The objectives of the Democracy Ranking are:

  • Supporting democracy awareness and the awareness of the need for improving the quality of democracy
  • Contributing to processes of a self-reflexive discussion and communication about democracy
  • Delivering empirical data for comparatively ranking democracies in a global format
  • Encouraging ongoing reforms, improvements and innovations of democracy for a further enhancement of the quality of democracy
  • Emphasizing the need for quality assurance and quality development of democracies and for systematic evaluations of democracy
  • Underscoring that for the development of the international community of countries the „dimension of democracy“ is just as important as the other dimensions, such as the economy, knowledge, health and the environment
  • Adding to our theoretical and conceptual understanding of democracy also the quality of democracy and the advancement of democracies; (8) offering crucial input for a „Global Democracy Award“