What Do We Know About Democratization After 227 Years

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) team is planning a book that uses V-Dem data to advance a new understanding of the causes of democratization. This will be the first book to use both the original (1900-2016) V-Dem and Historical (1789 to 1920) V-Dem data. The lead authors will be the four PIs of V-Dem – Michael Coppedge, John Gerring (Texas), Staffan Lindberg (Gothenburg), and Svend-Erik Skaaning (Aarhus) – and the two PIs of Historical V-Dem – Jan Teorell (Lund) and Carl Henrik Knutsen (Oslo). We are well positioned to retest all the leading hypotheses about democratization, to generate and test new hypotheses, and to synthesize a comprehensive and coherent new understanding of how democracy arose and what conditions have tended to sustain or undermine it. We have secured permission to use Notre Dame’s Rome Global Gateway in October for this workshop, an excellent location since half of the majority of participants are based in Europe or Chile.