"Democracy or not" is only the first question. Ask who is head of state, who runs the government and who can sack them, how the country is divided and how its parliament is elected, and the 197 countries of the world fall into 12 families and 112 distinct systems. 80 of those systems belong to a single country.
Most maps of political systems use two or three colours: democracies, autocracies and a grey zone between. That tells you something important, but it hides almost everything about how a country is actually put together. Germany and Italy are both parliamentary republics with a ceremonial president. Look closer and Germany is a federation that elects its Bundestag by mixed-member proportional representation, while Italy is a regionalised state whose Chamber of Deputies uses a parallel system with no compensation between its two tiers. They are cousins, not twins.
This page sorts every country by eight features of its constitution and its practice, cross-checks each against two independent sources, and documents every case where I had to decide by hand. Then it sets those features beside V-Dem's measures of how democratic each country really is, because the form of a government and the freedom of its people are different questions.
Each colour is a family of government. Within a family, darker shades elect the lower (or only) chamber by majority or plurality, middle shades use a mixed or semi-proportional system, lighter shades use proportional representation, and the palest shades have no directly elected chamber. Stripes mark federations, a fine cross-hatch regionalised states, dots unitary states with autonomous regions. Switch the colours to any single feature, click a country for its full record, or ask for the systems most like it.
Classification of 197 states (the 193 UN members, the two UN observer states, Taiwan and Kosovo) as at the start of 2026. Sources: V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16 (Coppedge et al. 2026, CC BY-SA 4.0), latest year 2025; CIA World Factbook (2026 and December 2024 editions, public domain, via factbook.json); 83 documented hand decisions. Population: World Bank 2025. Boundaries: Natural Earth; small states shown as dots. Grey land is a dependent territory or an unrecognised state, not classified. Base map tiles (optional) © Esri.
The families group countries by two things: what kind of head of state they have and how the government is formed and removed. Presidential republics are the largest family by count (52 countries), parliamentary republics next (45), and each holds a little over a quarter of the world's people (27% and 28%). Then come the 29 parliamentary monarchies, 14 of them Commonwealth realms whose monarch lives in London.
Countries and people in each family
Each bar is split by how the lower or only chamber is elected (shades as on the map). Hover a segment; click a bar to show the family on the map.
Population changes the picture. The 6 one-party states hold 19% of humanity, almost all of it in China. The semi-presidential world splits in two: the 9 premier-presidential systems, where the government answers to parliament alone, are mostly in Europe; the 18 president-parliamentary systems, where the president can also dismiss the prime minister, include Russia, Egypt, Algeria, Kazakhstan and much of francophone Africa, and hold 8% of the world's people. 30 countries, with 28% of the world's people, are run by a party, an army, a cleric, a royal family or a transitional council rather than by an elected executive.
There are 43 monarchies in all, home to 8% of the world's people, and 25 federations. The federations are few but large: India, the United States, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil and Russia are all federal, so 41% of humanity lives in one.
Two countries count as having the same system only when all eight features match: the kind of head of state, how that office is filled (hereditary, elected, a monarch abroad, a collective presidency), the executive, whether head of state and head of government are one office, the territorial structure, the number of chambers, the lower-house electoral system and any power sharing fixed by community. On that test there are 112 systems. Only 32 are shared by two or more countries; the other 80 countries are loners.
The most widely shared systems
Every country in a row has the same eight features. Click a row to light them up on the map.
The largest group is a European one: 14 unitary parliamentary republics with one chamber elected by list proportional representation, from Estonia and Latvia through Croatia, Bulgaria and North Macedonia to Israel, Iceland, Armenia, Cabo Verde and Fiji. The second is its presidential mirror, 13 unitary presidential republics with one list-PR chamber: six in Latin America, with Turkey, Cyprus, Sri Lanka, Angola, Benin, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. Some pairs are surprising. India shares its exact system with Pakistan and Ethiopia (federal parliamentary republics with two chambers and first past the post), the United States with Nigeria, and Brazil with Argentina.
Germany and Italy, the pair this study started from, differ in two of the eight features: territory (federal against regionalised) and electoral system (mixed-member proportional against parallel). France, on the other hand, has exactly the same constitutional form as the Republic of the Congo: premier-presidential, unitary, two chambers, the two-round system. V-Dem scores France's liberal democracy at 0.80 and Congo's at 0.12. The form of a government is not its quality.
80 countries, 42% of the world's people, have a system nobody else has. The biggest are China, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Japan, Iran and Germany. Some are famous one-offs: Switzerland's seven-member Federal Council, Bosnia's three-member ethnic presidency, Lebanon's confessional parliament, the co-princes of Andorra, the Holy See. Others are unique because of one feature, such as Ireland's single transferable vote or Nauru's Borda count.
One-country systems, by family
Click a name to open its record.
