A unique approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. Dataset with 31 million data points, 202 countries, 480+ indicators, from 1789-2023.
The V-Dem Institute, led by Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, is an independent research institute and the Headquarters of the V-Dem project. The institute is based at the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The V-Dem Project
Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a unique 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. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
Note: the V-Dem produces its rankings using among other things, the subjective opinion of anonymous supposed-experts. But when asked, they claim they have a model that runs on a supercomputer.
