Electoral democracy index

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	Not applicable
Technical name	polnat_polity_democ_polyarchy_vdem
Category	Political factors
Label	Electoral democracy index
Related indicators	Liberal democracy index Participatory democracy index Deliberative democracy index Egalitarian democracy index

The "Electoral democracy index" is one of five V-Dem's high level democracy indices capturing features of democracy at the most abstract level. The "Electoral democracy index" in particular captures to what extent the ideal of electoral democracy is achieved. It ranges from low (0) to high (1).

Conceptually, it is defined as follows: "The electoral component of democracy embodies the core value of making rulers responsive to citizens through competition for the approval of a broad electorate during periodic elections. We have opted to capture Dahl's (1998) concept of polyarchy, which identifies the following political institutions as constitutive of modern representative democracy: (1) elected officials; (2) free, fair and frequent elections; (3) freedom of expression and alternative sources of information; (4) associational autonomy; and (5) inclusive citizenship (universal suffrage)" (Coppedge et al. 2016, 582).

Coding rules

The index is composed of several components and lower-level indices applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2021) which in turn are indices built from a number of indicators. The index itsels is derived from "the elected executive index (v2x_accex, based on 12 indicators), the clean elections index (v2xel_frefair, based on 8 indicators), the freedom of expression index (v2x_freexp_thick, based on 9 indicators, including 3 for alternative sources of information), the freedom of association index (v2x_frassoc_thick, based on 6 indicators), and the suffrage indicator (v2x_suffr). All indices range from 0 to 1, and all except that on elected executive (which is a derived construct) are based on point predictions from Bayesian factor analyses (BFA) that all support unidimensionality" (Coppedge et al. 2016, 582) [emphasis in original; note that variable names in italics refer to V-Dem's nomenclature in their dataset, not in WeSIS].

For the exact index aggregation formula see Coppedge et al. 2021, Appendix A.

Bibliographic info

Citation: Coppedge, Michael, Staffan Lindberg, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jan Teorell. 2016. "Measuring high level democratic principles using the V-Dem data". International Political Science Review 37 (2): 580-593. https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512115622046

Related publications:

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Lührmann, Seraphine F. Maerz, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundtröm, Eitan Tzelgov, Luca Uberti, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2021. "V-Dem Codebook v11.1" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
• Dahl, Robert A. 1998. On Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Teorell, Jan, Michael Coppedge, Staffan Lindberg, and Svend-Erik Skaaning. 2019. "Measuring Polyarchy Across the Globe, 1900–2017". Studies in Comparative International Development 54 (1): 71–95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12116-018-9268-z
• Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2021. “The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data”. V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 6th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Misc

Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (A01)

Data release:

• Version 0.001: Initial release
• Version 0.002: Updated with data from V-Dem v10 and two erroneous CoW-Codes fixed resulting from country name mismatches
• Version 0.003: Updated with data from V-Dem v11.1

Revisions: No revisions yet

Sources

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, Nazifa Alizada, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Garry Hindle, Nina Ilchenko, Joshua Krusell, Anna Lührmann, Seraphine F. Maerz, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Josefine Pernes, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson and Daniel Ziblatt. 2021. "V-Dem [Country–Year/Country–Date] Dataset v11.1" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds21