How often nations vote, and what it does to them

A country-year record of national elections since 1945, and a first look at whether elections change political division, indifference, mobilization, and the quality of democracy. The story comes in three parts: how often the world votes, what voting more often does, and what holding an election does. Explore each below.

Part 1

The landscape: how often the world votes

Before any consequences, the raw record. Elections have grown far more common since 1945, and a handful of countries go to the polls strikingly often.

Elections over time

National polling occasions worldwide each year, 1945 to 2026. The rise tracks decolonisation, the third wave of democratisation, and the post-communist transitions. 2026 is still running, so its count is partial and the series is drawn dashed there.

Who votes most often

Total national elections in the chosen period, collapsed to one polling occasion per day. Choose the period and how many countries to show; hover for the count.

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Period
Part 2

Does voting more often change politics?

Here the treatment is how often a country votes. Two outcomes anchor the question: turnout, which we read as a proxy for indifference, and polarization, a proxy for division. The turnout pattern holds up across the models; the division one doesn't.

The two findings, interactively

Each dot is a country, averaged over the chosen period. Move between the two outcomes, switch the period, toggle regime types, or hover a country. The fitted line and correlation recompute from whatever is showing, so you can see how much any group drives the pattern. The turnout panel also lets you swap the turnout source, so you can see whether the wider IDEA-based series and V-Dem's own series tell the same story.

Outcome
Period
Turnout source
Regime type
Find a country

Descriptive association, not causation. Election frequency is endogenous to regime type: consolidated democracies and electoral autocracies both hold elections often, so a slope is not evidence that elections cause the outcome. That is why regime type is always on the plot.

Does the pattern hold up

The frequency coefficient (per one standard deviation) with country and year fixed effects, standard errors clustered by country. Turnout stays negative across every recent-frequency measure; division sits near zero and changes sign. Left of the line means more elections predict lower turnout or less division.

Indifference: turnout (pp)
Division: polarization

Across every specification

Rather than trust one model, each coefficient below is re-estimated across every reasonable combination of outcome, treatment, controls, fixed effects, and sample. Each dot is one specification, ranked by size; the dashed line is the median. This is the honest test of whether a result survives analytical choices.

Division: does holding an election raise it?

Indifference: does voting more often lower turnout?

The contrast is the point. Division sits on zero and its sign flips with the measure you pick; turnout is negative in almost every specification. The robust political consequence of frequent elections is on engagement, not division.

With the missing data filled in

Multiple imputation (Amelia, m set to the maximum missingness) pooled with Rubin's rules, so imputation uncertainty is carried into the intervals, against the complete-case estimate. Standard errors clustered by country, the treatment level.

Division (polarization)
Indifference (turnout)
Part 3

What does holding an election do?

Now the treatment is a single election year. What changes when a country goes to the polls? Mostly mobilization and the quality of democracy, less so division, and how much depends on the regime.

What an election does to division

A country-year model with country and year fixed effects, tracing political division in the years around a national election. If elections drove division, the jump would land at the election year. Instead division drifts up before the vote too, so this looks like a build-up, not an effect of the election itself. Hover for the numbers.

Descriptive within-country associations, not causal estimates. Election timing is endogenous (snap elections come in crises), and the pre-election rise signals anticipation.

Beyond division: what else an election moves

The same country-year model, run for five annual outcomes, each standardised. Positive means more of the outcome in an election year. Elections mobilize, and sometimes inflame, but they do not clearly divide. Hover for the robustness across specifications.

Descriptive within-country associations, not causal estimates. Each row is one workhorse model; the hover shows how often the effect is positive and significant across the specifications for that outcome.

Does an election improve democracy?

V-Dem's Electoral Democracy Index and its five sub-indices, in an election year versus a normal one. Because the outcome is democracy, these models control for income and education but not for democracy itself. Elections coincide with gains almost everywhere, most of all in filling elected offices.

Descriptive within-country associations, not causal: democracies hold more elections, so read these as gains that coincide with elections, not gains they cause.

Where do elections matter most?

The same election effect, re-estimated within each Regimes-of-the-World category, from closed autocracy to liberal democracy. Each small panel is one outcome; each dot an effect for one regime type, with its 95% interval. The pattern the project cares about is the hump in mass mobilization: elections mobilize most in the contested middle, electoral autocracies and electoral democracies, and least at the two extremes.

Descriptive within-country associations, not causal. Reading left to right in each panel moves from closed autocracy to liberal democracy; a solid dot is significant at 5%, a faded one is not.

Explore every specification

Pick an outcome, then pin any analytical choice or leave it open. The curve and the summary recompute from the specifications that match, so you can check for yourself whether a result depends on the choices, rather than taking one model's word for it.

Descriptive within-country associations, not causal. Each point is one model of the election effect on the chosen outcome; colour marks significance at 5%.

What's behind the numbers

Everything here is real, drawn straight from the analysis outputs. Sources are attributed; nothing is invented.

National election
Elections choosing national legislative or executive representatives by popular ballot. Same-day contests count once (one polling occasion per day). A runoff folds into its first round, so a two-round vote is one occasion. Referendums are excluded, as are offices filled by a legislature or electoral college rather than by voters (the German and Greek presidencies, the Kazakh and Uzbek senates, and the like).
Frequency
Polling occasions per year: the country's total over the chosen window divided by the years in it. Not a fixed lookback, so the three windows are on the same scale and can be read against each other.
Division
V-Dem political polarization (v2cacamps), higher means more divided. Recorded every year, so a country's figure averages every year in the window.
Indifference
Voter turnout, share of registered voters, from the International IDEA Voter Turnout Database, with V-Dem's v2eltrnout filling the country-years IDEA lacks; the scatter can be switched to V-Dem's series on its own, which covers fewer countries. Turnout exists only for election years, so a country's figure averages its own elections in the window, not every year in it and not just the most recent ones. Coverage is partial: the two sources between them report turnout for 84% of election-years, and for Japan only 30 of 52, because neither records House of Councillors elections. Where a country's chambers are covered unevenly, its turnout average rests on fewer elections than its frequency counts. Lower turnout is the proxy.
Sources
NELDA 6.0 (1945–2020, authoritative); International IDEA for the post-2020 extension, with IFES ElectionGuide filling the country-years IDEA lacks (held elections only, to 2026); V-Dem v14 (outcomes and covariates); World Bank (robustness covariates). 2026 is the calendar year in progress, so its counts are partial and it is excluded from the trend line. NELDA is authoritative before 2020 but not complete: it omits 22 country-years that ElectionGuide records, among them Japan's July 2013 House of Councillors election, and those are filled in.
Cross-check
The three election sources agree closely where they overlap: NELDA vs IDEA before 2020 (84% exact, 98% within one election), NELDA vs ElectionGuide before 2020 (96% exact, 99% within one), and IDEA vs ElectionGuide after 2020 (87% exact, 99% within one), so the sources reinforce rather than pull against the counts. ElectionGuide files a number of sub-national bodies under a sovereign state's ISO code, which would merge Montenegro into Malta and Scotland into the Seychelles; those are remapped or dropped before it is used.
Inference
Country and year fixed effects; standard errors clustered by country; missing values multiply imputed with Rubin pooling.
Caveat
Descriptive associations, not causal estimates. Frequency is endogenous to regime type.