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PolisWatch

PolisWatch

Neutral, source-attributed tracking of leaders, elections and legislatures — present and past.

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Wikidata / V-Dem (OWID)
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Observations appear here once ingestion runs (set the data source key, then SITE=politics).

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Learn the basics

PolisWatch is a neutral reference for how governments are organized and for the academic measures researchers use to describe political systems. It records factual basics — who holds an office, whether a country’s legislature has one chamber or two, how and when elections are held — and presents widely cited governance indices alongside their own definitions. It is non-partisan and informational: it does not endorse parties, leaders or ideologies, and it takes no side on any country.

The headline figures here are academic democracy indices, shown on a 0–10 display scale. An index is not a verdict on whether a country is “good” or “bad”; it is one research group’s structured estimate of a specific, named concept — say, how closely elections meet a defined standard. Different indices use different definitions and methods and can disagree. PolisWatch always shows an index with the publisher that produced it, what it claims to measure, and the limits of that claim.

How governments are structuredHead of state vs. head of government, the legislative–executive–judicial branches, and why some legislatures have one chamber and others two — described as mechanisms, neutrally.How elections and electoral systems workTerms of office, what an electoral system is, and how proportional representation differs from first-past-the-post — explained purely as mechanisms, with no preference between them.What democracy indices measure and howHow academic indices like V-Dem turn thousands of expert-coded indicators into a 0–1 score, what concepts they target, and why the number is an estimate with uncertainty — not a grade.Sources, neutrality, and the limits of any single indexWhere the facts and figures come from, why no single index is the final word, and the principles that keep this reference non-partisan.
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