V-Dem Democracy Indices

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The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are democracy indices published by the V-Dem Institute that describe qualities of different democracies. This dataset is published on an annual basis and is publicly available and free.^[1] In particular, the V-Dem dataset is popular among political scientists and describes the characteristics of political regimes worldwide. In total, datasets released by the V-Dem Institute include information on hundreds of indicator variables describing all aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators. An R package automatically bundles new data.^[2]

The V-Dem Institute's measures of democracy are the most elaborate and granular among several democracy indexes (such as the Polity data series and Freedom House's Freedom in the World).^[3][how?] By 2020, the V-Dem index had "more than 470 indicators, 82 mid-level indices, and 5 high-level indices covering 202 polities from the period of 1789–2019".^[3] Each indicator is coded independently by at least five country experts.^[3] V-Dem uses methodological tools to deal with rating reliability and confidence intervals in the expert ratings.^[3] Political scientist Daniel Hegedus describes V-Dem as "the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research".^[3]