Stateness Index

this graph was created in OurDataWorld:

Democracy is broadly understood to mean ‘rule by the people’.

In practice, it is often defined as people choosing their leaders in free and fair elections.

Other definitions go beyond this. For example, some of them see democracy as people having additional individual rights and being protected from the state.

Democracy gives citizens the right to influence important decisions over their own lives and allows them to hold their leaders accountable.

But it can have other benefits too: democratic countries seem better governed than autocracies, seem to grow faster, and foster more peaceful conduct within and between them.

On this page, you can find data, visualizations, and writing on how democracy has spread across countries, how it differs between them, and whether we are moving towards a more democratic world.

Many more countries have become democracies over the last two hundred years. The chart shows — based on data from Regimes of the World (RoW) — that a much larger share of countries are now democracies.

In the late 18th century, no country could be meaningfully characterized as a democracy. RoW classifies almost all of them as closed autocracies, in which citizens do not have the right to choose their political leaders through elections.1

Elections spread throughout the 19th century, but they were often marred by limitations. Many countries became electoral autocracies, in which political leaders were chosen through elections, but citizens lacked additional freedoms to make those elections free and fair. Only a few countries held elections that were sufficiently meaningful to call them electoral democracies.2 And even fewer had the additional individual and minority rights and the constrained governments to consider them liberal democracies.3