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A network of over 3,700 Country Experts helps the V-Dem team assess political institutions and protect human rights in countries around the world. These experts complete surveys online that ask them to rate various aspects of democracy and the protection of rights in their own country or region. The Country Experts are a crucial part of the V-Dem community and help make its data useful to scholars, policy makers, and anyone interested in understanding the functioning of democratic political systems.

Many of the Country Experts are academics, members of civil society, journalists, or former high-ranking government officials. In general, they are nationals or residents of the country that they evaluate and know its political system well. Their expertise allows them to evaluate the harder-to-observe rules and laws of the political system (e.g., whether the legislature has a lower and upper house). V-Dem researchers also supplement these experts’ evaluations with their own work. For example, they code some of the easier-to-observe features of the political system, such as whether elected officials are reelected or whether voters can change their representatives in elections.

In order to increase the validity of the Country Experts’ assessments, V-Dem employs techniques that reduce the subjectivity of their ratings. For example, the surveys include very specific questions on clearly explained scales about sub-characteristics of political systems. Moreover, the Country Experts are asked to evaluate hypothetical countries as well as actual ones, and they denote their own uncertainty and personal demographic information.

These efforts reduce the likelihood of disagreements among experts, and in fact V-Dem’s methodology accounts for most of the remaining differences between experts. https://userscloud.com/wzakux4in813 The methodology uses a statistical model to combine the experts’ ratings of actual and hypothetical countries, as well as their own uncertainty and demographics, to estimate latent traits that describe what is actually observed. The result is a series of best, upper- and lower-bound estimates for the different characteristics that V-Dem measures. These estimates are used in V-Dem’s main and supplementary democracy indices, as well as the Demscore.

The V-Dem Institute, located at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, administers the V-Dem project and prepares its data for use by others. Its staff includes the project’s Principal Investigators, two International Advisory Board members, and Post-Doctoral Fellows. In addition to overseeing the coding process, the Institute manages the database, develops web interfaces, and supports research on the effects of democracy and its components on different domains. The Kellogg Institute at Notre Dame played an important early role in the development of V-Dem, assisting in data collection in the Western Hemisphere and funding numerous students and researchers working on the project. The Institute has since shifted its focus and now serves as the North American Regional Center for V-Dem and hosts CurateND, an online repository of the project’s previous data.