Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. It provides a multidimensional and disaggregated dataset that reflects the complexity of the concept of democracy as a system of rule that goes beyond the simple presence of elections. The V-Dem project distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
Please note there have been some changes introduced to the methodology; please refer to the website of the original source to read said modifications in more detail.
V-Party provides expert-coded assessments of party organization and identity for most parties in most countries over 1970-2019. Using V-Dem methodology (Coppedge et al., 2020), in January 2020, 665 experts rated the policy positions and organizational capacity of political parties across elections in a given country. Specifically, as a general rule, experts coded data for all parties that reached more than 5% of the vote share at a given election. The expert-coded data are aggregated using V-Dem’s Bayesian Item Response Theory measurement model (Pemstein et al., 2020). The result is data on 1,955 political parties across 1,560 elections in 169 countries; in total 6,330 party-election year units. Typically, at least 4 coders provided their assessment per observation.