Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. We provide 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. 

With six Principal Investigators (PIs), seventeen Project Managers (PMs) with special responsibility for issue areas, 33 Regional Managers (RMs), 134 Country Coordinators (CCs), Research Assistants, and 3,200 Country Experts (CEs), the V-Dem project is one of the largest social science data collection projects on democracy.

The Headquarters is based at the V-Dem Institute, the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.