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 describe a change to the status-quo of the state of democracy at the country level. They 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.

Country profile pages offer detailed, context-setting socio-political narratives; basic background information on the country’s political system; an overview of the extent to which the country has ratified core human rights treaties; our latest quantitative scores of democratic performance; and monthly event reports that are organized by the four categories in the Global State of Democracy 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 to the present. The GSoD Indices aggregate specific measures of aspects of democratic performance into a hierarchical framework with four high-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 indicators collected by other organizations using different types of sources, including expert surveys, standards-based coding by research groups and analysts, and observational data.