Democracy, Voice, and Accountability Index from the World Governance Indicators

Download the latest version (WGI 2.0, 2025 revision, with data up to 2024) of the Democracy, Voice, and Accountability index from the World Governance Indicators and process it via country_year_coder.

Usage

download_wgi_voice_and_accountability(
  url,
  verbose = TRUE,
  return_raw = FALSE,
  ...
)

Source

Worldwide Governance Indicators. Data and documentation available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators.

Arguments

url: The URL of the dataset. Defaults to https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/sites/govindicators/doc/wgidataset_with_sourcedata-2025.xlsx.
verbose: Whether to print a running commentary of what the function is doing while processing the data.
return_raw: Whether to return the raw data, with minimal processing. Default is FALSE.
...: Other parameters passed to country_year_coder.

Value

A dataset containing the country-year version of the latest update (WGI 2.0, covering 1996-2024) of the World Governance Indicators "Democracy, Voice and Accountability" index, compiled by Daniel Kaufmann and Aart Kraay. The original data are available at https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/worldwide-governance-indicators, along with a full explanation of the methodology used to compile the index.

According to the compilers, "Voice and accountability captures perceptions of the extent to which a country's citizens are able to participate in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association, and a free media."

wb_country: Country name (World Bank standard).
wb_code: World bank 3 character country code.
year: Year.
Estimate: Estimate of governance (ranges from approximately -2.5 (weak) to 2.5 (strong) governance performance), with a mean of 0.
StdErr: Standard error reflects variability around the point estimate of governance.
NumSrc: Number of data sources on which estimate is based. The methodology document lists, among these, the EIU Democracy Index, Freedom House, the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, the Gallup World Poll, the Institutional Profiles Database, the Political Risk Services International Country Risk Guide, and Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. See https://www.worldbank.org/content/dam/sites/govindicators/doc/va.pdf for more details.
Rank: Percentile rank among all countries (ranges from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest) rank).
Lower: Lower bound of 90% confidence interval for governance, in percentile rank terms.
Upper: Upper bound of 90% confidence interval for governance, in percentile rank terms

Details

Methodology break (WGI 2.0, 2025 revision). In 2025 the World Bank released a full methodological revision of the WGI. The source pool was expanded (now 35 sources including the Arab, Asian, and Euro barometers), the aggregation model was changed, and all estimates were recomputed back to 1996. Scores obtained through this function are therefore not directly comparable to scores produced by earlier versions of this package (any democracyData release before 0.7.0). Use wgi_legacy for the archived pre-0.7.0 series (1996-2023) with the same column schema. See the WGI methodology PDF linked from the documentation URL for details.

Standard descriptive variables (generated by this package)

extended_country_name: The name of the country in the Gleditsch-Ward system of states, or the official name of the entity (for non-sovereign entities and states not in the Gleditsch and Ward system of states) or else a common name for disputed cases that do not have an official name (e.g., Western Sahara, Hyderabad). The Gleditsch and Ward scheme sometimes indicates the common name of the country and (in parentheses) the name of an earlier incarnation of the state: thus, they have Germany (Prussia), Russia (Soviet Union), Madagascar (Malagasy), etc. For details, see Gleditsch, Kristian S. & Michael D. Ward. 1999. "Interstate System Membership: A Revised List of the Independent States since 1816." International Interactions 25: 393-413. The list can be found via the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20130627160240/http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~ksg/statelist.html.
GWn: Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code, from the Gleditsch and Ward list of independent states.
cown: The Correlates of War numeric country code, 2016 version. This differs from Gleditsch and Ward's numeric country code in a few cases. See https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/state-system-membership/ for the full list.
in_GW_system: Whether the state is "in system" (that is, is independent and sovereign), according to Gleditsch and Ward, for this particular date. Matches at the end of the year; so, for example South Vietnam 1975 is FALSE because, according to Gleditsch and Ward, the country ended on April 1975 (being absorbed by North Vietnam). It is also TRUE for dates beyond 2012 for countries that did not end by then, depsite the fact that the Gleditsch and Ward list has not been updated since.

Note

The datasets downloaded by the download_* family of functions are not directly available in this package. You will always need to directly download them in order to use them.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
download_wgi_voice_and_accountability()} # }