V-Dem Institute

The V-Dem Institute (Varieties of Democracy), founded by Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014, studies the qualities of government. The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.

Democracy indices
The V-Dem Institute publishes a number of high-profile datasets that describe qualities of different governments, annually published and publicly available for free. These datasets are a popular dataset among political scientists, due to information on hundreds of indicator variables describing all aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators. Compared to other measures of democracy (such as the Polity data series and Freedom House's Freedom in the World), the V-Dem Institute's measures of democracy are more granular and 2020 included "more than 470 indicators, 82 mid-level indices, and 5 high-level indices covering 202 polities from the period of 1789–2019." Political scientist Daniel Hegedus describes V-Dem as "the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research."

The V-Dem institute also republishes 59 other indicators and several other indices which are created, in part, with the assistance of V-Dem indices. The Digital Society Project is a subset of indicators on V-Dem's survey which asks questions about the political status of social media and the internet.

Democracy Report
The V-Dem Institute publishes the Democracy Report that describes the state of democracy in the world, with a focus on democratization and autocratization. The Democracy Report is published annually in March. The Democracy Report, the dataset, scientific articles, and working papers are free to download on the institute’s website, which also features interactive graphic tools.

V-Party Dataset
Party positions for all political parties above a vote share of 5% in 169 countries are published as V-Party Dataset by V-Dem Institute. The V-Party Dataset includes indices of Anti-Pluralism, Populism, Cultural Dimension and Economic Left-Right. The Anti-Pluralism Index is modeled as lack of commitment to democratic process, disrespect for fundamental minority rights, demonization of opponents, and acceptance of political violence. The dataset demonstrates higher autocratization for high anti-pluralism and populism.

Regimes of the World
The Regimes of the World (RoW) distinguishes four types of political systems: closed autocracies, electoral autocracies, electoral democracies, and liberal democracies, this classification is built on V-Dem Democracy Core indices.