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Franchise

✶ Franchise · An atlas of who governs

How the world
chooses who governs.

Every country answers the same questions differently: who holds power, how they get it, and who gets a say. Turn the globe and pick a country, or start with how the systems work.

Compare countries → How it works

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What this is

One question,
many answers.

Franchise — the right to choose who governs — is an atlas of how that choice is made. For each country: the offices, how they are filled, the rules that turn votes into seats, and the results.

  1. 01 Who holds power: heads of state and government, legislatures, courts.
  2. 02 How they get it: elections, appointments, inheritance — and the rules behind each.
  3. 03 What happened: calendars, live counts and history, from official sources.

Learn

How the
systems work.

  1. I

    Forms of government

    Democracies, monarchies, one-party states and everything between — and whether power sits in one capital or is shared with states.

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  2. II

    Executives

    Presidential, parliamentary, semi-presidential: who leads, how they are chosen, and how they can be removed.

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  3. III

    Electoral systems

    First past the post, runoffs, ranked ballots, proportional lists, mixed systems. The same votes can elect different winners.

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  4. IV

    The political spectrum

    Left and right, the two-axis model, ideologies and party families, and why some countries have two parties and others twenty.

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  5. V

    Civics

    Constitutions, rights, the separation of powers, judicial review, citizenship and who gets the vote.

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Countries

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country.

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