Measuring democracy has increasingly attracted academic attention over the past several years, and the instruments for assessing the quality of democracy have continuously gained sensitivity. If we were to call Vanhanen’s Index of Democratization (Vanhanen, 1997) the abacus in terms of measurement of democracy, then today with the Transformation Index (Bertelsmann Stiftung, 2009) or the Democracy Barometer (Bühlmann, et al., 2011) we have arrived at modern methods of calculation. However, if we want to advance to the high-tech age in assessing the quality of democracy, we not only need more sensitive but also more complementary measurements. Merely considering the national level as a unit of assessment no longer accounts for the special conditions of some countries. Moreover, the variance in the quality of democracy may differ more strongly between two subnational units within a state than one would expect when comparing two countries with one another. Thus, examining the subnational level of federal states, especially in those which show a high degree of cultural heterogeneity (Snyder, 2001), consequently marks a necessary and important step towards a more correct and precise assessment of their state of democracy. This study aims to contribute to the young field of measuring democracy on the subnational level with a comparative study in two very different cultural contexts. The importance of measuring democracy on a regional level for the field of empirical democracy research will be illustrated by the examples of Brazil and India.