Political Regimes

Form of government of each sovereign state. The map classifies regimes by how the executive is appointed and to whom it answers: directly elected president, government accountable to parliament, monarch, single party, junta. This is a map of constitutional law, not of political practice.

Cross-check of the French Wikipedia list of countries by form of government against its English counterpart, as of 2026. Twelve categories are used, from presidential republic to transitional regime. Borderline cases exist and are accepted as such: several constitutions describe a regime that the actual exercise of power contradicts.

Each colour is a category, with no hierarchy and no order: the legend is a partition, not a scale. For effective democratic quality — free elections, checks and balances, civil liberties — the democracy index is the map to look at, never this one.

The parliamentary system, in its various forms, remains the most widespread, largely through British colonial legacy. The surviving absolute monarchies are almost all concentrated in the Arabian Peninsula. And a presidential constitution says nothing about the real concentration of power: several of the world's most authoritarian regimes are formally presidential republics holding regular elections.