Our World
in Data
It’s Giving Season. Help us do more with a donation.
Data

Age of democracy

See all data and research on:
Democracy

What you should know about this indicator

Democracies are political systems in which political leaders are selected under broad suffrage in free and fair elections.

Age of democracy
The number of consecutive years passed since the country last became a democracy(not necessarily including women's suffrage).
Source
Boix-Miller-Rosato (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data
Last updated
March 7, 2024
Date range
1800–2020
Unit
years

Related research and writing

Featured image for how long people have had democratic rights. Stylized bart chart indicating the age of democracies worldwide.

In most countries, democracy is a recent achievement. Dictatorship is far from a distant memory

Bastian Herre

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

This dataset covers all sovereign countries (including micro-states) from 1800 to 2020. Generally, we use United Nations membership to define when micro-states enter the data set. We thank Benjamin A.T. Graham and his students at USC (Valeria Flores-Cadena, Jiaming Shi, Affan Rahman, and Apurvi Bhartia) for providing their own democracy ratings and supporting information as part of a class project.

The authors argue that their measure’s distinguishing features—a concrete, dichotomous coding and a long time span—are of critical value to empirical work on democracy. Inspired by Robert Dahl, they define a country as democratic if it satisfies conditions for both contestation and participation. Specifically, democracies feature political leaders chosen through free and fair elections and satisfy a threshold value of suffrage.

Retrieved on
March 7, 2024
Retrieved from
https://sites.google.com/site/mkmtwo/data?authuser=0
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Carles Boix, Michael K. Miller, and Sebastian Rosato. 2013. “A Complete Data Set of
Political Regimes, 1800-2007.” Comparative Political Studies 46(12): 1523-54.

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

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.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Age of democracy”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Boix-Miller-Rosato. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-of-democracy-bmr [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Boix-Miller-Rosato (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

Boix-Miller-Rosato (2022) – with major processing by Our World in Data. “Age of democracy” [dataset]. Boix-Miller-Rosato, “Boix-Miller-Rosato (BMR) dichotomous coding of democracy (1800-2020) 4” [original data]. Retrieved December 12, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/age-of-democracy-bmr