How the World Is Governed: A Feature-by-Feature Classification of 197 Systems of Government, Cross-Checked against V-Dem and the CIA World Factbook

Maps of political regimes usually sort countries into democracies and autocracies. I classify the constitutional form of all 197 states (the 193 UN members, the Holy See, Palestine, Taiwan and Kosovo) on eight features: the kind of head of state, how that office is filled, the executive type (including the premier-presidential and president-parliamentary subtypes of semi-presidentialism), whether head of state and head of government are one office, the territorial structure, the number of chambers, the electoral system of the lower or only chamber and any power sharing fixed by community. Each field is derived by stated rules from two independent sources, V-Dem v16 (latest year 2025) and the CIA World Factbook (2026 and 2024 editions), compared cell by cell, with 83 documented and cited hand decisions. The countries fall into 12 families and 112 exact systems, of which 80 belong to a single country; those 80 countries hold 42% of the world's population. The largest shared system, unitary parliamentary republics with one chamber elected by list proportional representation, has 14 members. Presidential republics (52) and parliamentary republics (45) are the largest families and each holds over a quarter of humanity; 25 federations hold 41%. Set against V-Dem's Regimes of the World, 71% of countries electing their lower house by proportional representation are democracies against 43% of majoritarian ones, 78% of premier-presidential against 11% of president-parliamentary systems, and ceremonial monarchies have the highest mean Liberal Democracy Index of any family (0.64). These patterns are descriptive. The classification, sources and decisions are released as open data. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/government-types/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/government-types. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/31/government-types/. Data: V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v16 (Coppedge et al. 2026, https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds26), CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://researchdata.se/en/catalogue/dataset/ext0309-1); CIA World Factbook 2026 and 2024 editions (public domain); World Bank population (CC BY 4.0); Natural Earth (public domain). Derived data, text and figures: CC BY-SA 4.0. Code: MIT.