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Citizen support for democracy

See all data and research on:
Democracy

What you should know about this indicator

  • Examples of survey questions include: 'Democracy may have its problems, but it is better than any other form of government. To what extent do you agree or disagree?', 'There are many ways to govern a country. Would you approve or disapprove of the following alternatives? Elections and Parliament are abolished so that the president can decide everything.', 'I will describe different political systems to you, and I want to ask you about your opinion of each one of them with regard to the country's governance. For each one would you say it is very good, good, bad, or very bad? — A democratic political systems (public freedoms, guarantees equality in political and civil rights, alternation of power, and accountability and transparency of the executive authority)'
  • Responses above the median were considered as support of democracy. Non-supportive respondents may have opposed democracy, may have given an indifferent answer, may have answered "I don't know", or may not have responded at all.
  • Higher scores indicate more support. Positive scores mean that citizen support for democracy is higher than the average across all countries and years. A score of 1 means that citizen support lies one standard deviation above the average support.
Citizen support for democracy
Central estimate of the average extent to which citizens support a democratic political system and reject autocratic alternatives. It combines responses across more than one thousand nationally-representative surveys on how desirable citizens find democracy, how they evaluate undemocratic alternatives (such as a strong unelected leader, the army, or religious authorities), and how they assess democratic and autocratic political systems relative to another.
Source
Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 22, 2024
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1988–2020

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

Claassen – Democratic Mood

Democratic mood measures the extent to which the public of a given country supports a democratic political system and opposes any autocratic alternatives. In contrast to satisfaction with democracy, democratic mood captures principled support for democracy. It is measured by applying a Bayesian latent variable model to aggregated survey data from a wide variety of cross-national survey projects. The latest update provides estimates for 141 countries, with estimates beginning in 1988 (for some cases) and ranging until 2020.

The Bayesian model is developed and described in this article (http://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2018.32). The mood estimates are extended and applied in several additional articles (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12452, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000558, https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211036042). This choropleth shows democratic mood in 2020.

Retrieved on
May 22, 2024
Retrieved from
http://chrisclaassen.com/data.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Claassen C. Estimating Smooth Country–Year Panels of Public Opinion. Political Analysis. 2019;27(1):1-20. doi:10.1017/pan.2018.32

Democratic mood measures the extent to which the public of a given country supports a democratic political system and opposes any autocratic alternatives. In contrast to satisfaction with democracy, democratic mood captures principled support for democracy. It is measured by applying a Bayesian latent variable model to aggregated survey data from a wide variety of cross-national survey projects. The latest update provides estimates for 141 countries, with estimates beginning in 1988 (for some cases) and ranging until 2020.

The Bayesian model is developed and described in this article (http://doi.org/10.1017/pan.2018.32). The mood estimates are extended and applied in several additional articles (https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12452, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055419000558, https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140211036042). This choropleth shows democratic mood in 2020.

Retrieved on
May 22, 2024
Retrieved from
http://chrisclaassen.com/data.html
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
Claassen C. Estimating Smooth Country–Year Panels of Public Opinion. Political Analysis. 2019;27(1):1-20. doi:10.1017/pan.2018.32

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline
Notes on our processing step for this indicator

The variable matches Claassen's variable supdem.

Reuse this work

  • All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately (see below). This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.
  • All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Citizen support for democracy”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from Claassen. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.html [online resource] (archived on March 4, 2026).

How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

Claassen (2022) – processed by Our World in Data. “Citizen support for democracy” [dataset]. Claassen, “Democratic Mood” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260304-094028/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.html (archived on March 4, 2026).

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Data API

Use these URLs to programmatically access this chart's data and configure your requests with the options below. Our documentation provides more information on how to use the API, and you can find a few code examples below.

Data URL (CSV format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false
Metadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false

Code examples

Examples of how to load this data into different data analysis tools.

Excel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Python with Pandas
import pandas as pd
import requests

# Fetch the data.
df = pd.read_csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", storage_options = {'User-Agent': 'Our World In Data data fetch/1.0'})

# Fetch the metadata
metadata = requests.get("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()
R
library(jsonlite)

# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")

# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/citizen-support-for-democracy.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear