Power distributed by socioeconomic position

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	Not applicable
Technical name	polnat_politics_power_distri_socio_vdem
Category	Political factors
Label	Distribution of political power by socioeconomic position (V-Dem)
Related indicators	Power distributed by social group Power distributed by gender Power distributed by sexual orientation

Aggregated V-Dem country expert ratings whether political power was equally distributed between wealthy, average and poorer people. Lower values indicate power distribution in favor of wealthy people, higher values suggest equal distribution of power.

Coding rules

Ordinal ratings were aggregated to interval scale applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2021). Experts were asked "Is political power distributed according to socioeconomic position?" and the ordinal wordings of the question were (Coppedge et al. 2021, 204):

• 0: Wealthy people enjoy a virtual monopoly on political power. Average and poorer people have almost no influence.
• 1: Wealthy people enjoy a dominant hold on political power. People of average income have little say. Poorer people have essentially no influence.
• 2: Wealthy people have a very strong hold on political power. People of average or poorer income have some degree of influence but only on issues that matter less for wealthy people.
• 3: Wealthy people have more political power than others. But people of average income have almost as much influence and poor people also have a significant degree of political power.
• 4: Wealthy people have no more political power than those whose economic status is average or poor. Political power is more or less equally distributed across economic groups.

Bibliographic info

Citation: 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. 2021b. "V-Dem Codebook v11.1" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.

Related publications:

• 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.
• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2025. "V-Dem Codebook v15". Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project.
• Pemstein, Daniel, Kyle L. Marquardt, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Juraj Medzihorsky, Joshua Krusell, Farhad Miri, and Johannes von Römer. 2025. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 10th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Misc

Project manager(s): Nils Düpont (INF), Paul Bederke

Data release:

• Version 0.001: Initial release
• Version 0.002: Updated with data from V-Dem v11.1
• Version 0.003: Updated with data from V-Dem v15

Revisions: Prior to version 0.003 data for Germany and Yemen were separated adhering to their COW code in a strict sense; as of v0.003 data is now in line with V-Dem's continous ID reflecting the "related unit coding" of WeSIS.

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
• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Fabio Angiolillo, Michael Bernhard, Agnes Cornell, M. Steven Fish, Linnea Fox, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Adam Glynn, Ana Good God, Sandra Grahn, Allen Hicken, Katrin Kinzelbach, Joshua Krusell, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Natalia Natsika, Anja Neundorf, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Johannes von Römer, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Aksel Sundström, Marcus Tannenberg, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Felix Wiebrecht, Tore Wig, Steven Wilson, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2025. "V-Dem [Country-Year/Country-Date] Dataset v15" Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemds25