Upcoming Elections in May
By: V-Dem Staff
May 02, 2017
Coverage of this event garnered massive media attention in many parts of the world, crowding out coverage of other elections including the Algerian legislative election on May 4th, the South Korean Presidential election on May 9th, and the Iranian legislative election on May 19th. This week’s graph will take a look at the development of participatory democracy in the countries where these elections will be held.
The V-Dem Participatory Democracy Index measures how actively citizens participate in all political processes, electoral and non-electoral. The index takes suffrage for granted and emphasizes citizen’s engagement in civil society organizations, direct democracy, and subnational elected bodies.
The graph displays that after the German occupation during World War II, France took a general upward trajectory and holds currently the highest level of participatory democracy across the countries. In South Korea, participatory democracy did not see any great improvements until 1987 with the establishment of the Sixth Republic and subsequent struggles for democracy. While France and South Korea have reached relatively high levels of participatory democracy, Algeria and Iran remains on very low levels with only minor improvements since the middle of the last century.
If you want to know more about the participatory democracy across the globe, use our Online Analysis Tool at v-dem.net. And stay tuned for the upcoming V-Dem V7 Data release!
