How can we measure democracy more accurately? Coppedge et al. (2019) detail how the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project provides a new methodological framework to measure democracy using deep data and open statistical tools.
The article explains the newest methods V-Dem uses to measure democracy and related topics. Aside from breaking democracy down into distinct, detailed parts, V-Dem stands apart through several specific features. It brings together long-term historical records reaching back to 1900, and as far back as 1789 for a large group of countries across the globe. To ensure reliability, the project relies on multiple independent coders for every evaluative question and runs coder-agreement checks through a custom Bayesian item-response theory model. In addition, the authors provide confidence bounds for each individual expert score and summary index, showing the uncertainty around each estimate. V-Dem also offers multiple indices that reflect different theoretical definitions of democracy, uses fully transparent steps to combine the data, and makes all datasets freely available to the public, including the individual scores from each coder with all personal identifying details removed.
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Coppedge, M., Gerring, J., Knutsen, C. H., Krusell, J., Medzihorsky, J., Pernes, J., Skaaning, S.-E., Stepanova, N., Teorell, J., Tzelgov, E., Wilson, S. L., & Lindberg, S. I. (2019). The Methodology of “Varieties of Democracy” (V-Dem)1. Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 143(1), 107–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0759106319854989