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Measuring the state of democracy across the world helps us understand the extent to which people have political rights and freedoms.
But measuring how democratic a country is, comes with many challenges. People do not always agree on what characteristics define a democracy. These characteristics — such as whether an election was free and fair — even once defined, are difficult to assess. The judgement of experts is to some degree subjective and they may disagree; either about a specific characteristic, or how several characteristics can be reduced into a single measure of democracy.
So how do researchers address these challenges and identify which countries are democratic and undemocratic?
In our work on Democracy, we provide data from eight leading approaches of measuring democracy:
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) by the V-Dem project1
Regimes of the World (RoW) by Lührmann et al. (2018)2, which use V-Dem data
Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) by Skaaning et al. (2015)3
Boix-Miller-Rosato by Boix et al. (2013, BMR)4
Polity by the Center for Systemic Peace5
Freedom House’s (FH) Freedom in the World6
Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) by the Bertelsmann Foundation7
Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index8
These approaches all measure democracy (or a closely related aspect), they cover many countries and years, and are commonly used by researchers and policymakers.
You can delve into their data — the main democracy measures, indicators of specific characteristics, and global and regional overviews — in our Democracy Data Explorer.
Reassuringly, the approaches typically agree about big differences in countries’ political institutions: they readily distinguish between highly democratic countries, such as Chile and Norway, and highly undemocratic countries, such as North Korea and Saudi Arabia.
But they do not always agree. They come to different assessments about which of the two highly democratic countries – Chile and Norway – is more democratic, and whether Chile is more or less democratic than it was ten years ago. At times they come to strikingly different conclusions about countries that are neither highly democratic nor highly undemocratic, such as Nigeria today or the United States in the 19th century.
Why do these measures sometimes reach such different conclusions? In this article I summarize the key similarities and differences of these approaches, and discuss when each source is best.