Global Leadership Representation Index: Country Rankings

The Country Representation Rankings dataset (MIT license) from the Global Leadership Project provides a set of indices quantifying how closely each country’s political leadership reflects its population’s demographic makeup. Contained in CountryRepresentationRankings.csv, it offers an Overall representation score, a Representation Gap (the difference between observed representation and what would be expected under a random-selection model), and separate indices for Ethnicity, Gender, Religion, and Language. These metrics enable researchers and policymakers to compare representation levels across nations, pinpoint areas of underrepresentation, and track trends over time when multiple snapshots are available. For complete details on data collection and index computation, please see: Gerring, John; Jerzak, Connor T.; Öncel, Erzen. 2024. “The Composition of Descriptive Representation.” American Political Science Review 118(2): 784–801.