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V-Dem

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Varieties of Democracies (V-Dem)
Founded2009 (2009)
TypeResearch Institute
Area served
Worldwide
Websitewww.v-dem.net

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is an independent research institute that describes itself as aiming to 'produce better indicators of Democracy'.[1] [2]The V-Dem project collects data on various aspects of democracy tied to five core principles, electoral, liberal,participatory, deliberative and egalitarian. Each principle contains a number of components, which in turn are based on almost 400 indicators. [3] The purpose, according to its creators, is to develop an instrument that reflects different dimensions of democracy and therefore should produce a more accurate representation of the level of democracy in a country or region.[4] [5]A total of 120 countries are available for online graphing and analysis in a user-friendly interface from the V-Dem website: https://v-dem.net/.

The two institutional homes of V-Dem are the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and The Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame. The Principal Investigators for the project are Professor Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame, and Professor John Gerring, Boston University, Professor Staffan I. Lindberg, University of Gothenburg and Associate Professor Svend-Erik Skaaning, Aarhus University. The institute has fifteen Project Managers with special responsibilities for certain thematic areas (e.g. deliberative democracy, elections, judiciary etc.), more than twenty Regional Managers, approximately 2,500 Country Expert, two Project Coordinators and a number of Assistant Researchers.[6]

History[edit]

When V-Dem was created the aim of the project was to create a wide-ranging database composed of several hundreds of indicators that provided a variety of democracy indices. The preparation for the pilot phase for V-Dem started in 2009. The project received the first grant for this phase in 2010 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sweden. Data collection for 12 countries from 6 different regions of the world started on the 29th of May 2011. The list of countries included Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Albania, Japan, Burma, South Africa, Ghana, Suriname, and Mexico.

During the 30th of September and the 1st of October 2011, the results of the pilot phase were presented during "Varieties of Democracy End-of-Pilot-Phase Conference" at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Following this, V-Dem received further grants that would support the main phase of the project, which was launched in 2012. At the present time the aim of the project is to cover all the countries in the world from 1900 to the present day. The data collection will generate approximately 22 million data points and will thus become the largest dataset of its kind. As of now, the V-Dem database covers 168 countries and contains over 15.5 million data on democracy.

One development worth mentioning is the V-Dem research fellowship that was launched on the 16th of December 2013. The fellowship is open to postdocs as well as junior faculty members with a background in comparative democratization and skills in research methods.[7]

V-Dem indicators[edit]

The 461 indicators listed in the V-Dem Codebook fall into five main types. Type (A) data is gathered from extant sources (other datasets or secondary sources) is largely factual in nature (though some coder judgment may be required in interpreting historical data). The collection of this data is supervised by the Principal Investigators and Project Managers and carried out by Assistant Researchers connected to the project.

Selected (A) data are also crosschecked and vetted by V-Dem's Country Coordinators. Sources can be found in the V-Dem Codebook. This type of coding comprises 201 indicators.

Type (B) data is gathered from country-specific sources and is, again, largely factual in nature. This data is gathered by Country Coordinators under the supervision of Regional Managers. This type of coding comprises 16 indicators.

Type (C) data requires a greater degree of judgement about the state of affairs in a particular country at a particular point in time. This genre of indicator is coded by Country Experts-generally academic or policymakers who are nationals and/or residents in a country, with deep knowledge of that country and of a specific substantive area. This type of coding comprises of 187 indicators. Type (D) data is created from (A), (B), or (C) coding.This includes cumulative indicators such as 'number of presidential elections since 1900'. It also includes more aggregated variables such as components and democracy indices. In principle, there is no limit to the number of higher-order variables that might be generated as part of the V-Dem project. At present, the V-Dem dataset includes some 41 indicators and indices.

Type (E) data is adopted from other sources and is not considered a V-Dem product. These variables are included in the Codebook and in the database for the convenience of end-users, who might (for example) wish to examine the correlation between various measures of democracy and per capita GDP. The current version of the codebook and dataset includes 16 such indicators.

Type (C) coding-by Country Experts- is the most complex, since it involves greater judgement on the part of the coder than (A) and (B) coding. Accordingly, a number of steps are taken to minimize error and to gauge the degree of imprecision that remains. A minimum of five Country Experts are required to code each country-year for every indicator and aggregate these various codings to arrive at a point estimate and confidence interval for that rating, for each country-year.[8][9]

Measurement Model[edit]

Even though experts are selected carefully, they may exhibit varying levels of reliability and bias. For this reason Bayesian item response theory (IRT) modelling techniques is used [10] to estimate latent polity characteristics from the collection of expert ratings. Specifically, hierarchical ordinal IRT models are fitted to each of the ordinal ratings (see Johnson & Albert[11] for a technical description of these models). The intuition of this measurement model is straightforward: they use patterns of cross-rater (dis)agreement to estimate variations in reliability and systematic bias across disparate measures of the same, or similar, concepts (i.e. multiple expert ratings). In turn, these techniques make use of the bias and reliability estimates to adjust estimates of the latent—that is, only indirectly observed—concept (e.g. executive respect for the constitution, judicial independence, or freedom or movement for women) in question.

The latent variable model uses patterns to quantify the relative degree of confidence that users should place in individual ratings. Variation in these confidence estimates reflect situations where experts disagree, or where little information is available because few raters have coded a case, or there are few changing scores for a variable in a particular country over time. V-Dem thus provides not only a point estimate for a particular indicator and each country-year, but also a confidence interval that is tremendously important.

For nominal and dichotomous variables, both the unweighted means and the equivalent binary coding (0/1) are provided in the dataset and use the latter for the online analysis tools. V-Dem data is the first democracy data (and among the first in national-level comparative social science) to include score-specific reliability estimates. Reliability estimates can be used in several ways. Using measures that are accompanied by estimates of confidence is an important step in guarding against this threat and forces both academics and practitioners to be more honest in their empirical assessments of the validity of theoretical arguments and the effectiveness of applied policies. These reliability estimates will be incorporated into applied analyses, reducing overconfidence in statistical conclusions[12]

External links[edit]

References[edit]

  1. https://v-dem.net/DemoComp/en
  2. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/inrikes/nytt-index-ska-ranka-demokratier_8655580.svd
  3. "Project MUSE". jhu.edu. Retrieved 21 April 2015.
  4. https://v-dem.net/DemoComp/en/about
  5. http://visionlegislativa.com/variedades-de-democracia-y-reglamento-del-senado-3jun14/
  6. "Varieties of Democracy Project". nd.edu. Retrieved 21 April 2015.
  7. https://v-dem.net/DemoComp/en/news-publications/news%20and%20publications/news
  8. v-dem.net/DemoComp/en/images/VDemMethodologyv4.pdf
  9. "Project MUSE - V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy". jhu.edu. Retrieved 21 April 2015.
  10. J.-P Fox . Bayesian Item Response Modeling: Theory and Applications. New York, NY: Springer, 201
  11. Johnson, V. E., & Albert, J. H. (1999). Ordinal data modeling. New York: Springer-Verlag
  12. Shawn Treier and Simon Jackman. 2008. “Democracy as a Latent Variable.” American Journal of Political Science. 52(1): 201–217


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