Academic Perspectives: The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project Dataset

On the cutting edge of nuanced and multidimensional democratic trends indices, the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project dataset was released for the first time publicly in 2016. The dataset boasts historical time-series data going back to 1900 coded by a global network of 3,700 country experts. While assessed as outperforming other measures of democracy such as Polity IV or the Freedom House Index (Boese, 2019), the academic perspective articulated through statistical analysis of V-Dem data has come under recent critique for “the ways in which academic research relates to the outside world” and its emphasis on liberal versus pluralistic or non-Western democratic norms (Wolff, 2022, Little and Meng, 2023). Likewise, V-Dem and other academic democratic trends indicators are too high-level and slow-moving, and lack complementary qualitative descriptions to aide interpretation, limiting their utility for real-time storytelling or informing targeted democratic assistance programming. Through interactive dashboards and a variety of reports, V-Dem provides a historical and academic perspective on the story of democratic consolidation, and more recently, backsliding. The story tells of the level of democracy in decline over the last decade and more autocracies than liberal democracies in 2022 (Papada et al., 2023). This presentation will provide an overview of the unique features of the V-Dem dataset for understanding the story of democracy worldwide and evaluating democracy assistance. We will particularly explore areas of alignment and deviation between the V-Dem data and other data sources (including CEPPS) and present a framework to understand the deviations (McMann et al., 2022).