The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are democracy indices published by the V-Dem Institute that describe qualities of different democracies. It is published annually.[1] In particular, the V-Dem dataset is popular among political scientists and describes the characteristics of political regimes. 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.
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".[2] V-Dem uses methodological tools to deal with the subject nature of ratings and their reliability.[2]
Democracy indices
As of 2022, the V-Dem Institute published 483 indicators and republishes 59 other indicators.[3][4] V-Dem publishes five core indices with several other supplementary indices. The core indices are the electoral democracy index, the liberal democracy index, the participatory democracy index, the Deliberative Democracy Index and the egalitarian democracy index.[5]
The Electoral Democracy Index
This index measures the principle of electoral or representative democracy, including whether elections were free and fair, as well as the prevalence of a free and independent media. This index is part of all the other indices as a central component of democracy.[6]
This index measures the degree to which citizens participate in their own government through local democratic institutions, civil society organizations, direct democracy, and the concepts measured in the electoral democracy index.[6]
This index measures the degree to which decisions are made in the best interest of the people as opposed to due to coercion or narrow interest groups, in addition to the basic electoral democracy index.[6]
This index measures the level of equal access to resources, power, and freedoms across various groups within a society, in addition to the level of electoral democracy.[6]
Rankings
The table below shows V-Dem Democracy rankings published in 2024.[7][8][9]
Countries autocratizing (red) or democratizing (blue) substantially and significantly (2010–2020). Countries in grey are substantially unchanged.[10]
A variety of other organizations use V-Dem's dataset in the construction of their indicators.[11][12] The World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators also use V-Dem's data to inform their Control of Corruption indicator (includes V-Dem's Corruption index), Rule of Law Indicator (includes V-Dem's liberal component index), and the Voice and Accountability Indicator (includes V-Dem's Expanded freedom of expression, freedom of association, and Clean elections indicators).[12]
Digital Society Project
The Digital Society Project is a subset of indicators on V-Dem's survey that asks questions about social media's political status and the internet.[6] Specifically, the Digital Society Project measures a range of questions related to internet censorship, misinformation online, and internet shutdowns.[13] This annual report includes 35 indicators assessing five areas: disinformation, digital media freedom, state regulation of digital media, the polarization of online media, and online social cleavages.[14][15] It has been updated each year starting in 2019, with data covering from 2000–2021.[14] Similar to other expert analyses like Freedom House, these data are more prone to false positives when compared with remotely sensed data, such as that from Access Now or the OpenNet Initiative.[15]
Data on democracy, and particularly global indices of democracy, and the data they rely on, have been the subject of scrutiny and criticized by various scholars. Gerardo L. Munck and Jay Verkuilen for instance, have raised concerns about the methodologies used by prominent democracy indices such as Freedom House and Polity.Such as the concept of democracy they measured, the design of indicators, and the aggregation rule.[16] Political scientists Andrew T. Little and Anne Meng "highlight measurement concerns regarding time-varying bias in expert-coded data" such as Freedom House and V-Dem and encourage improving expert-coding practices.[17] Knutsen et al.[18] did not see evidence for time-varying bias in their expert-coded data and note the application of item response theory, factor analysis and estimates of uncertainties to limit expert biases while discussing concerns in operationalization of observer-invariant measures of democracy.
Political scientist Jonas Wolff criticized V-Dem for gradually abandoning a pluralist conceptualization of democracy. According to him, V-Dem has moved away from its original emphasis on the conceptual varieties of democracy and adopted an uncontested view of democracy as liberal democracy while also ignoring the limitations of liberal democracy.[19]
^ abHegedüs, Daniel (2020). "Varieties of Democracy: Measuring Two Centuries of Political Change. By Michael Coppedge, John Gerring, Adam Glynn, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Svend-Erik Skaaning, and Jan Teorell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 226p. $99.99 cloth". Perspectives on Politics. 18 (4): 1258–1260. doi:10.1017/S1537592720003059. ISSN1537-5927. S2CID230623566.
^Coppedge, Michael; John Gerring; Carl Henrik Knutsen; Staffan I. Lindberg; Jan Teorell; Kyle L. Marquardt; Juraj Medzihorsky; Daniel Pemstein; Nazifa Alizada; Lisa Gastaldi; Garry Hindle; Johannes von Römer; Eitan Tzelgov; Yi-ting Wang; and Steven Wilson. 2020. "V-Dem Methodology v10". Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
^ abcdefCoppedge, Michael; John Gerring; Carl Henrik Knutsen; Staffan I. Lindberg; Jan Teorell; David Altman; Michael Bernhard; Agnes Cornell; M. Steven Fish; Lisa Gastaldi; Haakon Gjerløw; Adam Glynn; Allen Hicken; Anna Lührmann; Seraphine F. Maerz; Kyle L. Marquardt; Kelly McMann; Valeriya Mechkova; Pamela Paxton; Daniel Pemstein; Johannes vonRömer; Brigitte Seim; Rachel Sigman; Svend-Erik Skaaning; Jeffrey Staton; Aksel Sundtröm; EitanTzelgov; Luca Uberti; Yi-ting Wang; Tore Wig; and Daniel Ziblatt (2021). "V-Dem Codebook v11". Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. Archived 8 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
^Mechkova, Valeriya; Daniel Pemstein; Brigitte Seim; & Steven Wilson. (2020). Digital Society Project Dataset v2.Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. http://digitalsocietyproject.org/.
^ abMechkova, Valeriya; Pemstein, Daniel; Seim, Brigitte; Wilson, Steven (2021). Digital Society Survey Codebook(PDF). Digital Society Project.
