V-Dem Institute

The V-Dem Institute studies democracy and autocratisation by producing and analysing the Varieties of Democracy dataset. Its premise, set out by Michael Coppedge, John Gerring and colleagues in 2011, is that democracy is multidimensional: rather than a single score, it should be measured through distinct principles — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian — each built from disaggregated indicators.

The V-Dem project was developed by an international team of principal investigators; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame was one of its two founding institutions and handled early data collection for the Western Hemisphere and the database in about 2011–2014, becoming V-Dem's North American regional centre in 2018. The V-Dem Institute was founded in 2014 by Staffan I. Lindberg in the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, which hosts the project. The institute is currently led by Steven Wilson.

• Dataset. The V-Dem database measures more than 600 indicators annually from 1789 to the present for all countries, combining factual coding with ratings by more than 4,000 country experts, aggregated through a Bayesian measurement model that estimates and adjusts for differences between coders.
• Democracy Report. The institute publishes an annual Democracy Report on global trends; recent editions were titled 'Democracy Winning and Losing at the Ballot' (2024), '25 Years of Autocratization – Democracy Trumped?' (2025) and 'Unraveling the Democratic Era?' (2026).
• Research. V-Dem data are among the most widely used in comparative politics, including in studies of backsliding, electoral manipulation, civil society repression and the economic effects of democracy.

The institute's research programmes and data collection are funded by research councils and foundations — including the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, the European Research Council and the Swedish Research Council — and by governments and international organisations such as the European Commission, the Swedish and Danish foreign ministries and the World Bank. It describes itself as independent and publishes its methodology, codebook and data openly.

• Expert bias. Andrew Little and Anne Meng (2024) found little evidence of global democratic decline in objective indicators, such as incumbents' electoral performance, over the preceding decade, and considered coder bias as one explanation for the gap with expert-coded indicators. V-Dem researchers, including Carl Henrik Knutsen and Michael Coppedge, replied in the same issue, engaging with their data and conclusions and with broader debates on how to measure backsliding.
• Coder selection. Critics question how country experts are recruited and whether their political views and networks are representative.
• Agenda-setting. The institute's prominent public reports, with labels such as 'electoral autocracy', influence media and policy debates, so classification choices carry political weight.
• Funding. Support from governments and political foundations, though disclosed, invites questions about independence from democracy-promotion agendas.