Most maps of this kind split the world into democracies and non-democracies. This one uses thirteen categories. Select a country to see its classification and an explanation where the choice is debatable.
Each snapshot is dated 1 September. This keeps changes later in the year out of the record: Duvalier had not yet taken power in Haiti in 1956, Ben Ali had not yet deposed Bourguiba in Tunisia in 1987, and Obama had not yet won the 2008 US election. The 2023 snapshot likewise excludes the later fall of Assad and Botswana’s first change of governing party.
Every snapshot uses current borders. Kenya and Nigeria therefore appear at their modern extent in 1910 and are marked as colonies, although their borders and official names were different. Historical borders would make comparisons between years harder to follow.
Forms of government
Land area dominates an ordinary map. Russia and Canada occupy a tenth of the image but contribute only two observations, while the Caribbean and Pacific contain more than twenty states in very little space.
This cartogram gives most states equal-sized rectangles and groups them into eight regions. Five very large countries use a larger tier. It makes country counts easier to compare, at the expense of accurate location and borders.
Squares are arranged so neighbours stay neighbours where each region’s rectangle allows it, but the arrangement is a compromise and several countries sit beside states they do not border.
Each panel keeps the countries’ real outlines and relative positions, but zooms to one of the eight historical regions used by the cartogram.
Red is left and blue is right — the European convention, and the opposite of American election-night television. Red has meant labour since 1848 in most of the world; the American assignment dates from the 2000 count.
These scores describe the government’s politics, including in states without competitive elections. Hue shows its left-right position; saturation shows how useful that distinction is in the country and year. A faded colour indicates a weak fit.
Every electoral government is coded. Across the seven displayed dates, all 439 country-years with an elected government have a left-right observation, and non-competitive cases are included where a defensible placement is useful. The United Kingdom, United States and Japan have complete government timelines; most other countries are scored specifically on each displayed 1 September. Grey means that country-year has not been scored.
The scale is relative to its era and only partly to its country. A party at 20 in 1910 and a party at 20 in 2023 are each near their own era’s left edge but may have little else in common. The numbers should not be used to track a country across eras. National party systems are not recentered, so both major US parties sit to the right of the European centre.
How far a mass entitlement to education extends in practice: from no general system, through primary and secondary schooling, to broad access to higher education. Legal promises do not count when ordinary children cannot use them.
Choose any two 0–100 dimensions to see how they move together. Colour marks government type; countries without a score on either chosen dimension are omitted.
Scores are judgement calls on a 0–100 scale, not measurements. Education’s five levels are placed at 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100. Because scores fall on coarse steps, overlapping dots are spread over a small disc so the pile remains visible.
Hover or tap a country.
The categories
Each category combines the source of executive authority with the degree to which that authority can be contested.
Notes on the hard cases
Ceremonial monarchies are not monarchies here
The United Kingdom, Japan, Sweden and the Commonwealth realms are classified parliamentary. The test is whether abolishing the crown tomorrow would change who governs; where it would not, the crown is not the form of government. Morocco, Jordan and Liechtenstein fail that test and are classified as monarchies.
Three kinds of non-democratic rule
These categories separate three arrangements. Personalist rule depends on one ruler and lacks an organisation able to survive succession. In a dominant-party state, leaders can change while the party keeps control. Under unstable competitive rule, elections can transfer power but coups, rigging and changes to term limits remain common.
The third category has no settled name. “Competitive authoritarian”, “hybrid regime” and “anocracy” each carry narrower assumptions. Here it means that elections can remove a government, but coups, rigging or constitutional changes can also decide who holds power.
Colonies and constituent territories
Much of the world was governed from another capital in 1910, under several different arrangements. This map defines a colony as a territory with a separate and lesser legal regime, a separate administration, and no vote for the parliament that governs it.
Austria-Hungary fails that test, so its lands are not grey. A Czech voted in the same Reichsrat elections as an Austrian, on the same universal male suffrage won in 1907; Hungary had its own crown, parliament and government under the Compromise of 1867. Bohemia, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Hungary therefore take the monarchy’s own category and colour, marked part of rather than a colony of, and what differed between them — a franchise worth a quarter in Bohemia and almost nothing in Slovakia — is carried by the sovereignty score instead.
That flag is reserved for constituent territories. Russian Poland shows where the boundary lies. Congress Poland’s constitution and Sejm were abolished after 1863, Vistula Land was administered by a governor-general under emergency rule, and printing Polish in the Latin alphabet was illegal until 1904. Although the Duma franchise reached it, Russian Poland remained a conquered province rather than a partner in a joint state, so it is coded as a colony. The same applies to the Ottoman Arab provinces, the Caucasus and Turkestan.
Why some countries are grey
Grey marks a country with no settled government at that date. The readout distinguishes four situations. Occupied: a foreign army holds a country that was governing itself. Collapsed: no authority controls enough territory to be the government. Contested: rival authorities each govern their own ground, and neither is the government of the country. Interim: a caretaker administration with a stated end condition.
A collapsed state receives no sovereignty or institutional score because no government exists to assess. It is hatched on the institutional map and omitted from correlations that use either measure. Contested states are scored because rival authorities still exercise state power within parts of the country.
Ideology and left-right answer different questions
Regime ideology is recorded separately from the government’s left-right position. A Marxist-Leninist state, for example, is classified as one-party because vanguard-party rule determines its institutions. Its current government can still receive a left-right score. A low meaningfulness score indicates that other divisions explain more.
Sources and method
Map geometry is Natural Earth 1:50m admin-0 data, in the public domain. The Equal Earth projection avoids Mercator’s severe enlargement of Russia and Canada and reduction of Africa and Indonesia.
The categories and underlying regime classifications were produced by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) in conversation with Alexander Power, who set the questions and reviewed the answers. OpenAI Codex completed the left-right snapshots, 1871 history and education-scope backfills. These are AI-assisted judgements, not measurements from a published dataset. Country readouts explain debatable classifications. The 1956 snapshot has received the least review and is the most likely to contain errors.