mDemocracy began with a genuine curiosity about a simple question: if democracy is a social contract between the people and their governments — as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke envisioned during the Enlightenment — why is that contract almost never formally measured?
Political success is still judged by elections, headlines and sentiment, rather than by whether a country is measurably moving in the right direction and whether its citizens' quality of life is improving.
Citizens need a simple measure they can use in everyday conversation and refer to when speaking with their elected representatives — one that is credible, factual and relatable to the concerns that matter most to them.
That is what mDemocracy sets out to provide. Using eight KPIs that capture the foundations of a prosperous country and an improving quality of life, it offers a single, comparable measure of how well a nation is being governed.
With more than 35 years of international business experience, including as CEO of listed companies, I can attest that being measured and judged continually in the corporate world is onerous and gruelling — but it is absolutely necessary. It is only by innovating, competing and improving that you build a better future. Government deserves the same honest scrutiny.
This is a work in progress. The aim is to add more countries over time. I started with my home country, Cyprus, and others will follow as the framework improves through feedback.
mDemocracy is an independent, non-partisan work with no relation to any political party or organisation — and it will remain so, forever.
The help of AI — Claude, in this case — has been invaluable. The early work of debating which KPIs to use, what structure to build and what would genuinely make a difference took real effort; but the data collection and tabulation that would normally have taken months were compressed into hours.
I would greatly welcome any feedback to help make this a better tool.