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What electoral system is used by most countries? The majority of electoral systems involve a single-winner process to elect heads of state and legislatures. Approximately 120 different countries use this type of electoral system.
This is a list of electoral systems by country in alphabetical order. An electoral system is used to elect national legislatures and heads of state. Maps. Electoral systems by country. Democracies and hybrid regimes. Authoritarian regimes. According to the Economist Democracy Index 2023 on electoral process and pluralism.
CountryBody Or OfficeType Of Body Or OfficeElectoral SystemHead of stateElected by the ParliamentUnicameral legislatureHead of stateUpper chamber of legislatureIndirectly elected (2/3) Appointed by the ...Based on the expert estimates and index by V-Dem. It captures to which extent political leaders are elected under comprehensive voting rights in free and fair elections, and freedoms of association and expression are guaranteed. It ranges from 0 to 1 (most democratic).
Based on a survey that collects the views of election experts, the PEI dataset provides an overall score for each election, ranging from 0 to 100, as well as comparative rankings of countries based on these scores.
- What Is The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project?
- How Does V-Dem Characterize Democracy?
- How Is Democracy Scored?
- What Years and Countries Are Covered?
- How Is Democracy Measured?
- How Do We Change The Data?
- How Often and When Is The Data updated?
- What Are The Data’s Shortcomings?
- What Are The Data’s Strengths?
- What Is Our Summary Assessment?
In some of our work on democracy, we rely on data published by the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project.1 The project is managed by the V-Dem Institute, based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. It spans seven more regional centers around the world and is runby five principal investigators, dozens of project and regional managers, and more...
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.2 The index is used in all of V-...
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...
As of version 13 of the dataset, V-Dem 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.
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.3 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-observ...
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 coun...
In our work, we expand the years covered by V-Dem further. To expand the time coverage of today’s countries and include more of the period when they were still non-sovereign territories, we identified the historical entity they were a part of and used that regime’s data whenever available.8 We also calculated regional and global averages of the Ele...
V-Dem releases a new version of the data each year in March. We at Our World in Data aim to update our own data within a few weeks of the release.
There are shortcomings in the way the Electoral Democracy Index characterizes and measures democracy.9 The index focuses on an electoral understanding of democracy and does not account for other characterizations, such as democracies as egalitarian political systems, in which political power is equally distributed to allow everyone to participate. ...
Despite these shortcomings, the index tells us a lot about how democratic the world was in the past and today. Its characterization of democracy as an electoral political system, in which citizens get to participate in free and fair elections, is commonly recognized as the basic principle of democracy and shared by all of the leading approaches of ...
Whether V-Dem’s Electoral Democracy Index is a useful measure of democracy will depend on the questions we want to answer. The index will not give us a satisfying answer if we are interested in non-electoral understandings of democracy (or different understandings of electoral democracy); if we are also interested in the political systems of micros...
May 22, 2024 · According to the 2023 Democracy Index, 74 of the 167 countries and territories covered by the model are democracies of some type. The number of "full democracies" (those scoring more than 8.00 out of 10) remained at 24 in 2023, the same as the previous year.
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Jan 30, 2023 · The IDEA Voter Turnout database contains information about three types of elections: (national) parliamentary elections, (national) presidential elections and elections to the European Parliament held in all countries that are members of the European Union.