Democratic consolidation depends on common perceptions of institutional legitimacy among citizens aligned with governing and opposition parties. Elections always result in winners and losers, but if they also create subservient insiders and aggrieved outsiders, the future of the democratic...

This chapter first discusses some of the established literature on the effects of natural resource abundance on democratization and then shows how an empirical analysis of the relationship supports the theoretical expectations. We also reveal an under-researched aspect of the “resource curse....

This study seeks to establish the composition of one key political institution (the office of Member of Parliament of Ghana-MPG) in one African country (Ghana) in terms of both the formal rules and the informal norms, and to explore the relationship between the composition of the institution and...

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project is generating a new dataset of indicators for various facets of democracy. Although many of the indicators are quite useful by themselves, most users of V-Dem data probably require measures of democracy at a higher level of aggregation.This paper...

With Version 6, we are releasing new data for 113 countries covering 2013 and 2014, and for 76 of these countries data is also available for 2015 – in addition to the full data for all 173 countries from 1900-2012. The dataset now includes about 350 unique and disaggregated democracy...

For policymakers, activists, academics, and citizens around the world the conceptualization and measurement of democracy matters. The needs of democracy promoters and social scientists are convergent. We all need better ways to measure democracy. In the first section of this document we...

National governments are the main actors responsible for mapping and protecting their biodiversity, but countries differ in their capacity, willingness, and effectiveness to do so. We quantify the global biodiversity managed by different regime types and developed a tool to explore the links...

This document lists (a) every country in the eventual V-Dem database, (b) the years for which we have collect data or plan to collect data (in parentheses next to the entry); (c) the polities that comprise each country’s 20th century history (even if falling outside the time-period that we...

Numerous studies have reported that countries tend to become more similar to their immediate geographic neighbors with respect to democracy. We show that a similar process of mutual adjustment can be found within very different international networks: geographically dispersed colonial empires,...