As a democracy watchdog, Europe Elects has decided to publish a summary of the democratic performance of each outgoing government.
This page aims to provide maximum transparency regarding the indicators used in our reports.
If you have any questions, recommendations or input about our democratic performance reports, please get in touch with us at contact[at]europeelects.eu.
The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) is an independent research institute hosted by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. It publishes an annual Democracy Report that describes the state of democracy worldwide.
V-Dem has 5 high level indices which correspond to each of the five high level principles of democracy it identifies:
- Electoral Democracy Index: This index measures the principle of electoral or representative democracy, including whether elections were free and fair and the prevalence of free and independent media. This index is part of all the other indices as a central component of democracy. We also display this index in our charts and website country pages.
- Liberal Democracy Index: This index incorporates measures of the rule of law, checks and balances, and civil liberties along with the concepts measured in the electoral democracy index.
- Participatory Democracy Index: This index measures the degree to which citizens participate in their own government through local democratic institutions, civil society organisations, direct democracy, and the concepts measured in the electoral democracy index.
- Deliberative Democracy Index: This index measures the degree to which decisions are made in the people’s best interest as opposed to due to coercion or narrow interest groups, in addition to the basic electoral democracy index.
- Egalitarian Democracy Index: This index measures the level of equal access to resources, power, and freedoms across various groups within a society, in addition to the level of electoral democracy.
Each Index is measured on a 0-1 scale. All of them are displayed in our summaries.
Several reasons motivated our decision to use V-Dem instead of another Index, such as the EIU Democracy Index or the Freedom in the World report:
- V-Dem indexes rely on much more elaborate measures of democracy than the other major democracy indexes: their five indexes account for almost 500 indicators. In contrast, the other indexes usually rely on 50 to 100;
- The set of questions appears to be fewer Euro-centered than in the other indexes;
- Each dimension is independent, which means that good scores in one category do not make it possible to compensate for authoritarian practices of another category;
- V-Dem covers almost all self-administered territories in the world;
- Unlike the other democracy indexes, indicators are not coded by a single researcher but by a college of 5 known scholars with diverse backgrounds;
- V-Dem’s funding sources are relatively diverse and have various, sometimes contradictory identities (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian governments, independent social science research groups, private foundations, public universities, European Research Council, etc.). These funding sources are, for the most part, hailed for the independence they allow to their projects. Although we express our reservations about some of V-Dem’s partnerships with controversial private companies (e.g. Facebook) or politically-engaged organisations (e.g. the International Republican Institute), their influence appears to be derisory. On the other hand, the other major democracy indexes are funded by politically-motivated and engaged organisations: Freedom in the World is a U.S.-based non-governmental organisation, and the EIU Democracy Index is associated with The Economist, a liberal-conservative newspaper.
The Regimes of the World classification, displayed in the top left corner of our summaries, relies on data from the V-Dem project. It distinguishes between four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies.
The advantage of this model is that it is based on a conditional system and not on a raw sum of scores in each indicators. Differently said, a country where voters cannot challenge the executive power holders is bound to be an autocracy, even if it scores mightily on corruption or distribution of wealth. This is not the case in the Freedom in the World/EIU indexes.
The 2022 report can be found here.
The Press Freedom Index is an annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders, an international non-profit and non-governmental organisation that aims to safeguard the right to freedom of information. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organisations, and netizens have in each country and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom. It only deals with press freedom and does not measure the quality of journalism in the countries it assesses, nor does it look at human rights violations in general.
The report, measured on a 0-100 scale, is partly based on a questionnaire using seven general criteria: pluralism, media independence, environment and self-censorship, legislative framework, transparency, infrastructure, and abuses. The questionnaire takes account of the legal framework for the media (including penalties for press offences, the existence of a state monopoly for certain kinds of media and how the media are regulated) and the level of independence of the public media. It also includes violations of the free flow of information on the internet.
Violence against journalists, netizens, and media assistants, including abuses attributable to the state, armed militias, clandestine organisations or pressure groups, are monitored by RSF staff during the year and are also part of the final score. The 2022 results can be found here.
Global Peace Index (GPI) is a report produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) which measures the relative position of nations’ and regions’ peacefulness on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being the most peaceful and 5 the least peaceful.
In assessing peacefulness, the GPI investigates the extent to which countries are involved in ongoing domestic and international conflicts and seeks to evaluate the level of harmony or discord within a nation. Ten indicators broadly assess what might be described as safety and security in society. It asserts that low crime rates, minimal incidences of terrorist acts and violent demonstrations, harmonious relations with neighbouring countries, a stable political scene, and a small proportion of the population being internally displaced or refugees can suggest peacefulness.
It is built based on 23 indicators published by multiple sources, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, the International Centre for Prison Studies, and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan endorsed it. It is sometimes described as slightly euro-centred. The 2022 report can be found here.
The Women Peace and Security Index is published by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security and the PRIO Centre on Gender, Peace and Security with support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The index captures and quantifies the three dimensions of women’s inclusion (economic, social, political), justice (formal laws and informal discrimination), and security (at the individual, community, and societal levels) through 11 indicators. It relies on a 0-1 scale.
We decided to rely on the Women P&S Index as it relies on a less essentialist, natalist vision of women’s rights than the UN Gender Inequality Index. It is also less trans-exclusive. The 2021-2022 report can be found here.
Although V-Dem’s Participatory Component Index partially covers this dimension, our attachment to a Rousseauist conception of democracy made it necessary to display the average turnout in elections and its evolution in our democratic performance summaries.
We calculate it by dividing [the sum of all cast votes in direct elections during the term] by [the sum of registered voters for all the direct elections held during the term]. The same calculation is applied to the elections preceding those which took place during the considered period; these two figures are then rawly compared. We only measure this indicator if at least25% of registered voters were called to the polls during the term.
However, this calculation method does not consider indirect elections or highlight their importance in the electoral system.
We strongly regret the non-existence of an index that would measure the degrees of academic freedom, political education, and democratic inculcation worldwide. Nevertheless, access to in-depth education is not only a human right but also an essential and often neglected factor in assessing a country’s democratic potential. Therefore, we thought it was necessary to display the evolution of the average year of schooling in our democratic performance summaries.
This indicator is published each year in the UN Human Development Report. It differs from the expected years of education, which is also shared in the HDR but is often not effectively implemented. The 2021-2022 report can be found here.
Notes
We have decided not to use any indicator based exclusively on the citizens’ perception of their government. These are indeed too dependent on external variables such as propaganda, the government’s popularity, or the citizens’ degree of information. This decision obliges us not to include any index relating to corruption or governments’ effectiveness.
In addition, we decided to discard all indexes produced by institutions with obvious ideological bias.
We are aware of the Eurocentrism of some indexes and regret the biases sometimes noticed in favour of traditional capitalist, Western regimes. We are open to using new indexes if they allow these tendencies to be attenuated.
If you have any questions, recommendations or input about our democratic performance reports, please get in touch with us at contact[at]europeelects.eu.