Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between seven high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, egalitarian, majoritarian and consensual, and collects data to measure these principles.
It is a collaboration among more than 50 scholars worldwide which is co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA. With four Principal Investigators (PIs), fifteen Project Managers (PMs) with special responsibility for issue areas, more than thirty Regional Managers (RMs), 170 Country Coordinators (CCs), Research Assistants, and 2,800 Country Experts (CEs), the V-Dem project is one of the largest social science data collection projects focusing on research.