How democratic are countries really

I mentioned many times how "democratic" countries are actually not all that democratic. It's time to quantify that.

I have no time to data mine all the Tanzanias and Liechtensteins of the world, so I limited this analysis to OECD member countries plus 3 extra not-yet-OECD EU members. Also excluded is Switzerland, as it has a completely unique system of government.

Limitations

This ranking only covers how representative elections are, and only for Lower House, Upper House, Head of State, and Head of Government, as most countries either have those four roles, or a single entity covers two of those roles in a way that's easy to score.

This excludes all other elections, such as regional elections, super-national elections, possibly judicial elections, and such.

This also excludes any issues such as term limits, mandatory retirement age, campaigning, party financing, relative division of power between those branches, any rule of law issues and such. There's a lot to cover beyond this list, but it's very country-specific and difficult to score objectively.

It's all about how will of the voters is translated into results. If votes are thrown away (by non-proportional system), or voters are forced to vote for their non-preferred candidates (by FPTP and such), it gets lower scores.

If a very insignificant number of seats are reserved (like current VP, former presidents, ethnic minority groups), I'm not counting that either way.

I compiled the information from Wikipedia, and it's possible that I made a few mistakes.

Scoring

Power is divided differently between branches of government in different countries, but for some reasonable baseline the following mix is used:

• Lower House - 40%
• Upper House - 15%
• Head of Government - 30%
• Head of State - 15%

If there's no Upper House, Lower House is counted for both roles.

If elected Head of State is also Head of Government, they're counted for both roles. 

If parliament elects Head of Government and/or Head of State, Lower House is counted for both roles. This also includes all cases where technically Head of State nominates Head of Government, but they need some kind of parliamentary confirmation, as that's in practice the same as direct election by the parliament.

Scoring for parliamentary elections

• Proportional representation (with threshold less 4%) - 100%
• Proportional representation (with threshold 4% or higher) - 80%
• Single Transferable Vote - 80%
• Mixed Member Representation - 60% - there's a lot of variety here, so it's a non-committal scoring
• Proportional representation (with threshold 7% or higher) - 60%
• FPTP with runoff - 60%
• Proportional representation (with threshold 10% or higher) - 40%
• Proportional representation with majority bonus - 40%
• FPTP - 40%
• FPTP with vastly disproportional sized districts (like US states) - 20%
• Unelected - 0%

Proportional representation always has some threshold. For example a no-threshold elections with single national list for 100-member parliament basically forces de facto 1% threshold. And any kind of regional lists de facto results in low thresholds, even without any distortionary intend.

Medium-threshold systems are distortionary in practice. For example in Poland's electoral threshold alone was responsible for overturning results of 1993 and 2015 elections.

High threshold systems and bonus for largest party are intentional distortions targeted against minor parties.

FPTP is extreme distortionary in theory and practice, and it only somewhat works if districting just so happen to be random and not too biased. In practice every single FPTP system in the world has severe bias against certain demographies and parties.

FPTP with vastly disproportional sized districts is borderline if it should count as elections at all.

Unelected Upper House obviously gets no points.

STV and Mixed Member Representation systems cover various systems which are generally less representative than pure proportional representation would be, but it's difficult to score them properly.

Scoring for presidential elections

• Single Transferable Vote - 100%
• Majority with runoff - 80%
• Plurality without runoff - 60%
• Electoral College - 40%
• Monarch - 0%

This should be fairly obvious. There's no way to elect a single position proportionally, so whichever system most reasonably approximates Condorcet winner is best.

None of the countries currently hold Prime Minister elections (Israel had them for a while), so either Lower House score or Head of State score counts.

