World Democracy Map

Every country, shaded by its classification in the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index — from full democracies to authoritarian regimes — or, switched to the second layer, by its score in the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators — or, switched to History, by its Democracy Index score in any year back to 2006. Drag to spin the globe, and hover (or tap) a country for its details.

Classifications are from the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index 2024 (167 countries rated 0–10 across electoral process, civil liberties, government functioning, political participation, and political culture). The second layer uses the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2024 estimates (189 countries, scored roughly −2.5 to +2.5) across six dimensions: voice and accountability, political stability and absence of violence/terrorism, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption. Government-type summaries are short, plain-language descriptions of each country's actual system of government. Small territories and dependencies not independently rated by either index are shown as "not rated."

Every country's info card also shows a "Composite democracy score" line (197 countries), from the Unified Democracy Scores (Pemstein, Meserve & Melton), in the "extended" build maintained by political scientist Xavier Marquez. Rather than averaging a handful of indices directly, it's a Bayesian latent-variable model fit across roughly 40 scholarly democracy and governance measures — including Freedom House, V-Dem, Polity, and the EIU index shown above — which lets it account for how much those measures already overlap, rather than double-counting the same underlying signal. It's rescaled here to a 0–100 "probability of being a full democracy" scale, alongside its 95% credible interval, which is normally wide for countries few of the underlying sources cover well. It is not a third map layer or color scale — just one additional, independently-sourced number for comparison.

The History mode replays every published edition of the Democracy Index (2006, 2008, and every year from 2010 through 2025 — 167 countries) using the same four tier colors and thresholds as the main layer, so a country's shade means the same thing whichever year is showing. Press play (or drag the slider) to watch a country's score, tier, and rank change over two decades, including well-known cases like the United States' 2016 downgrade out of "full democracy" or Hungary's steady decline since EU accession. Sourced from Wikipedia's aggregation of the Democracy Index via the xmarquez/democracyData research package, and cross-checked here against this page's own independently-sourced 2024 figures (an exact match for all 167 rated countries).