Electoral Law Indicators

The ELECLAW indicators measure the degree of inclusion of the electoral franchise for three categories of potential voters or candidates: resident citizens, non-resident citizens and non-citizen residents. They cover both the right to vote (VOTLAW) and the right to stand as candidate (CANLAW) in three types of elections (presidential/executive, legislative and referendum) at four levels (supranational, national, regional and local).

For each category of persons, the ELECLAW indicators measure on a 0 to 1 scale the degree of inclusion of electoral laws along two dimensions. First, eligibility restrictions determine the category of persons who have the right to vote or stand as candidate. Second, access restrictions determine how those eligible can exercise their right to vote by means of voter registration and voting methods. The indicators have been calculated on the basis of the qualitative information included in our National Electoral Laws and Electoral Rights databases and our country reports on Access to Electoral Rights. While the information and coding have been thoroughly checked, there may be residual inaccuracies. Please contact us also if you have found any error in our coding or if you have questions about how we have applied the coding rules specified in our ELECLAW explanatory note. A less technical introduction to ELECLAW and its methodology can be found in this article.

The current version – ELECLAW 5.1 – includes the 28 Member States of the European Union based on electoral laws in both 2013 and 2015, as well as Switzerland, the Americas, and Oceania based on electoral laws in 2015. For previous versions see the archive of data and explanatory notes below. For the EU-28 only very few electoral laws changed from 2013 to 2015 and changes that happened were mostly minor ones. The current visualisation of the ELECLAW indicators therefore only covers laws in 2015. You can download the EU-28 data for 2013 – which is updated, corrected, and newly aggregated according to the rules of ELECLAW 5.1 – as a part of the latest ELECLAW Masterfile for PC and for MAC.

The ELECLAW Indicators have been developed by Jean-Thomas Arrighi, (European University Institute), Rainer Bauböck (European University Institute) and Samuel D. Schmid (European University Institute) in consultation with Maarten Vink (University of Maastricht) and Derek Hutcheson (University of Malmö) and with the assistance of Lorenzo Piccoli (European University Institute) and Dejan Stjepanovic (Dundee University).

The indicators are made available freely for non-commercial use by the general public. We ask users to acknowledge its source when using the data. Please cite the current version as follows:

GLOBALCIT (2019). ELECLAW Indicators. Version 5.1, San Domenico di Fiesole: European University Institute.

Current version:

Contact us if you have any problems opening our CSV files. 

Archived versions:

ELECLAW files are also available through the EUI ResData Repository.