World Democracy Map, V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index

About This Chart

Data Visualization Method

• Data: V-Dem Electoral Democracy Index (v2x_polyarchy), a 0–1 index from the V-Dem Country-Year Full+Others Dataset v16, released in March 2026. Only the published point estimates are used; confidence intervals are not shown.
• Period and area: 1990–2025, one value per country per year (36 annual frames), worldwide. Coverage is 171 countries and territories in 1990 and 179 in 2025.
• Selection: Every V-Dem coding unit with a value in the period is included. No country was removed, and no value was added where V-Dem has none.
• Processing: Scores are kept at V-Dem's published three-decimal precision. Nothing was interpolated, carried forward, estimated or filled with zero. Only country labels were adjusted so each value matches its shape on the map.
• Historical units: Scores of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and South Yemen were not copied onto present-day states. A country appears from the first year V-Dem publishes a value for it, which in some cases is before formal independence.
• Chart form: An animated choropleth map on present-day borders. Color runs on a fixed 0–1 scale for every year, from ruby red (0) through blue slate (0.5) to royal blue (1). Countries without a value for that year are shown in neutral gray.

Creator's Note

This map follows how electoral democracy changed country by country from the end of the Cold War to 2025, on a single scale that stays the same for every year. It is a companion to an earlier chart on the left–right orientation of governments; this one looks at the quality of elections and the freedoms around them, not at ideology.

Across the countries in the data, the simple average rose from 0.408 in 1990 to a peak of 0.528 in 2012, then eased to 0.483 in 2025. From 2012 onward, more countries declined than improved in every year. The map shows where those movements happened, but not why.

The color scale went through several versions. Earlier palettes either flattened the middle of the range or made the world look redder than the data warrants, so the final palette was chosen to keep mid-range countries readable without changing any score. The open question the map leaves is less about which country ranks first, and more about why the long rise of the 1990s turned into a slow, broad drift after 2012.

Data Sources

• V-Dem Dataset v16 — source of all Electoral Democracy Index values, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute, University of Gothenburg.
• V-Dem Codebook v16 — definition and construction of the index.
• Coppedge et al. (2026) — dataset citation: "V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16," Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
• CC BY-SA 4.0 — license of the V-Dem data, which also applies to this adapted chart. V-Dem does not endorse this visualization.

Limitations

The Electoral Democracy Index is an estimate, not a direct count. V-Dem combines ratings from many country experts through a statistical measurement model, and each value carries uncertainty. This chart shows point estimates only, so small gaps between countries may fall within that uncertainty.

The map uses present-day borders for every year and cannot reproduce historical territories. Some V-Dem units have no separate shape on the base map: Gaza, Somaliland and Zanzibar are in the dataset but are not drawn on their own, and the shape labelled Palestine carries the West Bank value. In 1990, the shape of Germany shows V-Dem's value for Germany, not East Germany.

Gray areas mean no value for that year. This includes countries before V-Dem's coverage of them begins (for example South Sudan before 2011, Kosovo before 1999) and Turkmenistan in 1990, where the source value is blank. Values for recent years, including 2024–2025, may be revised in later V-Dem releases, and this chart uses v16 only.

What This Chart Doesn't Show

"Lower Democracy" and "Higher Democracy" mark the two ends of the index, not an official line between democracies and non-democracies. The index measures electoral democracy only; liberal, participatory and egalitarian dimensions that V-Dem tracks separately are not shown here.

Map area is not population. Large countries dominate the picture regardless of how many people live there, and the averages cited above are simple, unweighted means across countries whose number grows from 171 to 179 over the period.

Color transitions between years are visual only; the data consists of annual values. The chart shows what changed and where, but it does not identify the causes behind any country's rise or decline.