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

Free and fair elections score

See all data and research on:
Democracy

What you should know about this indicator

  • Score of 1: National elections, if held at all, are entirely unfree and unfair.
  • Score of 4: General elections are held, but serious irregularities during voting process and ballot count occur. The rights to vote, campaign and run for office are restricted, and elections have de facto only limited influence over who governs.
  • Score of 7: General, multi-party elections are held, conducted properly and accepted as the means of filling political posts. However, there are some constraints on the fairness of the elections with regard to registration, campaigning or media access.
  • Score of 10: There are no constraints on free and fair elections.
  • The remaining scores are intermediate categories.
Free and fair elections score
Indicates the extent to which elections are free from irregularities, the rights to vote, run for office, and campaign are unrestricted, registration is easy, and campaigning and media access are fair.
Source
Bertelsmann Transformation Index (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 21, 2024
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
2005–2023

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Throughout the world, democracy and a market economy have become powerful frameworks in which social sustainability can prosper. Successful processes of reform can be observed in every region of the globe. There are, however, no guarantees of success; many countries undergoing transformation face stagnation and power struggles or violence and even state failure. Good governance is pivotal to reform policies that work. What are the key decisions? What are the lessons to be learned from past experiences? What strategies are likely to succeed? Under which conditions? The BTI 2024 puts development and transformation policies to the test.

Advocating reforms aimed at supporting the development of a constitutional democracy and a socially responsible market economy, the BTI provides the framework for an exchange of good practices among agents of reform. The BTI publishes two rankings, the Status Index and the Governance Index, both of which are based on in-depth assessments of 137 countries. The Status Index ranks the countries according to the state of their democracy and market economy, while the Governance Index ranks them according to their respective leadership’s performance. Distributed among the dimensions of democracy, market economy and governance, a total of 17 criteria are subdivided into 49 questions.

BTI countries are selected according to the following criteria: They have yet to achieve a fully consolidated democracy and market economy, have populations of more than one million, and are recognized as sovereign states.

The Transformation Index project is managed by the Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Retrieved on
May 21, 2024
Retrieved from
https://bti-project.org/
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.
Bertelsmann Stiftung. 2024. Bertelsmann Transformation Index 2024.

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: Free and fair elections score”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Bertelsmann Transformation Index. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/free-fair-elections-bti [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:

Bertelsmann Transformation Index (2024) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Bertelsmann Transformation Index (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Free and fair elections score” [dataset]. Bertelsmann Transformation Index, “Bertelsmann Transformation Index, Scores” [original data]. Retrieved December 15, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/free-fair-elections-bti