About the Global State of Democracy Initiative

International IDEA defines democracy as popular control over public decision-making and decision-makers, and equality between citizens in the exercise of that control. These principles are further defined through a conceptual framework that divides democracy into four main categories, and 17 factors.

• There are many sources of annual data on democratic performance – often with a reporting delay – but the policy community could benefit from more current and focused information and analysis about events to which responses are required. As part of the Global State of Democracy Initiative, International IDEA developed the Democracy Tracker to fill the reporting delay gap and serve as a timely and policy-directed tool for monitoring events and alerting audiences to their potential impacts on democracy and human rights. To that end, the Democracy Tracker covers 21 categories and factors of democratic performance (derived from the Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoDI) framework) across 173 countries, reporting on a monthly basis. 
• The Democracy Tracker’s regional experts comprehensively study events and developing trends, using the monthly reports to highlight those that are most relevant for actors who require the most up-to-date country level analysis of how democracy is faring. While its primary audience is policy makers, we think it is useful for the media, researchers, civil society and anyone else who wishes to stay informed.
• The Democracy Tracker does not report on every single event that impacts democracy at the country level, nor does it offer predictions regarding the course of democratization. Reports and classifications do not represent comparisons between countries. Indications of positive, negative or static performance are relative to that country alone. 

• The data collection process involves comprehensive collection of online news media items relating to democracy and human rights in each of 173 countries. Sources include local and international outlets, reports from reputable NGOs and IGOs, and inputs from International IDEA’s regionally based experts. As a first step, we leverage the continuous monitoring of online news available from the Global Database of Events Languages and Tones’ (GDELT) 2.0 Event Database, which covers online media in 100 languages. This is supplemented by Nexis Newsdesk and additional manual surveys of local and international media that cover each country and conversations and interviews with regional IDEA experts, as necessary.
• What is GDELT? The Global Database of Events Languages and Tones (GDELT) is a data project that monitors, parses, and classifies news media. The GDELT 2.0 Event Database continuously monitors news media from nearly every country in broadcast, and web formats, in 100 languages. It includes hundreds of millions of event records in over 300 categories and is updated every fifteen minutes. For more information, see here.

Our analysts only report on events and developments that have the potential to impact the status quo at the country level, based on each country’s specific historical context and trends in the data. Events that do not meet that standard are not reported.

The front page of the Democracy Tracker tool includes “critical events,” which highlight one particular event per region every month. What is considered the most critical event is determined based on that event’s potential to impact the status quo that month.

• Events that are likely to lead to emergency situations receive warning signs, which indicate that they should be closely watched. Events that merit warnings could be part of a pattern over time, or they could be spontaneous but serious indications of impending change. It is important to emphasize that it is not our intention to imply that warning signs guarantee an impending crisis.
• Events that are uniquely and egregiously damaging to democracy or human rights will be labelled with a red flag irrespective of context. This category of events include political assassinations, coups d’état, and the outbreak of wars. Red flags are typically applied only after an event has taken place.

Every month, our analysts use their event reports to determine if the performance of each of the GSoD categories of democracy is positive, negative, or static. Upward trajectories are coloured in green, downward trajectories are coloured in red and stagnant trajectories are coloured in dark grey. These determinations are made based on the number and nature of the events that occurred each month, as well on the expert opinions of our analysts.

The country profiles provide readers with an overview of a country's political context so that they understand the background within which new political developments are taking place. The profiles aim to paint a general picture of how the country came to be where it is today, what has happened of import over the last five years, what the main political debates are about, and what to watch in the future.

Democracy Tracker is organized by country pages, with one page dedicated to each country. Each page includes the following information:   

• Country profiles: Each country page features a brief that sets out the country’s political context. Amongst other things, the briefs describe recent trends in the annual GSoDI data, relevant socio-political history, politically salient social cleavages, and an outlook on political developments to watch over the near future.   
• Basic information boxes: Complementing the narrative text of the country profiles are a series of key data points describing the institutional features of a country’s political system, recent elections, the representation of women in the legislature, and the country’s engagement with the United Nation’s (UN) Universal Periodic Review - a mechanism for reviewing member states’ human rights records.
• Human rights treaty boxes: Users are given a further indication of how countries engage with the international human rights system through summary information on the ratification status of three sets of human rights treaties: the UN’s Core International Human Rights Treaties, the International Labour Organisation’s Fundamental Conventions, and the principal regional human rights treaties.
• Early warning tool: Democracy Tracker’s “early warning tool” (EWT) highlights developing situations with a high potential for negative outcomes in the next two to six months. The EWT is a qualitative assessment of the likely broader impacts of events that have been reported through the Democracy Tracker’s established methodology. The EWT indicator will, in the first instance, be applied as an additional indicator on an individual event. Visually, the user will encounter this as an orange “eye” icon on the relevant event. Events which have been flagged as part of the EWT are publicly available on Democracy Tracker’s country profile pages and can be searched on the Data Archive page. This qualitative assessment is augmented by an additional feature that is available offline as a by-request resource for Member States and donors. This second level of the EWT uses the historical quantitative data from the GSoD Indices to assess the risks of significant adverse events for democracy over the two-year period following each annual data update. The annual forecasts are based on a machine learning algorithm.
• Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoDI) boxes: The country pages also feature visualizations of key GSoDI data. Sparkline graphs featured at the top of the country page show the country’s performance on the GSoDI’s four democracy categories (with only the observed variation in the data) over the most recent ten-year period. The trend lines in the main GSoDI box show the full range of possible values in the index regarding the country’s performance on democracy from 1975 to 2022. A spider chart offers the user an overview of the state of democracy in the country, illustrating performance levels across the GSoDI’s 17 factors of democracy. An interactive timeline illustrates the country’s regime classification from 1975 to the year of our most recently published data and allows users to produce a spider chart for any year.

The Global State of Democracy reports are based primarily upon data from the GSoD Indices and Democracy Tracker.