to the "weakest link" argument. The aggregation is done at the level of Dahl’s subcomponents with the one exception of the non-electoral component. The index is aggregated using this formula:
v2x_polyarchy = .5 ∗ MPI + .5 ∗ API
= .5 ∗ (v2x_elecoff ∗ v2xel_frefair ∗ v2x_frassoc_thick∗ v2x_suffr ∗ v2x_freexp_altinf) + .5 ∗ ((1/8) ∗ v2x_elecoff + (1/4) ∗ v2xel_frefair + (1/4) ∗ v2x_frassoc_thick + (1/8) ∗ v2x_suffr + (1/4) ∗ v2x_freexp_altinf)
[Text from V-Dem Codebook v13]
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Frequently Asked Questions
How does V-Dem characterize democracy?
True to its name, the Varieties of Democracy project acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently, and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.
How is democracy scored?
The Electoral Democracy Index scores each country on a spectrum, with some countries being more democratic than others.
The spectrum ranges from 0 (‘highly undemocratic’) to 1 (‘highly democratic’).
This scoring thereby differs from other approaches such as ‘Regimes of the World’ and other projects, which classify countries as a binary: either they are a democracy or not.
What years and countries are covered?
As of version 13 of the dataset, the original V-Dem data covers 202 countries, going back in time as far as 1789. Many countries have been covered since 1900, including before they became independent from their colonial powers.
Our World in Data expands the coverage of the original data to include more years when current countries were still non-sovereign territories. We use the index score of the historical entity that they were part of, whenever available.
For example, V-Dem only provides regime data since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. There is, however, regime data for Pakistan and the colony of India, both of which the current territory of Bangladesh was a part. We therefore use the regime data of Pakistan for Bangladesh from 1947 to 1970, and the regime data of India from 1789 to 1946. We did so for all countries with a past or current population of more than one million.
How is democracy measured?
How does V-Dem work to make its assessments valid?
To actually measure what it wants to capture, V-Dem assesses the characteristics of democracy mostly through evaluations by experts.
Where can I learn more about how V-Dem produces its data?
V-Dem releases its data publicly, and makes it straightforward to download and use. This includes the overall index scores, the underlying subindices, and the specific questions by country-year, country-date, and coder.
V-Dem also releases detailed descriptions of how they characterize democracy, the questions and coding procedures that guide the experts and researchers, as well as why it weighs, adds, and multiplies the scores for specific characteristics.
Sources and Processing
This data is based on the following sources
How we process data at Our World in Data
All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.
At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
We ingested the original data from the V-Dem project website and processed it with Stata.
We standardized the names of countries and regions by using the Our World in Data standard entity names.
We expanded the years and countries covered by V-Dem. To include more of the period when current countries were still non-sovereign territories, we identified the historical entity they were a part of and used that regime’s data whenever available.
For example, V-Dem only provides regime data since Bangladesh’s independence in 1971. There is, however, regime data for Pakistan and the colony of India, both of which the current territory of Bangladesh was a part. We, therefore, use the regime data of Pakistan for Bangladesh from 1947 to 1970, and the regime data of India from 1789 to 1946. We did so for all countries with a past or current population of more than one million.
We calculated regional and global averages of the Electoral Democracy Index and its sub-indices, weighted and unweighted by population.
All code and data is available on GitHub.
Reuse this work
- All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
- All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.