In spite of widespread concerns across the globe about the future of democracy, public support for it remains strong, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year in 38 countries. And by one measure, the number of democratic nations around the world is at a postwar high.

As of the end of 2016, 97 out of 167 countries (58%) with populations of at least 500,000 were democracies, and only 21 (13%) were autocracies, both post-World War II records. The rest either exhibited elements of both democracy and autocracy (26%) or were not rated. Broadly speaking, the share of democracies among the world’s governments has been on an upward trend since the mid-1970s.

To track the spread of democracy around the globe, we used the ratings contained in the Center for Systemic Peace’s Polity IV dataset. Polity is a widely used resource in political science that analyzes and codes how political authority is gained and used in every fully independent state with a population of 500,000 or more (167 of the world’s 200 or so sovereign states in the current version). Polity assesses six key factors, from openness of political participation to constraints on the chief executive, to place each country on a 21-point scale ranging from +10 (“consolidated democracy”) to –10 (“hereditary monarchy”). Polity doesn’t rate countries whose central government has completely collapsed, those that are subject to foreign intervention or occupation, or those in the midst of a regime transition; there were five such countries in 2016.

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