Compare methods

	State Capacity Measurement	V-Dem Democracy Measurement
Field	International Relations	International Relations
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2010	2011
Originator	State-capacity literature; measurement synthesis by Cullen Hendrix	V-Dem Institute (Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Staffan Lindberg, et al.)
Type	Measurement of the state's ability to penetrate, extract, and enforce	Multidimensional, expert-coded measurement of democracy
Seminal source	Hendrix, C. S. (2010). Measuring state capacity: Theoretical and empirical implications for the study of civil conflict. Journal of Peace Research, 47(3), 273–285.	Coppedge, M., Gerring, J., Altman, D., Bernhard, M., Fish, S., Hicken, A., et al. (2011). Conceptualizing and measuring democracy: A new approach. Perspectives on Politics, 9(2), 247–267.
Aliases	Measuring State Capacity, State Strength Measurement, Bureaucratic and Fiscal Capacity Measures, State Capacity Indicators	Varieties of Democracy, V-Dem Indices, V-Dem Democracy Indices, Disaggregated Democracy Measurement
Related	3	3
Summary	State capacity measurement is the effort to quantify how able a state is to do the things states do — raise revenue, administer territory, and enforce its will — a variable central to explaining civil conflict, development, and governance. Because capacity is abstract, researchers operationalize it through observable indicators of fiscal, bureaucratic, and coercive strength. Hendrix (2010) systematically compared fifteen common operationalizations, using factor analysis to show that they reduce to a few underlying dimensions, and clarified which measures best capture the capacity relevant to conflict.	Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a measurement project that captures democracy as a multidimensional concept rather than a single score. Set out by Coppedge, Gerring, and colleagues (2011), V-Dem distinguishes five principles of democracy — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian — and measures them from hundreds of specific indicators coded by multiple country experts. A statistical measurement model aggregates these expert ratings into disaggregated indicators and high-level indices, each accompanied by estimates of measurement uncertainty, producing one of the most detailed and transparent democracy datasets available.