Electoral democracy index

Quick info
Data type	Numeric
Scale	Metric
Value labels	Not applicable
Technical name	polnat_polity_democ_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 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). The V-Dem Electoral Democracy index measures these features using 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).

Coding rules

The index is composed of several components and lower-level indices applying V-Dem's measurement model (Pemstein et al. 2019) which in turn are indices built from a number of indicators. For the index aggregation formula see Coppedge et al. 2019, 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, 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.
• 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. 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