V-Dem's Regimes of the World puts each country in one of four classes for 2025: closed autocracy (33 countries), electoral autocracy (55), electoral democracy (56) and liberal democracy (31). Only 8% of the world's people live in a liberal democracy. 22 small states are not covered by V-Dem. Setting the classes against the constitutional features shows some strong patterns. They are descriptive only: history, region, wealth and colonial inheritance shape both the institutions and the democracy, and a constitution can be copied without its spirit.
Electoral system against regime type
Lower or only chamber, by V-Dem's Regimes of the World (2025). Hover a cell.
71% of the countries that elect their lower house by proportional representation are democracies of either kind, against 43% of those with a majoritarian system and 44% of those with a mixed one. List PR is the commonest system by count (73 countries) but covers only 19% of the world's people; first past the post is used by 38 countries holding 36%, 62% of them in India and the United States.
Liberal democracy by family
V-Dem's Liberal Democracy Index (2025, 0 to 1), one dot per country; the tick is the family median. Hover a dot; click to open its record.
The most striking pattern is the monarchies. The 20 ceremonial monarchies that V-Dem scores have a mean Liberal Democracy Index of 0.64, against 0.50 for parliamentary republics, and 10 of the 20 are liberal democracies. The top three countries on the index, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, are all kingdoms. That is a story about Scandinavia and the old Commonwealth, not about crowns: Thailand, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea are ceremonial monarchies too, and V-Dem classes all three as autocracies. Where the monarch actually rules, the scores are low.
The split inside semi-presidentialism is just as sharp. 78% of the premier-presidential countries are democracies, against 11% of the president-parliamentary ones. Among presidential republics the share is 55%, among parliamentary republics 69%.
Two countries can share a constitution line for line and still live under very different governments.
Most countries classify themselves. Some do not fit any box cleanly, and for those I made a decision by hand, gave a reason and cited the constitution, a statute or the source text behind it. There are 83 hand decisions across 60 countries; 66 I rate high confidence and 17 medium. The table shows the hardest cases.
The hardest cases
Click a row to open the country. Every decision, with its citation, is in data/hand_decisions.csv.
Each field rests on V-Dem's expert coding of how the system works in practice and on the CIA World Factbook's description of the constitution, compared field by field. Where both sources speak, they agree most of the time. There are 51 disagreements left standing, across 48 countries. The largest group (14) are countries the Factbook calls presidential that also have a prime minister, whom V-Dem's indicators show the president can dismiss: the president-parliamentary family. Next come monarchies the Factbook calls parliamentary where V-Dem codes the monarch as ruling (Jordan, Morocco) and military regimes the Factbook still lists under their constitutional label (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso). Where the Factbook's label lagged behind a new constitution (Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Togo, Tunisia) I resolved the case by hand, citing the constitution.
How often the sources agree
Countries per field. "One source" means only one of the two speaks to the field (mostly small states that V-Dem does not cover).
Countries. The 193 UN member states, the Holy See and Palestine (UN observer states), Taiwan and Kosovo: 197 in all. Dependent territories and unrecognised states are left grey. The reference date is the start of 2026: V-Dem's latest year is 2025 and the Factbook's last edition is from early 2026. Where events moved fast (Guinea, Myanmar, Syria) the country's notes say what changed.
Head of state and executive. A country is a monarchy if V-Dem says its head of state reached office by hereditary succession, a royal council or appointment from abroad (the Commonwealth realms), or, outside V-Dem, if the Factbook calls it one. A monarch rules (a dualist system) where V-Dem codes the head of state as at least as powerful as the head of government over the cabinet or the monarchy as at least half the executive's power base; the Factbook's "absolute monarchy" marks the absolute ones. A republic is presidential if one directly elected person is head of state and government; parliamentary if the head of state is not directly elected and a separate head of government leads, or if a directly elected president has little power over the cabinet; semi-presidential if a directly elected president shares power with a prime minister. The semi-presidential subtype follows the definition of Shugart and Carey: president-parliamentary where the president can also dismiss the prime minister, measured by V-Dem's in-practice indicator (above 0.5), premier-presidential otherwise; France and Ukraine are set by their constitutions instead. Military, one-party, theocratic and transitional governments come first: V-Dem codes a head of state who took power by force or was appointed by the military or a ruling party, and the Factbook names communist, theocratic and transitional states.
Territory, chambers and elections. Federations are the countries the Factbook calls federal, plus Argentina and Bosnia; regionalised states are Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom; autonomous regions come from the Factbook's administrative divisions and a short list of hand additions (the Faroes and Greenland, Åland, Zanzibar and others). Chambers are V-Dem's count of sitting chambers, checked against the Factbook. The electoral system is V-Dem's thirteen-category code for the latest election to the lower or only chamber, checked against both Factbook editions; a chamber less than half directly elected is "indirect or appointed".
Caveats. Every typology flattens. A threshold on an expert-coded index decides some semi-presidential subtypes; federal and regionalised are matters of degree; the electoral system of the last election may already have been reformed. V-Dem's scores carry uncertainty (the country records show the intervals). Patterns between form and freedom are descriptive and say nothing about cause.