Electoral democracy index

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

The "Electoral democracy index" is part of V-Dem's high level democracy indices capturing features of democracy at the most abstract level. The "Electoral democracy index" in particular refers to the ideal of electoral democracy in its fullest sense and ranges from 0 to 1.

It is defined as follows: "The electoral principle of democracy seeks to embody the core value of making rulers responsive to citizens, achieved through electoral competition for the electorate’s approval under circumstances when suffrage is extensive; political and civil society organizations can operate freely; elections are clean and not marred by fraud or systematic irregularities; and elections affect the composition of the chief executive of the country. In between elections, there is freedom of expression and an independent media capable of presenting alternative views on matters of political relevance. In the V-Dem conceptual scheme, electoral democracy is understood as an essential element of any other conception of representative democracy — liberal, participatory, deliberative, egalitarian, or some other" (Coppedge et al. 2019, 39).

Coding rules

The index is composed of several component and lower-level indices applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2019). For the index aggregation formula see Coppedge et al. 2019, 39.

Bibliographic info

Citation:

• 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

Related publications:

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Lührmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Agnes Cornell, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Valeriya Mechkova, Johannes von Römer, Aksel Sundtröm, Eitan Tzelgov, Luca Uberti, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2019. "V-Dem Codebook v9". 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. 2019. "The V-Dem Measurement Model: Latent Variable Analysis for Cross-National and Cross-Temporal Expert-Coded Data". V-Dem Working Paper No. 21. 4th edition. University of Gothenburg: Varieties of Democracy Institute.

Misc

Project manager(s):

• Nils Düpont (A01)

Data release:

• The indicator is included in WeSIS rev. 1

Revisions:

• 2019.10 Initial upload for WeSIS rev. 1

Sources

• Coppedge, Michael, John Gerring, Carl Henrik Knutsen, Staffan I. Lindberg, Jan Teorell, David Altman, Michael Bernhard, M. Steven Fish, Adam Glynn, Allen Hicken, Anna Lührmann, Kyle L. Marquardt, Kelly McMann, Pamela Paxton, Daniel Pemstein, Brigitte Seim, Rachel Sigman, Svend-Erik Skaaning, Jeffrey Staton, Steven Wilson, Agnes Cornell, Lisa Gastaldi, Haakon Gjerløw, Nina Ilchenko, Joshua Krusell, Laura Maxwell, Valeriya Mechkova, Juraj Medzihorsky, Josefine Pernes, Johannes von Römer, Natalia Stepanova, Aksel Sundström, Eitan Tzelgov, Yi-ting Wang, Tore Wig, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2019. "V-Dem Country-Year Dataset v9". Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Project. https://doi.org/10.23696/vdemcy19