Direction of Travel
Nothing reaches the corner, so where a country stands is the least interesting thing about it. Which way it is moving is the question.
204 countries · 1900 to 2026 · site leadership histories, CCP, elections atlas, Power Atlas · built 2026-09-04
Read this before the boards
The flagged-leader panel is a curated editorial list against a written criterion (atrocities, systemic subversion, criminal conviction), not a measurement of every country. Thirteen sitting leaders are flagged. The absence of a flag is not evidence of anything.
The movers
Countries that entered a flagged period within the last decade.
How this is measured
Entering a spell is the largest single change available on this signal, and it is the one a static board cannot see. A country flagged for forty years is not moving. A country flagged last year is.
Spells under a leader carrying the warning flag, merged where consecutive. Entering a spell is the largest single move a country can make on this board; holding one for decades is not a movement at all.
United States
since 2025Sits in The Approach on the grid. Spell 4 of its recorded history, 10 years flagged since 1900.
- 1829 to 1837, Andrew Jackson
- 1969 to 1974, Richard Nixon
- 2017 to 2021, Donald Trump
- 2025 to now, Donald Trump
Tunisia
since 2019Sits in The Institutional Machine on the grid. Spell 2 of its recorded history, 31 years flagged since 1900.
- 1987 to 2011, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
- 2019 to now, Kais Saied
The record
How often a country has returned to flagged leadership, and for how long.
How this is measured
Consecutive terms merge into one spell, so a junta that ran through four men counts once. The column that matters is not the total but the recurrence: a country that keeps going back is telling you something a single episode does not.
Turnout against a country's own history
The last election measured against that country's own median since 1945, in points.
How this is measured
Turnout against the country's own post-1945 median, and how far the last election's seats strayed from its votes against its own median.
Comparing a country to itself rather than to the field is the point. A turnout of sixty per cent means nothing in isolation and a great deal against a country that used to manage eighty five.
Why there is no single direction scoreon purpose
Deliberately not blended into one score. The force trend covers every ranked state, the accountability drift forty, the flagged-leader panel sixty-six. One number would hide that, and a reader could not tell a stable country from an unmeasured one.
- Flagged leadership: 66 countries have a record, 9 are flagged now.
- Power trend: 192 countries.
- Turnout and proportionality: 40 countries.
- Constitutional rupture in the last 25 years: 45 countries.
The signals also disagree with each other, and they are published disagreeing. A country can enter a flagged period, lose ground on power and raise its turnout in the same decade. Reconciling that into one decimal would be an opinion wearing a number.
What the flag means, and what it does notthe criteria
A leader carries the warning glyph on this site when at least one of three written criteria is met: command or direct responsibility for grave crimes against civilians as found by a court or a UN inquiry; systemic subversion of the constitutional order from inside it; or a criminal conviction. Each flag carries the dated acts behind it.
The flagged-leader panel is a curated editorial list against a written criterion (atrocities, systemic subversion, criminal conviction), not a measurement of every country. Thirteen sitting leaders are flagged. The absence of a flag is not evidence of anything.
It is a judgement about recorded acts, not about a person's worth, and it is not a measure of a country. A flagged leader is one fact about a state among the several on this page.
Sourcesbuilt 2026-09-04
- Site leadership histories, 315 country files, with the editorial warning flag
- scripts/data/warn-flags.json, the criteria and evidence behind each flag
- Correlates of War and Maddison via the site Power Atlas
- Comparative Constitutions Project, Chronology of Constitutional Events v6.0
- Site elections atlas, turnout and Gallagher index
- Site interstate war record