Results

• 100 Israel
• 97 Finland
• 97 Portugal
• 94 Iceland
• 91 Romania
• 85 Denmark
• 85 Luxembourg
• 80 Bulgaria
• 80 Croatia
• 80 Estonia
• 80 Latvia
• 80 Slovakia
• 80 Slovenia
• 79 Chile
• 76 Spain
• 74 Czech Republic
• 74 Poland
• 71 Ireland
• 70 Netherlands
• 68 Australia
• 68 Austria
• 68 Norway
• 68 Sweden
• 63 France
• 63 Lithuania
• 60 Hungary
• 60 Italy
• 60 Mexico
• 60 South Korea
• 58 Turkey
• 56 Belgium
• 51 Germany
• 51 Japan
• 51 New Zealand
• 40 Greece
• 37 United States
• 28 Canada
• 28 United Kingdom

Raw data

Country	Lower House	Upper House	Head of Government	Head of State
Australia	STV	STV	Parliament	Monarch
Austria	4%	Unelected	Parliament	Runoff
Belgium	5%	Unelected	Parliament	Monarch
Bulgaria	4%	none	Parliament	Runoff
Canada	FPTP	Unelected	Parliament	Monarch
Chile	0%	2 per state	President	Runoff
Croatia	5%	none	Parliament	Runoff
Czech Republic	5%	FPTP	Parliament	Runoff
Denmark	2%	none	Parliament	Monarch
Estonia	5%	none	Parliament	Parliament
Finland	0%	none	Parliament	Runoff
France	Runoff FPTP	Mixed	Parliament	Runoff
Germany	Mixed	Unelected	Parliament	Parliament
Greece	3%+bonus	none	Parliament	Parliament
Hungary	Mixed	none	Parliament	Parliament
Iceland	0%	none	Parliament	Plurality
Ireland	STV	Unelected	Parliament	STV
Israel	3.25%	none	Parliament	Parliament
Italy	Mixed	Mixed	Parliament	Parliament
Japan	Mixed	Mixed	Parliament	Monarch
Latvia	5%	none	Parliament	Parliament
Lithuania	Mixed	none	Parliament	Runoff
Luxembourg	0%	none	Parliament	Monarch
Mexico	Mixed	Mixed	President	Plurality
Netherlands	0%	Unelected	Parliament	Monarch
New Zealand	Mixed	none	Parliament	Monarch
Norway	4%	none	Parliament	Monarch
Poland	5%	FPTP	Parliament	Runoff
Portugal	0%	none	Parliament	Runoff
Romania	0%	Mixed	Parliament	Runoff
Slovakia	5%	none	Parliament	Runoff
Slovenia	4%	none	Parliament	Runoff
South Korea	Mixed	none	President	Plurality
Spain	3%	FPTP	Parliament	Monarch
Sweden	4%	none	Parliament	Monarch
Turkey	10%	none	President	Runoff
United Kingdom	FPTP	Unelected	Parliament	Monarch
United States	FPTP	2 per state	President	Electoral College

Commentary

There's a lot of "democratic" countries with very questionable scores. It's usually not quite as bad, as the general pattern is that more representative branches of government have more power than less representative branches.

So monarchs tend to have a lot less power than presidents, unelected Upper Houses tend to have a lot less power than elected Upper Houses and so on. Notably Emperor of Japan (sort of Head of State) has no role whatsoever, and British House of Lords (Upper House) is basically meaningless.

If this list was weighted by actual power, it would look a bit better.

The main exception to this pattern is US, which has it exactly backwards, and the (relatively speaking, none of them are actually good) most representative House of Representatives (Lower House) is least powerful, while the even less representative Senate (Upper House) and Presidency have almost all power between them.

Consequences

It all might have seemed like a purely theoretical issue a decade ago, but right now of the bottom 4 countries, 3 are in a major unending political crisis, and Canada's luck might run out just as it did for UK and US.

Of 13 countries scored 60% or lower, only Canada, Mexico, and New Zealand avoided major political crises recently, unless there were some that I missed. On top of the list, such situations are fairly rare.

One thing that's not directly connected with electoral systems, but would greatly improve quality of democracy, is implementing strict term limits, especially for top positions like presidents and prime ministers. Eternal prime ministers cause all sorts of problems, which could be easily avoided if their party just picked someone else for the role.