Free and fair elections vs. Independent opposition
Holds up after adjusting for income
Across 166 countries, Free and fair elections and Independent opposition rise and fall together at r = +0.72 (on a scale from −1 to +1, where 0 means no link). It holds up almost unchanged when only countries with similar income (GDP per person) are compared (r = +0.70, q = 0.030, allowing for the many pairs tested).
Comparing countries across the middle half of free and fair elections, 0.235 to 0.873 points, independent opposition is better by 1.97 points at the top of that range than the bottom. Comparing only countries with similar national income, the gap is 2.27 points.
Link before adjusting (r)+0.724p = 3.4e-28 · 166 countries
After adjusting for national income+0.704p = 5.7e-26 · likely range [+0.62, +0.77]
p, allowing for regions0.002standard error 0.137 · 7 regions
Check for luck (q)0.030across 17,292 pairs
How to read these.r runs from −1 (one goes up as the other goes down) to +1 (they rise together), and 0 means no link. Adjusting for national income means comparing countries with the same GDP per person, so differences in wealth can’t explain the link. Income is used in percentage terms, since an extra $1,000 means more to a poor country than to a rich one. p is how likely a link this strong would be if there were really none. Below 0.05 means it is unlikely to be chance. Very small values are written in short form: 1.1e-32 means a decimal point followed by 31 zeros and then 11, so very close to zero. The likely range is where the true figure probably lies, and a range that crosses zero means the link could easily be chance. Countries in the same region tend to resemble each other, so the third figure allows for that, which gives a fairer p. The standard error is the typical size of the error in r. Finally, testing this many pairs means some will look strong by luck alone. A q below 0.05 means this link is unlikely to be one of those.
Free and fair elections · index (0-1)link with income +0.61 · high
Independent opposition · score (higher = more independent)link with income +0.45 · moderate
“Link with income” is how closely each measure tracks GDP per person across countries, from −1 to +1.
Every country as a dot
best-fit line line after adjusting
Four ways to measure the link
| Method | r | p | Countries |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard (Pearson), not adjusted | +0.724 | 3.4e-28 | 166 |
| By rank (Spearman), not adjusted | +0.805 | 4.3e-39 | 166 |
| Standard (Pearson), adjusted for national income | +0.704 | 5.7e-26 | 166 |
| By rank (Spearman), adjusted for national income | +0.752 | 2.5e-31 | 166 |
The rank version uses only each country’s place in line, from lowest to highest, so a few extreme countries count for less. The adjusted and unadjusted versions use the same 166 countries: those that report both measures and GDP per person. So the gap between them comes from the adjustment, not from a change in which countries are counted. Drop in the size of r after adjusting: +0.020 (a minus sign means it grew).
How solid is it?
Leaving out one country at a time, r ranges from +0.686 (without SAU) to +0.727 (without VNM). The bar above shows that range on a scale from −1 to +1, with the solid line at the full result. The single country that moves r most: VNM (+0.023).
Within each region
Countries are not separate, unrelated cases, and neighbors share a lot. A link that holds inside each region is far more believable than one that shows up only when comparing regions.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| East Asia & Pacific | 21 | +0.70 | |
| Europe & Central Asia | 49 | +0.85 | |
| Latin America & Caribbean | 23 | +0.73 | |
| Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan & Pakistan | 19 | +0.68 | |
| Sub-Saharan Africa | 46 | +0.37 |
By income third
If the link shows up only in the richest third of countries, it is a feature of rich countries, not a general pattern.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Poorest third | 56 | +0.45 | |
| Middle third | 55 | +0.68 | |
| Richest third | 55 | +0.92 |
By largest religious group
Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Christians | 99 | +0.70 | |
| Muslims | 46 | +0.45 |
By last European coloniser
Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| France | 25 | -0.04 | |
| Never a European colony | 20 | +0.90 | |
| Spain | 19 | +0.69 | |
| United Kingdom | 48 | +0.69 |
By official ideology
Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Nationalist | 24 | +0.67 | |
| No strong official ideology | 116 | +0.66 |
By party system
Countries grouped by a label they share, such as main religion, rather than by a number. Groups of fewer than twelve countries are not shown. These groups differ in income, region and history all at once. So a gap between them is a place to start asking questions, not an answer.
| n | r | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| A few parties banned | 26 | +0.52 | |
| No parties banned | 121 | +0.63 |
Without outliers (countries far outside the middle half of countries on either measure, by more than one and a half times the width of that middle half): r = +0.706 after dropping 7 countries.
Two series, one country
Both measures over the years for one country you pick. The two charts are stacked so they share only the years along the bottom.
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Over time, within countries
Everything above compares countries with each other at one moment. This section compares each country only with itself over 36years. So a link here can’t come from anything about a country that stays the same, such as its history, geography, institutions or culture.
The link also shows up within countries over time (r = +0.427). It holds even when looking only at changes from one year to the next (r = +0.186). This is the strongest kind of evidence available here: it holds when each country is compared only with itself, and it is not just a product of shared trends.
