Historically, analysis of political leadership has largely been evaluated by philosophical and journalistic means. The political science and analysis that exists in this area consists largely of attempts to probe public opinion as opposed to the evaluation of the direct effects of a regime's policies' effects on its population's well-being. Although the evaluation of individual policies' effect on well-being persists, there has yet to be a thorough analysis of the effects of international and historic regime types on several measures of well-being simultaneously. As a way to attempt to evaluate political leadership independently I have produced two databases containing a series of variables which are indicators of and or surrogates for well-being. Using Leadership as the unit of an Index I have evaluated the change in and value of these Social, Economic, and Political indicators of well-being which include empirical measures of:
1 - Corruption
2 - Human Rights (Incidence of Torture and Killings per capita)
3 - Crime (Murder Rates)
4 - Mental Health (Suicide Rates)
5 - Wealth (income per capita)
6 - Health (Early Deaths per capita)
7 - Productivity
8 - Opportunity (Surrogates for social mobility)
9 - Consistency of economic growth
10 - Family Health (Teen birth rates)
The average of these ten indicators creates the Leadership Index, which is intended to evaluate the quality of governance in a country in the same way the Human Development Index and World Happiness Report measure the quality of life in a country. The findings of this study show several clusters of leaders which are often considered to follow certain ideological governance styles which perform differently. One example of this is the comparatively high scores of Western Liberal Democracies like the UK or Sweden in the consistency, Human rights and corruption categories while scoring relatively poorly in the Wealth, Productivity and Mental Health categories. Another finding was that the highest scoring region overall was Eastern Asia between 1960 and 2010, this was especially the case of the three of the Four Asian Tigers measured: South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore which had exceptionally high scores. This could mean that the regimes in charge in eastern Asia Governed more effectively during this period, and it could also mean that Eastern Asia was the most lucky for circumstantial reasons.