V-Dem Democracy Indices

The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are democracy indices published by V-Dem Institute that describe qualities of different democracies. This dataset is published on an annual basis and is publicly available and free. 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.

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). 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". Each indicator is coded independently by at least five country experts. V-Dem uses methodological tools to deal with rating reliability and confidence intervals in the expert ratings. Political scientist Daniel Hegedus describes V-Dem as "the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research".