Polity Data Series by Country 2025

The Polity data series is a political scoring system that measures a country’s level of democracy. It’s one of the most prominent methods for doing so, along with The Economist’s Democracy Index and V-Dem Democracy indices. Ted Robert Gurr initiated the Polity study in the late 1960s, and it’s currently conducted by one of Gurr’s students, Monty G. Marshall. The Political Instability Task Force (PITE), funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (PITE), sponsored the Polity study until February 2020.

Analysis

Common criticisms of the Polity data series include its Americentrism, connections to the CIA and methodology. For example, it’s more appropriate for examining the constraints on elite government leaders, rather than the expansion of suffrage, according to Seva Gunitsky, assistant professor at the University of Toronto. The paper “Conceptualizing and Measuring Democracy”, published in 2002, also pointed out several problems with common democracy ranking systems like Polity, claiming they used overly narrow definitions of “democracy.”

In addition, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a progressive organization that critiques media, also criticized Polity for its methods of determining whether a political system is a democracy. Another criticism from this organization is its Americentrism, based on Polity showing that the US was the world’s only democracy in 1842, with a score of 9. Polity also gave the US a 10 during the Jim Crow era. Polity provides no data for African and Asian countries prior to the 1960s, so it doesn’t rank governments in those regions that were under European colonialism, according to FAIR.