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Universal right to vote

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Democracy

About this data

Universal right to vote
Indicates whether virtually all men and women that are citizens are allowed to vote in national elections (score 2), whether it is only men (score 1), or there is no universal rights to vote for either men or women (score 0). It neither considers informal restrictions nor legal restrictions based on age, criminal conviction, disability, and local residency.
Source
Skaaning et al. (2023) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 9, 2024
Next expected update
May 2025
Date range
1789–2022

Related research and writing

Featured image for the article on women's political rights and representation. Stylized stacked area chart of countries by share of women in parliament.

Women have made major advances in politics — but the world is still far from equal

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Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

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. Svend-Erik Skaaning has developed the conceptual distinctions and cumulative logic associated with the lexical index in collaboration with John Gerring. The distinctions regarding modes of democratic transition and breakdown have been developed by Svend-Erik Skaaning, 1 who has also developed the turnover variables. Henrikas Bartusevicius was in charge of empirical analyses and the coding linked to the inter-coder reliability test presented in the dataset paper (see below).

The dataset consists of 14 original indicators and two original 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),2 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
May 9, 2024
Retrieved from
https://ps.au.dk/en/research/research-projects/dedere/datasets
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, John Gerring and Henrikas Bartusevičius. 2015. A Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy. Comparative Political Studies 48(12):1491-1525.

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.

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Notes on our processing step for this indicator

It combines the indicators male_suffrage and female_suffrage in Skaaning et al. (2015).

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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: Universal right to vote”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Skaaning et al.. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-suffrage-lexical [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:

Skaaning et al. (2023) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Skaaning et al. (2023) – processed by Our World in Data. “Universal right to vote” [dataset]. Skaaning et al., “Lexical Index of Electoral Democracy (LIED) v6.5” [original data]. Retrieved November 21, 2024 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/universal-suffrage-lexical