Democracy Index, produced by the Economist Intelligence Unit, provides a snapshot of the state of democracy in 165 independent states and two territories. It combines information on the extent to which citizens can choose their political leaders in free and fair elections, enjoy civil liberties, prefer democracy over other political systems, participate in politics, and have a functioning government that acts on their behalf.

This collection includes only a subset of indicators from the source dataset.

Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a new approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. It is a collaboration among more than 50 scholars worldwide which is co-hosted by the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA.

With four Principal Investigators, two Program managers, fifteen Project Managers, more than thirty Regional Managers, almost 200 Country Coordinators, and approximately 2,800 Country Experts, the V-Dem project is one of the largest social science data collection projects focusing on research.

V-Dem collects data for 350+ indicators across a wide range of democracy aspects. Electoral democracy is in the centre and linked to this concept we find six additional dimensions of democracy: liberal, majoritarian, deliberative, participatory, consensual and egalitarian. In addition to a number of main indices, data is broken down into a number of components that are available to the user along with all indicators. Through the unique character of the database, old and new questions about the nature, growth and survival of democracy can be tested in a way not possible before.

Data is available for 177 countries from 1900 to 2016. Altogether, the database consists of approximately 17 million data points. The database is updated annually and new datasets are launched every year in the spring.

The dataset is available for download here: https://www.v-dem.net/en/data/data-version-7-1/

The data can also be explored online via: https://www.v-dem.net/en/analysis/

Purpose:

The world's largest database on democracy. The database provides 350+ indicators for 177 countries 1900-2016.

Collected data sets from March 2025, Varieties of Democracy, version 15.Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) seeks to capture seven different conceptions of democracy—participatory, consensual, majoritarian, deliberative, and egalitarian, in addition to the more familiar electoral and liberal democracy. Varieties of Democracy 15 produces the largest global dataset on democracy with over 31 million data points for 202 countries from 1789 to 2024. Involving over 4,200 scholars and other country experts, V-Dem measures over 600 different attributes of democracy. The reliable, precise nature of the indicators as well as their lengthy historical coverage is useful to scholars studying why democracy succeeds or fails and how it affects human development, as well as to governments and NGOs wishing to evaluate efforts to promote democracy. V-Dem makes the improved indicators freely available for use by researchers, NGOs, international organizations, activists, and journalists. More information about V-Dem is available at v-dem.net, including visualization interfaces for data from 202 countries and the complete 2025 dataset for download.The V-Dem Collection contains coder-level data and uncertainty estimates for all of the Variety of Democracy Datasets.

Mexico: Liberal democracy index : The latest value from 2023 is 0.299 index points, a decline from 0.326 index points in 2022. In comparison, the world average is 0.385 index points, based on data from 171 countries. Historically, the average for Mexico from 1960 to 2023 is 0.268 index points. The minimum value, 0.106 index points, was reached in 1960 while the maximum of 0.51 index points was recorded in 2004.

The Comparative Parliamentary Democracy Data Archive data set consist of cabinet-level data of 17 Western European democracies for post-WWII cabinets through January 1, 1999. All together, a total of 424 coalitions, single party and non-partisan cabinets are included. Data for Greece, Portugal and Spain exist only after their democratizations in the 1970s, while data on France is limited to the Fifth Republic beginning in 1959. For the purposes of our data set, it can be said that the world "froze" on January 1, 1999. The last observation in each country is coded on the basis on the information that was available on that day.

Purpose:

The Comparative Parliamentary Democracy project examines West European parliamentary politics from a principal–agent perspective.

The ZIP file consist sav files (for SPSS) and documentation in pdf format (codebooks).

The Political Party Database (PPDB) is an online public database that is a central source for key information about political party organization, party resources, leadership selection, and partisan political participation in many representative democracies. The files contain the data in SPSS, STATA, and CSV formats. The dataset also includes a PDF with the text responses for the appropriate variables. The PPDB Round 2 dataset complements the Round 1a_1b Dataset. Round 2 data covers 51 countries, reflecting the state of 288 parties in the years 2017-2020.

This dataset and analysis files accompany the paper "Protecting democracy from abroad: Democracy aid against attempts to circumvent presidential term limits" (Democratization, forthcoming). The article addresses the question whether international democracy aid helps to protect presidential term limits, a commonly accepted safeguard for democracy. According to our analysis, democracy aid is effective in countering attempts to circumvent term limits, thus, contributed to protecting democratic standards in African and Latin American countries between 1990 and 2014. While democracy aid lowers the risk for a successful circumvention of a term limit, its effect is not as strong on initiating an attempt to circumvent term limits. Our analysis furthermore suggests that the risk for an attempt to circumvent term limits is about double as high in Latin American as in African states. Our results confirm prior findings that ‘targeted aid’ such as democracy aid matters for protecting democracy when it is at risk. They furthermore support previous indications that more refined theories on the effects of democracy aid in different phases of a domestic process are necessary.

