Where Data Tells the Story
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U.S. News designs its “Best Countries” ranking around 73 attributes grouped into 10 thematic subrankings, such as Heritage, Quality of Life, Power, and Entrepreneurship.
For the Heritage subtheme, they used five, equally-weighted attributes:
The attributes reflect public perceptions, not hard data. To gather this, the survey is distributed globally to about 17,000 respondents, including business leaders, informed elites, and general citizens.
Each participant is shown a random subset of countries (that must meet GDP, tourism, and FDI thresholds) and asked to rate how strongly they associate those countries with each of the five attributes.
These individual attributes are pre-assigned to categories by researchers, and scores are normalized on a 0–100 scale.