How we grade governments on transparency
Published Monday, June 22, 2026 · World Leaders Daily · #transparency #methodology #open data
Our Transparency Scorecard ranks every office we track on a single question: how openly does this government let the public see what its leader does? The score is deliberately simple, reproducible, and built only from facts we can measure directly from each official source — never from opinion.
Three things we can measure
Every leader gets a score from 0 to 100, made of three parts:
- Freshness (45 points) — how recently the source published. A schedule updated today scores full marks; one that trails off degrades to zero by about a month stale. Stale or undated schedules are the clearest sign of a transparency gap.
- Frequency (30 points) — how many days the source actually covers across our tracking window. A government that publishes most days scores higher than one that surfaces only the occasional press release.
- Detail (25 points) — how much is published. A genuine timed daily itinerary (the gold standard — the US, Canada, Japan and Brazil do this) scores highest; a vague press feed with no times gets partial credit.
We then translate the total into a familiar A–F grade so you can scan the table at a glance.
What the score does — and doesn't — mean
This is the important part. The score measures the publishing behaviour of the source, not how hard a leader works. A low grade means the public schedule is sparse, stale or undated — an accountability gap — not that the official is idle. A president can be extremely busy and still earn an F if their government simply doesn't publish what they do.
Honest by design
Because the inputs are objective and the formula is fixed, the scorecard is reproducible: anyone looking at the same official sources would arrive at the same grades. It updates every day alongside the rest of the site, and we record a daily snapshot so the scores can be tracked over time. As ever, every figure traces back to a primary source you can check yourself.