Varieties of Democracy

V-Dem

The V-Dem Institute, Gothenburg University

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. V-Dem is one of the largest-ever social science data collection efforts with a database containing over 18 million data points. Since April 2018, the dataset covers 201 countries from 1789 to 2017 with annual updates to follow. 

With five Principal Investigators (PIs), seventeen Project Managers (PMs) with special responsibility for issue areas, more than thirty Regional Managers (RMs), 170 Country Coordinators (CCs), Research Assistants, and 3,000 Country Experts (CEs), the V-Dem project is one of the largest social science data collection projects focusing on research.

We provide data on 450+ democracy indicators, 47 mid-indices and 5 high-level indices, for 201 countries in 1789-2017 in Excel, Stata, SPSS and CSV format, all downloadable online.

www.v-dem.net also contains online analysis tools for a number of indicators and indices.

The V-Dem Headquarters are located at the V-Dem Institute, Gothenburg University. Jan Teorell at the Department for Political Science, Lund university, is one of V-Dems four founders; one of five current Principal Investigators; and the Chairman of the V-Dem Steering Committee (the others being scholars at universities in Scandinavia and the US). Lund University is also together with Oslo University the two “Centers for Historical V-dem,” responsible for providing data from before 1900.