Our scientific indicators

The selection of content for this website does not follow journalistic principles alone, but also a special set of scientific indicators. 

These indicators provide a well-founded tool to more precisely observe, in every country in the world and using standardised measurement tools, whether that country is developing in an increasingly democratic direction or, on the contrary, becoming more autocratic. 

The indicators therefore, in a sense, show which subject areas journalists need to pay close attention to if they want to describe the state and development of democracy in a country.

The indicators have their origins in the scientific methods used by the renowned project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). Among the tasks of this project, whose executive management arm is the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, is regularly checking and evaluating more than 600 individual indicators regarding a country’s development. More than 4,200 country experts worldwide are involved in this process. The results of this work flow into various democracy indices and form a key foundation for the Democracy Report, which V-Dem publishes anew every March.

A total of 106 of these indicators now form the basis for topic selection for this website. These individual indicators range from the independence of the judiciary, to freedom of religion, or the quality of a country’s education and health systems, to questions such as which rules are applied to referenda or how the process for forming a regional government within the country works.

The 106 indicators are grouped into 15 different mid-level indicators. These are: 

• Clean elections
• Freedom of association
• Judicial constraints on the executive
• Legislative constraints on the executive
• Equality before the law and individual liberties
• Civil Society Participation
• Freedom of expression and alternative sources of information
• Academic Freedom
• Political corruption
• Equal access to power
• Equal distribution of resources
• Equal protection
• Direct popular vote
• Local government
• Regional government

Anyone who reads the articles on this website will find all of these mid-level indicators reflected. Each article lists, near the headline, the date of publication as well as the mid-level indicator that best matches the text and which formed the basis for the editorial decision to select the article.