Political regime
What you should know about this indicator
- It distinguishes between closed autocracies (score 0), electoral autocracies (score 3), electoral democracies (score 6), and liberal democracies (score 9) as the main types.
- In closed autocracies, citizens do not have the right to either choose the chief executive of the government or the legislature through multi-party elections.
- In electoral autocracies, citizens have the right to choose the chief executive and the legislature through multi-party elections; but they lack some freedoms, such as the freedoms of association or expression, that make the elections meaningful, free, and fair.
- In electoral democracies, citizens have the right to participate in meaningful, free and fair, and multi-party elections.
- In liberal democracies, citizens have further individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the actions of the executive are constrained by the legislative and the courts.
- It further includes intermediate categories for closed autocracies that may be electoral autocracies (score 1), electoral autocracies that may be closed autocracies (score 2), electoral autocracies that may be electoral democracies (score 4), electoral democracies that may be electoral autocracies (score 5), electoral democracies that may be liberal democracies (score 7) and liberal democracies that may be electoral democracies (score 8).
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Sources and processing
This data is based on the following sources
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.
Notes on our processing step for this indicator
While RoW covers the years since 1900, we use V-Dem's historical data from 1789 to 1899 to expand the classification's coverage back in time.
Data imputation
We expand the years covered by V-Dem further: To expand the time coverage of today's countries and include more of the period when they were still non-sovereign territories, we identified the historical entity they were a part of and used that regime's data whenever available
For example, V-Dem only provides regime data since Bangladesh's independence in 1971. There is, however, regime data for Pakistan and the colony of India, both of which the current territory of Bangladesh was a part. We, therefore, use the regime data of Pakistan for Bangladesh from 1947 to 1970, and the regime data of India from 1789 to 1946. We did so for all countries with a past or current population of more than one million.
For more details on the imputation methodology and which countries are affected, refer to this file.
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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: Political regime”, part of the following publication: Bastian Herre, Lucas Rodés-Guirao, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2013) - “Democracy”. Data adapted from V-Dem. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-112846/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.html [online resource] (archived on March 18, 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:
V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in DataFull citation
V-Dem (2026) – processed by Our World in Data. “Political regime – inc. ambiguous categories” [dataset]. V-Dem, “Democracy report v16” [original data]. Retrieved April 1, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20260318-112846/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.html (archived on March 18, 2026).Download
Quick download
Download the data shown in this chart as a ZIP file containing a CSV file, metadata in JSON format, and a README. The CSV file can be opened in Excel, Google Sheets, and other data analysis tools.
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/political-regime-amb-row.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseMetadata URL (JSON format)
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=falseExcel / Google Sheets
=IMPORTDATA("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.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/political-regime-amb-row.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/political-regime-amb-row.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false").json()R
library(jsonlite)
# Fetch the data
df <- read.csv("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")
# Fetch the metadata
metadata <- fromJSON("https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.metadata.json?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false")Stata
import delimited "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/political-regime-amb-row.csv?v=1&csvType=full&useColumnShortNames=false", encoding("utf-8") clear