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Our colleague @bastianherre.bsky.social wrote a full article explaining how these data sources differ and when to use which one: ourworldindata.org/democracies-...
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These include Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem; shown in the map here), the Lexical Index, Freedom House, and the Bertelsmann Transformation Index.
Spain and Portugal both get over 40% of their electricity from solar and wind—
On the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal have scaled up solar and wind power almost in step.
How can we measure the state of democracy around the world?
Measuring democracy is challenging. It has many dimensions, and researchers assess them in different ways. No single source of data captures the full picture, so we present data from several of them.
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Some of these data sources focus on broad characteristics of political systems to identify which countries are democracies at all. Others use expert surveys to assess smaller differences in the degree of democracy.
Our colleagues Mojmír Vinkler and @lcsrg.me recently updated more than 250 of our democracy charts with the latest available data from our sources, which now include data for 2025.
Explore all of the updated data in our interactive charts:
Wind power is more prevalent in Portugal, while solar is ahead in Spain.
(This Data Insight was written by @hannahritchie.bsky.social and @parriagadap.bsky.social.)
Explore more data on the rollout of clean energy across the world: ourworldindata.org/explorers/en...
The two countries have very similar geographies and share an electricity market. They also have weak connections to the rest of the European electricity grid, forcing them to generate clean power at home rather than rely on imports.
In the chart, you can see the share of electricity coming from solar and wind. Both countries generated over 40% of their electricity from these sources in 2025. That was higher than the European Union average of 30%.
Our World in Data
There are many ways to classify and measure political systems. What approaches do different sources take? And when is which approach best?
