Most democracy indices assess institutions, rights, participation and governance at the national level. This is a significant limitation in the Nordic countries, where municipalities and regions exercise substantial responsibilities and citizens encounter democracy through local elections, public services, planning and civic participation. National results may therefore conceal territorial differences in representation, inclusion, trust, accountability and institutional capacity. Addressing the subnational gap would require a distinct analytical layer within a Nordic framework, aligned with the same democratic dimensions used at national level but adapted to institutions and data below the state level.
Two broad approaches are possible. The first would assess each country’s system of decentralised democracy as a whole, producing separate national, regional and local profiles without scoring every municipality or region individually. The second would measure variation between individual municipalities or regions.
Assessing decentralised systems as a whole. A feasible first step would be to review the available subnational indicators in existing datasets, particularly V-Dem, which offers the most extensive international coverage. Measures of subnational elections, local government power, civil liberties and participatory institutions could be examined to determine what they already reveal about democracy below the national level in the Nordic Region. Existing coverage is nevertheless likely to be insufficient for a meaningful comparative assessment, making some additional data collection necessary. TiNDe provides the clearest practical model: it applies the same five democratic dimensions at national, regional and local levels and supplements international indicators with election data, administrative statistics, citizen surveys, coded institutional information and expert assessments. However, this approach does not capture differences between particular municipalities or regions (Dahlum et al., 2023).
Measuring territorial variation. A fuller approach would also assess democratic quality across individual municipalities or regions using a common set of measures aligned with the framework’s democratic dimensions. This would provide greater analytical depth and reveal territorial inequalities that national or governance-level profiles could conceal. However, it would also require extensive data collection and harmonisation across different Nordic administrative systems. More feasible intermediate options would be to compare categories of territories—such as urban, rural, remote or sparsely populated areas—or to conduct in-depth measurement in a small but diverse sample of municipalities and regions in the Nordic countries. Such pilots could test the availability and comparability of indicators before any attempt at comprehensive Nordic coverage.