Multi-party elections for government's chief executive
About this data
Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
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.
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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: Multi-party elections for government's chief executive”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from V-Dem. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/multi-party-elections-hoe-row [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:
V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data
Full citation
V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Multi-party elections for government's chief executive – (best estimate)” [dataset]. V-Dem, “V-Dem Country-Year (Full + Others) v14” [original data]. Retrieved December 3, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/multi-party-elections-hoe-row