A democracy index is an academic attempt to measure a defined concept — for example, how far a country’s elections and freedoms match a written standard — and express it as a comparable number. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes several such indices, including the Electoral Democracy Index and the Liberal Democracy Index. Each targets a specific definition; the Electoral Democracy Index focuses on whether elections are clean and competitive with associated freedoms, while the Liberal Democracy Index adds protections like rule of law and constraints on the executive.
These scores are built from the ground up. V-Dem gathers thousands of indicators, many of them coded by multiple independent country experts, and combines their judgments using a statistical model that also estimates how confident the result is. The output is reported on a 0–1 scale. PolisWatch rescales published 0–1 values to a 0–10 display scale for readability; the underlying figure and its meaning come from the publisher, not from this site.
Because expert coding involves judgment, every score carries uncertainty, which V-Dem reports as a range around the point estimate. Small differences between two countries, or between two years for one country, may fall within that uncertainty and should not be read as decisive. An index measures the concept it defines and nothing more — it is not a measure of a country’s overall worth, prosperity, culture or legitimacy.
Other projects measure related but distinct ideas with their own methods: Freedom House scores political rights and civil liberties, and the EIU Democracy Index combines several categories into its own scale. Because they use different definitions and procedures, these measures can place the same country differently. PolisWatch treats that disagreement as informative rather than as error, and always names which index a number comes from.