About this resource
The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project publishes one of the world’s largest databases of democracy measurement, coded collaboratively by hundreds of country experts and covering more than 200 polities from 1789 to the present. Built on the idea of the “many varieties of democracy”, it measures democracy along separate dimensions — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian — so that a single aggregate score does not hide structural differences.
Content and features
- Scale: thousands of indicators covering elections, executive and legislative institutions, the judiciary, media, civil society and political participation.
- Expert coding: experts code countries independently and estimates are calibrated statistically, with uncertainty intervals provided.
- Layered structure: high-level indices and underlying specific indicators are both available for researchers to use as needed.
Licence and use
- Licence: the dataset is released under CC BY-SA 4.0, allowing free use, adaptation and redistribution with attribution, and derivative works must carry the same licence.
- Access: registration and download from the official site (CSV/R/Stata), with codebook and version notes.
- Citation: follow the project’s citation guidance and state the dataset version.
Notes for researchers
V-Dem’s expert-coding method has design advantages and methodological controversy: scholars differ on the reliability of coding for particular countries. Use the methodological literature and uncertainty intervals alongside the data, explain the coding basis in cross-country research, and avoid treating measurement as essence.
Sources and version: this entry is a resource index pointing to a third-party open database; data and documentation rights belong to the V-Dem project, and licence terms follow the latest terms of the source site.