The Global State of Democracy Initiative

The Democracy Tracker provides comprehensive, monthly-updated qualitative data on democracy and human rights in 173 countries. The monthly updates flag developments that could impact the status quo of a country’s democratic performance. Each update indicates improvement, decline, or continuity 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 compliance with international human rights treaties; and a risk assessment, alerting users to countries’ risk of democratic backsliding and breakdown.

The Global State of Democracy Indices (GSoD Indices) measure performance across a broad range of indicators of democracy, covering 173 countries from 1975–2021. The GSoD Indices are built on a theoretical framework that organizes specific measures of aspects of democratic performance into five high-level attributes: Representative Government, Fundamental Rights, Checks on Government, Impartial Administration, and Participatory Engagement. These attributes are considered individually and are not combined into a single score for democracy.

The GSoD Indices are composite measures that are built from 116 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 (attributes, subattributes, and subcomponents) 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.