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What you should know about this indicator

  • Countries with universal voting rights in practice (score 2) have universal suffrage for both men and women, and hold elections for both the chief executive and the legislature.
  • Countries with broad voting rights for men in practice (score 1) have universal suffrage for men but not women, and hold elections for both the chief executive and the legislature.
  • Countries with no broad voting rights in practice (score 0) do not hold elections for the chief executive or the legislature, or do not have universal suffrage for men.
  • The indicator neither considers informal restrictions nor legal restrictions based on age, criminal conviction, disability, and local residency.
Universal right to vote in practice
Indicates whether virtually all adult citizens have the right to vote in practice (score 2), only men have broad voting rights in practice (score 1), or there are no broad voting rights in practice (score 0).
Source
Lexical Index (2026) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
April 2, 2026
Next expected update
April 2027
Date range
1789–2025

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Lexical Index – Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED)

LIED is the most comprehensive dataset on democracy in terms of country-years. It covers all independent countries and most semi-sovereign polities and overseas colonies, protectorates, etc. within the 1789 to 2020 timespan. Scores have also been assigned to the units in the case of short- term foreign occupation. Scores for each indicator reflect the status of a country on the last day of the calendar year (31 December) and are not intended to reflect the mean value of an indicator across the previous 364 days. Coding decisions are based on country-specific sources. All original coding has been done by Svend-Erik Skaaning (skaaning@ps.au.dk).

The dataset consists of 14 original indicators and original two indices. The LIED dataset offers indicators on whether legislative elections are on track (legislative_elections), whether (direct or indirect) executive elections are on track (executive_elections), whether multiple parties are able to run for legislative elections (multi-party_legislative_elections), whether there is universal male suffrage (male_suffrage), and whether there is universal female suffrage (female_suffrage),1 whether elections are genuinely contested (competitive_elections), whether political liberties in the form of freedom of expression, assembly, and association, are respected (political_liberties), whether countries experienced democratic transition in a given year (democratic_transition), the mode of democratic transition (transition_type), whether countries experienced democratic breakdown in a given year (democratic_breakdown), the mode of democratic breakdown (breakdown_type), whether elections led to a government turnover (turnover_event), and whether a period of competitive elections has been characterized by at least one government turnover (turnover_period). Finally, the data are used to construct two indices, i.e., the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (lexical_index) and an extended version called Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy+ (lexical_index_plus).

Retrieved on
April 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WPKNIT
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.
Skaaning, Svend-Erik, 2021, "Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) dataset v6.0", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WPKNIT, Harvard Dataverse, V5

LIED is the most comprehensive dataset on democracy in terms of country-years. It covers all independent countries and most semi-sovereign polities and overseas colonies, protectorates, etc. within the 1789 to 2020 timespan. Scores have also been assigned to the units in the case of short- term foreign occupation. Scores for each indicator reflect the status of a country on the last day of the calendar year (31 December) and are not intended to reflect the mean value of an indicator across the previous 364 days. Coding decisions are based on country-specific sources. All original coding has been done by Svend-Erik Skaaning (skaaning@ps.au.dk).

The dataset consists of 14 original indicators and original two indices. The LIED dataset offers indicators on whether legislative elections are on track (legislative_elections), whether (direct or indirect) executive elections are on track (executive_elections), whether multiple parties are able to run for legislative elections (multi-party_legislative_elections), whether there is universal male suffrage (male_suffrage), and whether there is universal female suffrage (female_suffrage),1 whether elections are genuinely contested (competitive_elections), whether political liberties in the form of freedom of expression, assembly, and association, are respected (political_liberties), whether countries experienced democratic transition in a given year (democratic_transition), the mode of democratic transition (transition_type), whether countries experienced democratic breakdown in a given year (democratic_breakdown), the mode of democratic breakdown (breakdown_type), whether elections led to a government turnover (turnover_event), and whether a period of competitive elections has been characterized by at least one government turnover (turnover_period). Finally, the data are used to construct two indices, i.e., the Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (lexical_index) and an extended version called Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy+ (lexical_index_plus).

Retrieved on
April 2, 2026
Retrieved from
https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/WPKNIT
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.
Skaaning, Svend-Erik, 2021, "Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) dataset v6.0", https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WPKNIT, Harvard Dataverse, V5

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
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Takes on the value of 2 if both men and women have the right to vote (universal suffrage) and there are elections for both the chief executive and the legislature; the value of 1 if men (but not women) have the right to vote and there are elections for both the chief executive and the legislature; and the value of 0 otherwise. It differs from the "universal suffrage" indicator in that it also considers whether elections for the chief executive and the legislature are actually held.

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: Universal right to vote in practice”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Lexical Index. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260717-085349/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.html [online resource] (archived on July 17, 2026).

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:

Lexical Index (2026) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Lexical Index (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “Universal right to vote in practice” [dataset]. Lexical Index, “Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) v6.9” [original data]. Retrieved July 17, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260717-085349/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.html (archived on July 17, 2026).

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Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-right-to-vote-in-practice.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear