Can you cover the election in my country?

If we're not covering an election it's certainly not because we're unaware of it!

We look at every national election going on everywhere in the world, but for the moment I'm focusing on elections for Head of State and Head of Government, and the occasional referendum when it has a major impact on people in other countries (like the UK's EU Referendum and Turkey's Constitutional Referendum).

Elections of assemblies are quite tricky for us: they tend to be very complex and are deeply entangled with domestic party politics - which really isn’t what the Good Country is about. The way we resolve this issue is simply by treating parliamentary elections as if they were direct elections for Head of Government, and we ask Global Voters to choose directly between the party leaders. The process doesn't exactly mirror the formal election, but the end result is the same.

We also like to cover elections for Head of State: although the role is often a largely ceremonial one, Presidents are expected to act as the country's diplomat-in-chief, and their impact on the international community - which is what the Global Vote is all about - can sometimes be a significant form of "soft power". The Head of Government tends to wield most of the hard power but the job is primarily focused on domestic issues, and these lie outside the remit of the Global Vote.

In the future we want to cover other kinds of elections and appointments that have a big impact around the world: and that might include senior officials in international bodies and agencies, and who knows, maybe even the bosses of big corporations. We'll see.