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Electoral democracy index

V-Dem
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Democracy

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.
Learn more in the FAQs

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]

Source
V-Dem
Adapted by Our World in Data
Date range
1789–2022
Last updated
2 March 2023
Next expected update
March 2024

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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.

At Our World in Data we primarily use V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index to measure democracy. The index is used in all of V-Dem’s other democracy indices because V-Dem considers there to be no democracy without elections. The other aspects can therefore be thought of as measuring the quality of a democracy.

V-Dem characterizes electoral democracy as a political system in which political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed. More specifically, this means:

  • Elected political leaders: broad elections choose the chief executive and legislature
  • Comprehensive voting rights: all adult citizens have the legal right to vote in national elections
  • Free and fair elections: no election violence, government intimidation, fraud, large irregularities, and vote buying
  • Freedom of association: parties and civil society organizations can form and operate freely
  • Freedom of expression: people can voice their views and the media presents different political perspectives

You can find data on the other democracy indices, electoral democracy’s characteristics, and other derived measures in our Democracy Data Explorer.

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.

These anonymous experts are primarily academics and members of the media and civil society. They are also often nationals or residents of the country they assess, and therefore know its political system well and can evaluate aspects that are difficult to observe.

V-Dem’s own team of researchers supplements the expert evaluations. They code some easier-to-observe rules and laws of the political system, such as whether the legislature has a lower and upper house.

How does V-Dem work to make its assessments precise and reliable?

V-Dem uses several experts per country, year, and topic, to make its assessments less subjective. In total, around 3,500 country-experts fill surveys for V-Dem every year.

While there are fewer experts for small countries and for the time before 1900, they rely typically on 25 experts per country and 5 experts per topic.

How does V-Dem work to make its assessments comparable?

V-Dem also works to make their coders’ assessments comparable across countries and time.

The surveys ask the experts to answer very specific questions on completely explained scales about sub-characteristics of political systems — such as the presence or absence of election fraud — instead of making them rely on their broad impressions.

The surveys are available in English, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish to reduce misunderstandings.

Experts further evaluate hypothetical countries, many coded several countries, and they denote their own uncertainty and personal demographic information.

V-Dem then uses this information to investigate expert biases, which they have found to be limited: they only find that experts from a country tend to be stricter in their assessments.

How are the remaining differences in the data dealt with?

V-Dem uses a statistical model to address any remaining differences between coders.

The model combines the experts’ ratings of actual countries and hypothetical countries, as well as the experts’ stated uncertainties and personal demographics to produce best, upper-, and lower-bound estimates of many characteristics.

V-Dem provides these different estimates for all of its main and supplementary indices, including the Electoral Democracy Index and the subindices for free and fair elections, freedom of association, and freedom of expression.

With the different estimates, V-Dem explicitly acknowledges that its coders can be uncertain or make errors in their measurement.

The overall Electoral Democracy Index score is the result of weighing, multiplying, and adding up the subindices.7

The subindices are weighted because V-Dem considers some of them as more important than others: elected officials and voting rights are weighted less because they capture more formal requirements, as opposed to free and fair elections and the freedoms of association and expression that rely more on expert assessments.

The subindices are partially multiplied and partially added up because V-Dem wants the subindices to partially compensate for one another, and partially for them to reinforce each other. An example of compensation is voting rights partially making up for a lack of rights to assemble and protest, whereas an example of reinforcement is voting rights mattering more if voters can also choose opposition candidates.

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

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes data and research on democracy and human rights.

It acknowledges that democracy can be characterized differently, and measures electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian characterizations of democracy.

The project relies on evaluations by around 3,500 country experts and supplementary work by its own researchers to assess political institutions and the protection of rights.

The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

Retrieved on
2 March 2023
Retrieved from

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.

Read about our data pipeline
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.

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