Learn — PolisWatch
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.
- 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.