Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is an international, collaborative research project that aims "to produce new indicators of democracy for all countries since 1900." Visitors to this ambitious project will find a number of interesting resources, including their annual democracy reports (currently available for 2017 and 2018); other publications (such as country reports and thematic reports); and a variety of analysis tools, such as interactive maps and motion charts. Social science researchers may be particularly interested in the V-Dem datasets, which (at the time of this write-up) include data for 201 countries and extend as far back as the year 1789 up to 2017. These datasets, which are released yearly around April, also include "450 V-Dem indicators, 47 mid-indices and 5 high-level indices," as well as documentation for each dataset and are available in formats such as SPSS, STATA, and Excel. Originally headquartered at the University of Notre Dame's Kellogg Institute for International Studies, V-Dem is now headquartered at the V-Dem Institute in the University of Gothenburg (Sweden). The University of Notre Dame became V-Dem's Regional Center for North America in 2018. V-Dem is funded by many organizations, including the European Research Council, the National Science Foundation, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, and the World Bank.
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