PolisWatch — glossary
Plain-language definitions of the terms used across PolisWatch (Wikidata / V-Dem (OWID)).
Government & institutions
- Head of state
- The person who formally represents a country, such as a president or monarch. The role may be largely ceremonial or carry executive power depending on the system, and can be held by the same person as the head of government or by a different one.
- Head of government
- The person who leads the day-to-day running of the government and its administration — often a prime minister, chancellor or president, depending on the country’s rules.
- Branches of government
- The common grouping of functions into the executive (carries out laws), the legislature (makes laws and controls budgets) and the judiciary (interprets laws). Constitutions divide power among them in different ways.
- Legislature
- The body that debates and enacts laws and typically oversees budgets. It is unicameral if it has one chamber and bicameral if it has two; PolisWatch records which design a country uses without rating it.
Elections & electoral systems
- Electoral system
- The set of rules that converts votes into seats or into a winner. Different systems can turn the same votes into different results; this is a mechanical design feature, not a measure of fairness.
- First-past-the-post (FPTP)
- A system in which each district elects the single candidate with the most votes. Simple and decisive locally; tends to favor larger parties and concentrated support.
- Proportional representation (PR)
- A family of systems that allocate seats to roughly match each party’s share of the vote, often via multi-member districts or party lists. Tends to represent smaller parties in proportion to their vote.
- Term of office
- The fixed period an office is held before the next election, set by a country’s laws or constitution. A neutral fact about timing, recorded with its source.
Indices & methodology
- Democracy index
- An academic measure that scores a specific, defined concept (for example, how clean and competitive elections are) as a comparable number. It is an estimate of that concept, not an endorsement, ranking of legitimacy, or overall verdict on a country.
- V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy)
- A research project that publishes indices such as the Electoral Democracy Index and Liberal Democracy Index, built from thousands of indicators, many coded by multiple independent experts, and reported on a 0–1 scale. PolisWatch rescales these for display.
- Expert coding
- The method of having multiple country specialists rate indicators that are then combined by a statistical model. Because it involves judgment, results carry uncertainty, which V-Dem reports as a range around each score.
- Uncertainty interval
- The range a publisher reports around a point estimate to show how confident the measure is. Differences smaller than this range should not be read as meaningful.
Intensity scale (index (0–10))
- 0–2 on the index
- 0 index (0–10)
- 2–4 on the index
- 2 index (0–10)
- 4–6 on the index
- 4 index (0–10)
- 6–8 on the index
- 6 index (0–10)
- 8–10 on the index
- 8 index (0–10)