V-Dem Institute
The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy) is an independent research institute founded by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014.[1] The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.[2]
Varieties of Democracy is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy around the world.[3][4] The V-Dem project distinguishes among five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.[5]
The dataset is updated, expanded, and released every year.[6] Based on the current data, V-Dem publishes an annual Democracy Report that describes the state of democracy in the world.[7] The Democracy Report, the dataset, scientific articles, and working papers are free to download on the institute’s website that also features interactive graphic tools.
The V-Dem Institute's measures of democracy are the most elaborate and granular among several democracy indexes (such as the Polity data series and Freedom House's Freedom in the World).[8] By 2020, the V-Dem index had "more than 470 indicators, 82 mid-level indices, and 5 high-level indices covering 202 polities from the period of 1789–2019."[8] Each indicator is coded independently by at least five country experts.[8] V-Dem uses methodological tools to deal with rating reliability and confidence intervals in the expert ratings.[8] Political scientist Daniel Hegedus describes V-Dem as "as the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research."[8]
References
- Coppedge, Michael; Gerring, John; Glynn, Adam; Knutsen, Carl Henrik; Lindberg, Staffan I.; Pemstein, Daniel; Seim, Brigitte; Skaaning, Svend-Erik; Teorell, Jan (2020). Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108347860. ISBN 978-1-108-42483-7.
- "Varieties of democracy (V-dem) - Varieties of democracy (V-dem), University of Gothenburg, Sweden".
- "New democracy dataset to 'revolutionize' democracy research".
- Tucker, Joshua. "Open data and (15 million!) new measures of democracy". Washington Post.
- Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Juraj Medzihorsky, Daniel Pemstein, Nazifa Alizada, Lisa Gastaldi, Garry Hindle, Johannes von Römer, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, and Steven Wilson. 2020. “V-Dem Methodology v10”. Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
- "New index rates countries by degree of freedom for scholars".
- "V-Dem: Autocratization continues but resistance grows". 25 March 2020.
- Hegedüs, Daniel (2020). "Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change. By Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Adam Glynn, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Svend-Erik Skaaning, and Jan Teorell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 226p. $99.99 cloth". Perspectives on Politics. 18 (4): 1258–1260. doi:10.1017/S1537592720003059. ISSN 1537-5927.