The Global State of Democracy Initiative

The Democracy Tracker provides event-centric, monthly information on democracy and human rights developments in 173 countries. Event reports include a description of the event, indications of the specific aspects of democracy that have been impacted, the magnitude of the impact, links to original sources and keywords to enable further research. Past event reports are available as a searchable and downloadable archive.

Each country profile page offers a context-setting socio-political profile, basic background information, an overview of the extent to which the country has ratified core human rights treaties, and our latest quantitative scores of democratic performance. It also features monthly event reports that are organized by the four categories in the Global State of Democracy’s conceptual framework, signaling the specific aspects of democracy most impacted by particular events.

The Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD Indices) measure performance across a broad range of indicators of democracy, covering 173 countries from 1975–2022. The GSoD Indices are built on a theoretical framework that organizes specific measures of aspects of democratic performance into five four-level categories: Representation, Rights, Rule of Law, and Participation. These categories are considered individually and are not combined into a single score for democracy.

The GSoD Indices are composite measures that are built from 157 individual indicators collected by other organizations using different types of sources, including expert surveys, standards-based coding by research groups and analysts, and observational data. The GSoD indices include estimated values for 28 indicators (categories and factors) per country per year. All the indicators are scaled to vary between 0 and 1, with 0 representing the lowest achievement in the whole sample and 1 the highest.