Most of the figures on this site come from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, which sorts every country into one of four categories under the Regimes of the World (RoW) classification introduced by Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg and Staffan Lindberg in Politics and Governance in 2018. The definitions below follow Our World in Data's summary of the RoW framework.
The four categories
- Closed autocracy
- Citizens do not have the right to choose either the chief executive or the legislature in multi-party elections (Our World in Data).
- Electoral autocracy
- Citizens can choose the chief executive and legislature through multi-party elections, but lack freedoms, such as association or expression, that would make those elections meaningful (Our World in Data).
- Electoral democracy
- Citizens elect the chief executive and legislature in meaningful, free and fair, multi-party elections (Our World in Data).
- Liberal democracy
- An electoral democracy in which citizens also enjoy individual and minority rights, are equal before the law, and the executive is constrained by the legislature and the courts (Our World in Data).
Why the middle categories matter
The playbook described on this site mostly operates in the space between electoral democracy and electoral autocracy: elections continue, but the conditions that make them meaningful erode. By V-Dem's count, autocracies outnumbered democracies at the end of 2025 (V-Dem Democracy Report 2026). Related scholarly concepts that describe this grey zone include competitive authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and autocratic legalism.