Back to overview

United Kingdom

The democracy assessment in the United Kingdom has been the forerunner of the current International IDEA methodology for democracy assessments. When the idea arose to systematically assess the UK's democracy in the 1980s, the UK Democratic Audit developed a methodology and the first assessment took place in 1992. International IDEA then proposed redesigning and expanding the original framework in order to create a universal tool for assessing the quality of democracy worldwide, which became the State of Democracy Assessment Framework. The UK Democratic Audit used the new framework to publish a comprehensive report on the state of democracy in the United Kingdom in 2012. A democracy assessment focusing only on Northern Ireland was also carried out in 2007 by the Dublin-based Think-tank for Action on Social Change.

The assessment report received a lot of attention from domestic as well as international media outlets, academia and political practitioners (such as The Guardian, London School of Economics and Open Democracy). Moreover, the assessment has been cited in both parliamentary chambers.

Assessment Reports

Submit feedback

Submit questions or comments about the Data or Tool

How did you find out about this? What do you like about it? What did you expect but did not find in using the Data or Tool?

To see how we handle your personal data, please read our Privacy Policy.

Close tooltip