Center for Blue Democracy Democratic Fitness Indicator

What is it

The Democratic Fitness Indicator is a diagnostic tool that identifies strengths and weak spots in a country’s political system, at the national level, with regard to its legal foundation. All of this from the perspective of whether citizens actually hold power in their hands. The DFI examines the political system across seven categories:

  1. Elections 
  2. Holding politicians accountable 
  3. Parliamentary legislative initiative
  4. Citizens-initiated referenda 
  5. Citizens’ assemblies 
  6. Safeguards 
  7. Ability to change the constitution 

The result is an overall score from 0% to 100%, with a breakdown for each of the seven categories.

For each element of the political system, the DFI framework lists the available options — actual institutional choices that may be used in democracies — with scores showing which align with the principle of people keeping power in their hands. This makes the DFI useful not only for diagnosis but also for designing improvements.

Who is it for

The DFI is for anyone interested in how democratic systems work and how they can be improved. Constitutional reformers and citizens’ assemblies can use it as a menu of design choices. Researchers, students and journalists can use it as a diagnostic lens. And anyone curious about their own country’s political architecture can read it as a structured guide to where citizens hold power and where they don’t.

Download the report

To test out the DFI, we applied it to twenty countries across five continents. The highest score was 38.63% (Colombia). The lowest was 13.49% (Norway). The average across the dataset was 20.65%.

The results are surprising: countries with the strongest democratic reputations — Norway, the UK, the USA, Sweden, Canada, Switzerland — came up at the bottom of the list. Some score well in individual categories: the Netherlands reaches 90% in Parliamentary Legislative Initiative, Spain 70% in Safeguards, Switzerland 64% in Ability to Change the Constitution, Mexico 88% in freedom of information laws. Yet no country reaches 40% overall. Many democracies have pieces of the puzzle in place. None has the full picture.

Download:
📄 Measuring the Content of Democracy with the Democratic Fitness Indicator (2026) – report
📁 Countries – full results and research files

Scoring a country on your own 

The DFI is designed to be applied to any democratic country, not only the twenty in our case studies. The methodology is open, the tool is open, and the process is straightforward.

The good news: most of the work can now be done by an AI agent. We recommend Claude Code (for those comfortable with a terminal) or Claude Cowork (desktop, no coding required). In practice, the workflow is simple: ask Claude to read the DFI Builder README and score your country. Claude does the rest — reading the legal sources, drafting the YAML, running the Builder, and verifying the results. Your role is to initiate the process and review the output.

Download:
📁 DFI Builder — open-source Python tool