An Updated IDB Tool Measures the Health of Democracy Worldwide

A new edition of the Database of Political Institutions (DPI), a cross-national database for tracking how institutions and political systems work around the world, has just been released, indicating some of the growing tests for democracies.

Housed and financed at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where experts coordinate and oversee data collection, disseminate it, and provide intellectual oversight, the DPI is one of the most comprehensive databases of its kind. It measures checks and balances, executive tenure, and party affiliation, as well as ideology and legislative structure and composition in up to 180 countries.

The recent edition, covering up to 2023 and produced in partnership with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM), expands the DPI's scope to include 50 years of international data on political institutions and electoral outcomes, while also providing evidence on topics of academic and public interest, such as political polarization.

Researchers using this new dataset found that political polarization in Latin Latina America and the Caribbean has increased, increasingly driven by establishment-versus-outsider dynamics rather than ideology.

Taking the Pulse of Democracies at a Critical Moment 

With backlashes to globalization intensifying and citizens worldwide feeling that they are losing control of their culture and economic stability, the new edition comes at a critical moment. As some experts warn of democratic backsliding; others despair of intensifying dislike, distrust, or ideological distance among individuals and groups in societies.

The DPI, among its many other indices, addresses these issues and more by revealing the concentration of different parties in a country’s legislature, the probability that two legislators picked at random will be from different parties, and the ideological distance between the executive party and opposition parties. All these measures are related to polarization and have been invaluable for researchers.

Polarization in Latin America

Using that data and other sources, Horacio Larreguy of ITAM and Ernesto Tiburcio of Tufts University find that polarization has increased in Latin America, with heightened distrust, distortions in the perceptions of facts, and legislative gridlock common. This polarization is not always ideological. 

As the authors point out, parties in the region are often ideologically fluid. Traditional ideological divides now play a smaller role, as political competition increasingly centers on anti-establishment sentiment and candidates positioning themselves against political elites. But as the democratic consensus is challenged, political instability, weaker institutional checks and growing executive-branch dominance are taking root, especially in countries where democratic safeguards are already fragile. The reasons for this are not completely clear. But the authors cite echo chambers, fueled by social media; biased news outlets; and ever more polarizing messages from political elites as possible causes.

Concerns over polarization tend to coincide with perceptions of democratic backsliding. Indeed, authoritarianism is widely believed to be on the rise globally. But on this front, there is a silver lining.  Objective data, like that in the DPI, don’t seem to bear out claims that, on the aggregate, the world is moving in an anti-democratic direction. Expert coders—academics, area specialists, and other observers—tend to argue that democracy is on the retreat, and academic papers on the subject have increased in recent years.  But, as Andrew Little, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Anne Meng of the University of Virginia, argue, “the common claim that we are in a period of massive global democratic decline is not clearly supported by the empirical evidence.”

Using data on elections and freedom of association from the National Elections Across Democracy and Autocracy (NELDA) dataset and the DPI on parties, elections, and legislatures, the authors find that overall incumbent leaders and their parties are not preventing electoral turnover. Anti-democratic leaders may try to stay in power by banning opposition parties, controlling the media, and gaining control over agencies in control of elections. But, on the whole, they are failing. Moreover, the authors find there has been no aggregate increase in leaders trying to evade term limits or an erosion in constitutional rules that limit executive power.

Indeed, on a global level, DPI data indicate that the number of countries with competitive elections in 2023 was the same as in 2015. And, despite clear evidence of polarization in some, overall, countries with competitive elections in 2015 were no more ideologically polarized in 2023 than they were in 2015.

The Advantage of Objective Measures

All these findings point to the relative advantages of objective measurements, like the DPI, and experts’ more subjective findings. Experts and other close observers are well-placed to capture changes in rhetoric and detect signs of individual stress. But personal judgement necessarily plays an important role as the literature provides little guidance about how to identify these changes and weigh their importance. Objective indicators in this context are helpful in judging whether changes are passing phenomena or precursors of democratic decline.

Amid this constant dialogue between the subjective and objective, the DPI is a vital tool, with the last three editions (2015, 2017, and 2020), which were produced at the IDB, used and cited in over 1000 academic publications.  As one of the most comprehensive cross-national datasets for tracking how politics works across democracies and autocracies alike, the DPI provides data that is vital to researchers’ questions about democratic health, including leadership, representation, accountability, and institutional design.  That is not only essential for appraising the current situation in individual countries and in the world as a whole. It is also fundamental to designing policy corrections.