Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)
The world’s largest data collection project on democracy.
| Host | University of Gothenburg |
|---|---|
| Website | V-Dem |
| Key Theme | Democracy |
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)
The world’s largest dataset on Democracy. V-Dem is a unique approach to conceptualising and measuring democracy by providing a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset covering more than 600 indicators across 202 country units, from 1900 to today.
Based at the University of Gothenburg, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Research Project takes a comprehensive approach to understanding democratization. This approach encompasses multiple core principles: electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each Principle is represented by a separate index, and each is regarded as a separate outcome in the proposed study. In this manner V-Dem reconceptualizes democracy from a single outcome to a set of outcomes. In addition, V-Dem breaks down each core principle into its constituent components, each to be measured separately. Components include features such as free and fair elections, civil liberties, judicial independence, executive constraints, gender equality, media freedom, and civil society. Finally, each component is disaggregated into specific indicators. This fundamentally different approach to democratization is made possible by the V-Dem Database, which measures 600+ indicators annually from 1789 to the present for all countries of the world.
The V-Dem approach stands out, first, as a large global collaboration among scholars with diverse areas of expertise; second, as the first project attempting to explain different varieties of democracy; and third, thanks to the highly disaggregated V-Dem data, the first project to explore causal mechanisms linking different aspects of democracy together.
With five Principal Investigators, 19 Project Managers with special responsibility for issue areas covered in the V-Dem dataset, around 33 Regional Managers, over 100 Country Coordinators and more than 4,200 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the world’s largest social science data collection projects on democracy.
V-Dem in Demscore
The Data
V-Dem is represented in Demscore with a total of six datasets, covering a time span from and 1789 to 2023 worldwide.
Data Preparation in the Demscore Infrastructure
The following section provides an overview of the data sources provided by V-Dem and how they are prepared and included in Demscore.
V-Dem has developed innovative methods for aggregating expert judgments in a way that produces valid and reliable estimates of difficult-to-observe concepts. This aspect of the project is critical because many key features of democracy are not directly observable. V-Dem typically gathers data from five experts per country-year observation, using a pool of over 3,700 country experts who provide judgment on different concepts and cases. Experts hail from almost every country in the world, allowing researchers to leverage diverse opinions.
The logic of the V-Dem measurement model is that an unobserved concept exists (e.g., a certain level of academic freedom and freedom of cultural expression) but one can only see imperfect manifestations of this concept in the form of the ordinal categories which experts use to code their judgments. The V-Dem model converts these manifest items (expert ratings) to a single continuous latent scale and thereby estimates values of the concept.
The result of this process is a set of versions of indicators of democratic institutions and concepts, which allow academics and policymakers alike to understand the different features of a polity.
The V-Dem Dataset Includes the world's most comprehensive and detailed democracy ratings. It includes all 483 V-Dem indicators and is available both in a country-year and a country-date format. In addition to that, V-Dem publishes the V-Dem Coder Level dataset, including Data coded by Country Experts and coder-reliability scores from the Measurement Model output.
The Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) Dataset identifies episodes of democratization (liberalizing autocracy, democratic deepening) and autocratization (democratic regression, autocratic regression) in the most recent V-Dem dataset.
The Varieties of Party Identity and Organization (V-Party) is a dataset examining the policy positions and organizational structures of political parties across the world.
All V-Dem variables can be retrieved through all other Output Units within V-Dem. The figure below is an overview of which variables can be retrieved in which other Output Units within this Module. The labelled arrows further indicate which aggregation methods we use and in what way observations are translated to each other.
Added are also translations between V-Dem Output Units and Output Units from other Modules that can be explored further in the Demscore Methodology Document.
Main Contacts
You can find a detailed explanation of all Units and more information on their programmatic construction on the Documentation page and in the Demscore Methodology Document.