Across countries (adjusted)+0.704for comparison
Within countries+0.463each country vs itself
…and vs the same year elsewhere+0.427q = 0.000 · 172 countries
Year-on-year changes+0.186q = 0.000
Read with care.
- The association is much weaker in year-on-year changes than in levels, which points to shared country-specific trends.
6,082 country-years (one country in one year), 172 countries, 1990–2025, about 35 years each on average. Share of the variation that happens within countries over time: 15% for Free and fair elections, 13% for Independent opposition. The margins of error allow for each country appearing many times, and for each year’s value being close to the year before.
Year-to-year changes are a cautious test, not a final answer. Looking only at changes from one year to the next removes each country’s own trends. But it also makes measurement mistakes louder, which pulls the results toward zero. A near-zero result here is weak evidence of no link, not proof.
With one measure years behind the other
Same year (lag 0): +0.427. A peak away from zero does not show which comes first. These series change slowly — this year’s value is close to last year’s. That makes the curve smooth and nearly symmetric, whatever produced the data. Even a sharp peak at one lag (a gap of some years) would not prove that one measure changes the other.
The data
index (0-1) | score (higher = more independent) | Years | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Belgium BEL | 0.968 | 2.85 | 2025 |
| Norway NOR | 0.966 | 2.19 | 2025 |
| Australia AUS | 0.962 | 2.62 | 2025 |
| Finland FIN | 0.961 | 2.65 | 2025 |
| Denmark DNK | 0.961 | 2.83 | 2025 |
| Germany DEU | 0.957 | 2.66 | 2025 |
| Spain ESP | 0.956 | 2.74 | 2025 |
| Chile CHL | 0.956 | 3.13 | 2025 |
| New Zealand NZL | 0.954 | 2.77 | 2025 |
| Netherlands NLD | 0.954 | 2.86 | 2025 |
| Estonia EST | 0.952 | 2.71 | 2025 |
| Uruguay URY | 0.947 | 2.96 | 2025 |
| Sweden SWE | 0.945 | 2.77 | 2025 |
| Italy ITA | 0.945 | 2.73 | 2025 |
| Ireland IRL | 0.945 | 3.01 | 2025 |
Coppedge, M. et al., V-Dem Dataset, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project
Coppedge, M. et al., V-Dem Dataset v16, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project; Lindberg, S. I. et al., Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) Dataset. Read from the V-Dem Institute's vdemdata package.
Sources
Free and fair elections
Free and fair elections index
V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · via Our World in Data · CC BY-SA 4.0 · updated annual
Whether elections are run without voter-registration fraud, widespread irregularities, government threats against the opposition, vote buying or election violence. This asks a narrower question than whether a country is a democracy, and one that is easier to answer. A state can run clean elections while barring the opposition from standing. It can also run dirty elections and still change government. It is the clean-elections part of the electoral democracy index. So its pair with that index, and with liberal and participatory democracy, is built from the same numbers and flagged as such.
Independent opposition
Opposition parties' independence from the ruling regime
V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · CC BY-SA 4.0 · updated annual (V-Dem); V-Party per election, to 2019
Are opposition parties really independent, or picked or bought by the people in power? Experts answer from 0 ("opposition parties are not allowed") to 4 ("all opposition parties are independent"). V-Dem turns the answers into a score of about -4 to +4. A part of V-Dem's freedom of association index.
How this was computed
Data used: most recent value in 2010-2025; values come from 2019–2025. To adjust for income, each measure is first predicted from GDP per person (in percentage terms, on a log scale) with a straight-line fit. Only what is left over is then compared. This is called a partial correlation. The line is drawn the standard way (ordinary least squares), which picks the line that comes closest to all the countries at once. The error margins allow for countries in the same region resembling each other, using 7 World Bank regions. The q-value corrects for testing all 17,292 pairs at once, using the Benjamini–Hochberg method. Underlying data last updated V-Dem v16; V-Party v2. How the country data works · explore Free and fair elections and Independent opposition
This page shows that two measures go together. It does not show that Free and fair elections changes Independent opposition, or the reverse. These figures also describe countries, not individual people. See the ecological fallacy.
More links with Free and fair elections or Independent opposition
- Freedom of expression vs Independent opposition before +0.89 → after adjusting +0.88
- Independent opposition vs Voice and accountability before +0.80 → after adjusting +0.82
- Civil liberties (FH) vs Independent opposition before -0.81 → after adjusting -0.80
- Civil society participation vs Independent opposition before +0.81 → after adjusting +0.79
- Independent opposition vs Political rights (FH) before -0.81 → after adjusting -0.79
- Free and fair elections vs Women's political empowerment before +0.78 → after adjusting +0.72
- Ease of forming a party vs Free and fair elections before +0.69 → after adjusting +0.71
- Economy free of state ownership vs Independent opposition before +0.69 → after adjusting +0.68