Regimes of the World (RoW) typology

Almost every state now holds elections of some kind, so whether elections exist says little about who can actually win them. Anna Lührmann, Marcus Tannenberg and Staffan I. Lindberg (2018) proposed the Regimes of the World (RoW) typology to classify regimes by the de facto working of their institutions rather than their constitutions. It has four categories:

• Closed autocracy: no multiparty elections for the chief executive or the legislature.
• Electoral autocracy: de jure multiparty elections, but they fall short of being free and fair, or freedoms of expression and association are too restricted for the result to be democratic.
• Electoral democracy: free and fair multiparty elections and the associated freedoms are in place to a sufficient degree.
• Liberal democracy: an electoral democracy that also has effective judicial and legislative constraints on the executive, the rule of law and protection of individual liberties.

RoW is built from indices in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset, mainly the Electoral Democracy Index and the Liberal Component Index, plus indicators for multiparty and free and fair elections. It draws on Robert Dahl's idea of polyarchy for the electoral threshold and on the liberal tradition for the upper category. Its methodological innovation is to use V-Dem's measurement uncertainty: countries whose confidence intervals straddle a threshold are flagged as upper or lower bound cases, which the V-Dem Democracy Report calls the grey zone. In V-Dem's data the classification is the variable v2x_regime, and the version with uncertainty bands is v2x_regime_amb.

• The V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, based on dataset v16 and published in March 2026, counts 92 autocracies and 87 democracies at the end of 2025: 35 closed autocracies, 57 electoral autocracies, 56 electoral democracies and 31 liberal democracies.
• By population, the same report puts 74% of humanity (about 6 billion people) in autocracies and 28% in closed autocracies, more than in electoral and liberal democracies combined; only 7% live in liberal democracies.
• Electoral autocracy, the RoW category closest to Levitsky and Way's competitive authoritarianism, has been the most common regime type for most of the period since the end of the Cold War.

Any four-way scheme hides variation within each category, and the thresholds are a judgement call. The underlying V-Dem scores come from country experts, so they may be affected by expert selection, changing standards over time and political bias, criticisms that V-Dem answers with its measurement model and by revising the whole series each year. Other classifications, such as the binary democracy–dictatorship coding of Cheibub, Gandhi and Vreeland, or the Geddes–Wright–Frantz typology of autocracies, answer different questions and sometimes classify the same country-year differently. The original article reports disagreement with other datasets in 7–12% of country-years, with RoW the more conservative in calling a regime democratic.

RoW has become a standard dependent variable in comparative politics and the basis of the most widely cited annual counts of democracies and autocracies. Because the dataset is recalculated each year, counts for past years can change between editions of the Democracy Report, so figures should always be cited with the dataset version or report year.