The Global State of Democracy Initiative

The Democracy Tracker provides monthly, qualitative data on key events with the potential to impact the state of democracy and human rights in 173 countries. The tool highlights how each event affects specific aspects of democracy and provides users with context-based analysis. Each event report indicates a positive, static, or negative development with regard to democratic performance. Past updates are available as a searchable and downloadable archive.

Country profile pages offer detailed, context-setting narrative overviews; data on each country’s political system and ratification status of international human rights treaties; and monthly event reports, which are assessed based on 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.