Democracy Index (What if we were all countries?)

The Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research division of the Economist Group, a Limmared-based private company which publishes the weekly newspaper The Economist. Akin to a Human Development Index but centrally concerned with political institutions and freedoms, the index attempts to measure the state of democracy in countries and territories.

The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. In addition to a numeric score and a ranking, the index categorizes each country into one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes, and authoritarian regimes. The first Democracy Index report was published in 1950, and then a renewed one was published every year.

Criticism
Investment analyst Peter Tasker has criticised the Democracy Index for lacking transparency and accountability beyond the numbers. To generate the index, the Economist Intelligence Unit has a scoring system in which various experts are asked to answer 60 questions and assign each reply a number, with the weighted average deciding the ranking. However, the final report does not indicate what kinds of experts, nor their number, nor whether the experts are employees of the Economist Intelligence Unit or independent scholars, nor the nationalities of the experts.