Political regime
What you should know about this indicator
- It distinguishes between closed autocracies (score 0), electoral autocracies (score 3), electoral democracies (score 6), and liberal democracies (score 9) as the main types.
- In closed autocracies, citizens do not have the right to either choose the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections.
- In electoral autocracies, citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression, that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair.
- In electoral democracies, citizens have the right to participate in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.
- In liberal democracies, citizens have further individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts.
- It further includes intermediate categories for closed autocracies that may be electoral autocracies (score 1), electoral autocracies that may be closed autocracies (score 2), electoral autocracies that may be electoral democracies (score 4), electoral democracies that may be electoral autocracies (score 5), electoral democracies that may be liberal democracies (score 7) and liberal democracies that may be electoral democracies (score 8).
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.
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: Political regime”, 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/political-regime-amb-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 DataFull citation
V-Dem (2024) – processed by Our World in Data. “Political regime – inc. ambiguous categories” [dataset]. V-Dem, “V-Dem Country-Year (Full + Others) v14” [original data]. Retrieved December 3, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row