Democracy Across 20 Countries

About This Chart

Data Visualization Method

• Data: V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index (v2x_polyarchy), a 0–1 index. The values are V-Dem's published point estimates, used at the three-decimal precision of the official release.
• Period and coverage: Annual values from 1990 to 2025 for 20 countries, a total of 720 country-year scores with no missing years.
• Selection: The 20 countries were chosen by aistockQ Charts as an editorial selection. The choice balances international influence, regional spread, public familiarity and a range of democratic trajectories. It is not a statistical sample and not a ranking of national importance.
• Why some high scorers are absent: The chart does not try to collect the most democratic countries. Several of the highest-scoring countries, including the Nordic states, are not included, because the aim is to compare different regions and different paths of change.
• Processing: Scores are shown as published. Nothing was interpolated, imputed or rescaled. Germany uses V-Dem's unit for Germany; East Germany is a separate historical unit in V-Dem and was not merged into it. Four labels are shortened (USA, UK, S. Korea, S. Africa), and Turkey is used as the country label.
• Chart form: An animated bar chart race that re-sorts the 20 countries by score each year. Bar length represents the index score, measured from zero. All bars share a single color; color does not encode region, score or rank.

Creator's Note

World maps of democracy show every country's level at a glance, but they make it hard to follow how familiar countries move relative to each other over time. This chart puts 20 of them on one moving board, so that changes in relative position become visible year by year.

The paths diverge widely. South Africa rose from 0.224 in 1990 to 0.743 in 2025, while India moved from 0.693 to 0.377 over the same period. The United States, close to the top of this group for most of the period, ends 2025 at 0.735.

In the author's reading, the more useful question is not who ranks first, but which countries moved, in which direction, and how quickly.

Data Sources

• V-Dem Dataset v16 — Electoral Democracy Index scores, 1990–2025. Coppedge et al. (2026), dataset DOI. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• V-Dem Codebook v16 — definitions of the index and its uncertainty intervals.
• Flagpedia / Flagcdn — country flag images, based on vector files from Wikimedia Commons.

Limitations

The index is a model-based estimate built from expert assessments, not a direct count. V-Dem publishes a 68% highest posterior density interval for each score, roughly one standard deviation either side, not a 95% interval.

In 2025 the intervals for France, Germany, Spain, Japan and South Korea overlap substantially. For example, France spans 0.828–0.914 and South Korea 0.778–0.879. Small gaps between neighboring bars should not be read as a firm order.

The official scores carry three decimals, so ties in the chart are real ties in the source data, not rounding artifacts. Japan and South Korea both score 0.819 in 2025; Australia, Germany and Spain share 0.892 in 1990. When bars are tied, their vertical order carries no meaning.

Bars move smoothly between annual values; the intermediate frames are visual transitions, not additional data. V-Dem revises past years with each release, so the values reflect version 16 and may differ from other versions.

What This Chart Doesn't Show

Positions in the chart are ranks within the 20 selected countries only. France is first here in 2025, but among the 179 V-Dem coding units with a 2025 score it ranks ninth, behind Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Estonia, Switzerland and Luxembourg. V-Dem's coding units are not identical to a list of current sovereign states.

The index measures electoral democracy: clean elections, suffrage, elected officials, and freedom of expression and association. It does not measure the rule of law, the quality of governance or economic outcomes, and the chart does not explain why any country's score changed.