Multi-party elections for government's chief executive

While RoW covers the years since 1900, we use V-Dem's historical data from 1789 to 1899 to expand the classification's coverage back in time.

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

For example, V-Dem only provides regime data since Bangladesh's independence in 1971. There is, however, regime data for Pakistan and the colony of India, both of which the current territory of Bangladesh was a part. We, therefore, use the regime data of Pakistan for Bangladesh from 1947 to 1970, and the regime data of India from 1789 to 1946. We did so for all countries with a past or current population of more than one million.

Finally, we make some additional minor changes to the coding rules.

The two most consequential changes we make relate to RoW's identification of whether a country's chief executive is elected. First, one way RoW considers a chief executive to have been elected — even if they are not directly elected or appointed by the legislature — is if they are the head of state, they depend on the approval of the legislature, and there were multi-party elections for the executive. This last part is likely a coding error because to be consistent with RoW's other definitions, this should depend on multi-party legislative, not executive, elections. Only if the legislature has been chosen in multi-party elections does it make an otherwise unelected chief executive—who must be approved by that legislature—dependent on multi-party elections. We correct this error.

Second, RoW considers a chief executive to have been elected if the country had chosen both its legislature and executive in multi-party elections. But this considers some chief executives as elected even if they came to power through force after elections were previously held. Examples include the coup d'états led by Fulgencio Batista in Cuba in 1952 and by Muhammadu Buhari in Nigeria in 1983. We instead consider such chief executives as unelected.