Varieties of Democracy Project
The Varieties of Democracy Project is an ambitious, multiyear effort to produce new indicators of democracy for all countries since 1900. Spearheaded by Kellogg Faculty Fellow Michael Coppedge and initially funded with the Institute’s first-ever collaborative faculty grant (since renewed), the initiative promises to help keep the Kellogg Institute at the forefront of research on democratization.
The reliable, precise nature of the indicators as well as their lengthy historical coverage will be useful to scholars studying why democracy succeeds or fails as well as to governments and NGOs wishing to evaluate efforts to promote democracy. Eventually, users of the data—freely available to the public—will be able to customize their own indices of democracy.
A Collaborative Project
The Varieties of Democracy Project—also known as “V-Dem”—involves a total of 15 researchers at 13 universities in the US, Europe, and Latin America, as well as the input of 1300 country experts around the world. The Kellogg Institute serves as the project’s institutional home in the US.
Launched in 2010, the project seeks to capture six different conceptions of democracy—broken down into components and then into 316 specific indicators—to analyze all countries since 1900. A pilot study, begun in January 2011, focuses on 12 countries, with country experts attempting to code 188 democracy indicators since 1900.
Click here to visit the V-Dem website.
Click here to read an article by Michael Coppedge on the design of the project and how it works.
Kellogg Community Involvement
The Varieties of Democracy Project has been enriched by the involvement of the entire Kellogg community:
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Kellogg faculty fellows and graduate students give input through a new Measuring Democracy Working Group.
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Project collaborators have visited the Institute to lecture and take part in working sessions
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Co-PI John Gerring is a 2011–2012 Kellogg visiting fellow
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Undergraduate international scholars have built a database of potential country experts and helped to edit the project’s website
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A Kellogg PhD fellow serves as project research assistant
Leveraging Funding
Collaborative faculty grants promote innovative, collaborative, and interdisciplinary research on issues closely aligned with the Kellogg Institute research themes. In the case of the Varieties of Democracy Project, Kellogg grants have allowed the project to leverage additional funding.
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Coppedge has received grants totaling $129,000 from the Research Council of Norway and Notre Dame’s Nanovic Institute, Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Office of Research, and Center for Creative Computing.
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European collaborators Staffan Lindberg and Jan Teorell have won more than $250,000 for the project from the Swedish Foreign Ministry and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund.
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Proposals for significant additional funding are under consideration.
Collaborators
(areas of project expertise listed under names)
Principal Investigators
Michael Coppedge (University of Notre Dame)
Latin America
John Gerring (Boston University)
Deliberative Democracy
Staffan I. Lindberg (University of Gothenburg, Sweden and University of Florida (on leave))
Elections; Africa
Jan Teorell (Lund University, Sweden)
The Executive; Europe
Project Managers
David Altman (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile)
Direct Democracy; Latin America
Michael Bernhard (University of Florida)
Civil Society; Sovereignty; Central & Eastern Europe
M. Steven Fish (University of California, Berkeley)
Legislatures; Post-Soviet States
Allen Hicken (University of Michigan)
Parties and Party Systems; Asia
Matthew Kroenig (Georgetown University)
Legislatures; Western Europe
Drew Linzer (Emory University)
Measurement
Kelly McMann (Case Western Reserve University)
Subnational Government; Russia & Central Asia
Pamela Paxton (University of Texas, Austin)
Formal & Descriptive Representation
Holli Semetko (Emory University)
Media; Western Europe
Svend-Erik Skanning (Aarhus University, Denmark)
Civil Liberties; Western Europe
Jeffrey Staton (Emory University)
The Judiciary; Latin America
