How the country indices work

What the indices measure

Each index is a 0–100 sentiment gauge for one theme in a country's news, centred on 50:

• Happiness — public mood and life satisfaction as reflected in coverage.
• Stability — steadiness of government and institutions: unrest, cabinet changes, continuity of policy.
• Trust — public confidence in government, courts, media and elections.
• Economic — how the economy is being reported: growth, prices, jobs, fiscal credibility.

As with leader scores, these track how things are being reported, not an objective national statistic. They are not GDP, not a polling average, and not a happiness survey.

The weekly batch

Once a week, a batch process reviews every relevant story published that week and, for each country and index it touches, records two numbers:

• delta — how far and in which direction that story should nudge the index, e.g. +1.8 or −2.6.
• weight — how much confidence to place in that judgement, from 0 to 1, based on the prominence and clarity of the coverage.

Every one of these is stored as an auditable row. On each index → country page you can see the individual stories that moved that week's score.

From deltas to a score

1. The week's contributions for a country/index are combined as a weighted sum: each delta multiplied by its weight, then added up and normalised by the total weight.
2. That aggregate weekly change is applied to the previous week's score, with a mild pull back toward the neutral 50 so a quiet week naturally decays toward the centre.
3. The score is clamped to the 0–100 range and published with that week's ending date. The historical series you see on each page is simply every week's published value.

Global and regional averages

The “global average” shown on the homepage and the indices overview is the unweighted mean of every country's most recent weekly score for that index. It is a rough summary, dominated by whichever countries had the most eventful week.

Limitations

• Countries with little tracked coverage in a given week barely move, which can look like stability when it is really just silence.
• The four themes overlap — a coup attempt hits stability, trust, and often the economy at once.
• Week-to-week noise is real; the trend over a quarter is more informative than any single week.