V-Dem Democracy Measurement

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.