Methods

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem)

Indicators of democracy and civil liberties, including freedom of movement, country by country and year by year.

V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg · The publisher's page · All methods

What it looks at

Experts score countries — What happens

What it is made of

Its parts have not been read yet.

May its data be shown here?

May not be shown

Share-alike: anything made from it must carry the same licence, which Solon's policy excludes.

The publisher's terms, quotedpublished under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 license… provided that appropriate attribution is given and that any derivative products are distributed under the same license terms.

Questions to ask of it

  • Who are the experts, how many score each country, and how far do they disagree? A score from a handful of people is an opinion with a number on it.
  • Its figures cannot be shown here. Read them at the publisher's, and weigh them with the questions above.
  • Some of how it works has not been read yet; until it is, judge it on what is listed.

Not read yet

These are left open rather than filled in from memory.

  • The list of indicators and how experts are recruited and aggregated (the codebook)

Read these figures with help

The facts below are worked out by program from this page's figures, with no AI. The explanation, if you ask for one, is written by an AI from these facts only, and is checked against them before you see it.

The facts, in plain words

  1. F1Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), published by V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, says it measures: Indicators of democracy and civil liberties, including freedom of movement, country by country and year by year.
  2. F2How it is made: expert scoring. What it looks at: de facto.
  3. F3Its parts have not been read yet.
  4. F4Licence: not loadable. The terms say: "published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 license… provided that appropriate attribution is given and that any derivative products are distributed under the same license terms." Share-alike: anything made from it must carry the same licence, which Solon's policy excludes.
  5. F5Not read yet: The list of indicators and how experts are recruited and aggregated (the codebook).
  6. F6A question to ask of it: Who are the experts, how many score each country, and how far do they disagree?
  7. F7A question to ask of it: Its figures cannot be shown on Solon.
  8. F8A question to ask of it: Part of how it works has not been read yet.
  9. F9Source read on 2026-11-09: V-Dem Institute: the V-Dem dataset.

Where this description comes from