The Comparative Political Economy Database (CPEDB) began at the Centre for Learning, Social Economy and Work (CLSEW) at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) as part of the Changing Workplaces in a Knowledge Economy (CWKE) project. This data base was initially conceived and developed by Dr. Wally Seccombe (independent scholar) and Dr. D.W. Livingstone (Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto). Seccombe has conducted internationally recognized historical research on evolving family structures of the labouring classes (A Millennium of Family Change: Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe and Weathering the Storm: Working Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline). Livingstone has conducted decades of empirical research on class and labour relations. A major part of this research has used the Canadian Class Structure survey done at the Institute of Political Economy (IPE) at Carleton University in 1982 as a template for Canadian national surveys in 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016, culminating in Tipping Point for Advanced Capitalism: Class, Class Consciousness and Activism in the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/tipping-point-for-advanced-capitalism) and a publicly accessible data base including all five of these Canadian surveys (https://borealisdata.ca/dataverse/CanadaWorkLearningSurveys1998-2016). Seccombe and Livingstone have collaborated on a number of research studies that recognize the need to take account of expanded modes of production and reproduction. Both Seccombe and Livingstone are Research Associates of CLSEW at OISE/UT. The CPEDB Main File (an SPSS data file) covers the following areas (in order): demography, family/household, class/labour, government, electoral democracy, inequality (economic, political & gender), health, environment, internet, macro-economic and financial variables. In its present form, it contains annual data on 725 variables from 12 countries (alphabetically listed): Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Norway, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States. A few of the variables date back to 1928, and the majority date from 1960 to 1990. Where these years are not covered in the source, a minority of variables begin with more recent years. All the variables end at the most recent available year (1999 to 2022). In the next version developed in 2025, the most recent years (2023 and 2024) will be added whenever they are present in the sources’ datasets. For researchers who are not using SPSS, refer to the Chart files for overviews, summaries and information on the dataset. For a current list of the variable names and their labels in the CPEDB data base, see the excel file: Outline of SPSS file Main CPEDB, Nov 6, 2023. At the end of each variable label in this file and the SPSS datafile, you will find the source of that variable in a bracket. If I have combined two variables from a given source, the bracket will begin with WS and then register the variables combined. In the 14 variables David created at the beginning of the Class Labour section, you will find DWL in these brackets with his description as to how it was derived. The CPEDB’s variables have been derived from many databases; the main ones are OECD (their Statistics and Family Databases), World Bank, ILO, IMF, WHO, WIID (World Income Inequality Database), OWID (Our World in Data), Parlgov (Parliaments and Governments Database), and V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy). The Institute for Political Economy at Carleton University is currently the main site for continuing refinement of the CPEDB. IPE Director Justin Paulson and other members are involved along with Seccombe and Livingstone in further development and safe storage of this updated database both at the IPE at Carleton and the UT dataverse. All those who explore the CPEDB are invited to share their perceptions of the entire database, or any of its sections, with Seccombe generally (wallys@blackcreekfarm.ca) and Livingstone for class/labour issues (davidlivingstone@utoronto.ca). They welcome any suggestions for additional variables together with their data sources. A new version CPEDB will be created in the spring of 2025 and installed as soon as the revision is completed. This revised version is intended to be a valuable resource for researchers in all of the included countries as well as Canada.

Switzerland: Participatory democracy index: The latest value from 2023 is 0.792 index points, a decline from 0.799 index points in 2022. In comparison, the world average is 0.319 index points, based on data from 171 countries. Historically, the average for Switzerland from 1960 to 2023 is 0.738 index points. The minimum value, 0.53 index points, was reached in 1961 while the maximum of 0.81 index points was recorded in 2017.

The downloadable ZIP file contains the dataset in Stata 13 format.

LocalView is a database co-created by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko to advance the study of local government in the United States. It is the largest existing dataset of local government public meetings— the central policy-making process in American local government — as they are captured on video. To get started, select the file(s) that you'd like for your use case based on the year that the meeting took place. Note: we are no longer supporting file formats other than .parquet for space considerations. For potential use cases or further guidance on downloading the data in bulk, visit the companion website: localview.net. Change Log Scraping, parsing, identifying, and merging together meetings involves a large number of non-trivial decisions, many of which need to be adjusted over time particularly as the YouTube API changes. As such, when such decisions notably deviate from process or the outputs documented in the first version of this database, it will be logged here. Version 2.0 (2023-10) Data updated up until September 2023. ~10,000 new videos added, all belonging to existing channels in database. Change in data format: channelType column changed to channel_type. ST_FIPS correctly padded to be 7 characters (2 digit state code + 5 digit place FIPS code). videos with no caption available from YouTube are explicitly marked as “” in caption_text. caption_text_cleaned is actually consistently cleaned (previously stray timestamps/pause markers in some entries). acs_2018_* columns now prefixed as acs_18. additional ACS variables now available for each place: acs_18_median_gross_rent: Median gross rent in FIPS place. acs_18_median_hh_inc: Median household income in FIPS place. acs_18_median_age: Median age in FIPS place. acs_18_amind: American Indian population in FIPS place. acs_18_asian: Asian population in FIPS place. acs_18_nhapi: Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander population in FIPS place. census_2015_* columns removed for redundancy. to avoid confusion and possible conflicts, .json and .csv file formats eliminated in favor of .parquet format. municipal voteshare (_dem2pv) variables have been removed from the public use files for a number of reasons: (1) high degree of missingness, (2) no columns estimates available, (3) potential sensitivity The matching process of videos to ST-FIPS and government types is as follows: videos are matched to channels’ previous ST-FIPS codes and/or government types if there is an umambiguous match, otherwise a (1) series of regex matches with video title/description are used to attempt to match video to the government and (2) state/place names are extracted from each video’s title/description/caption and used to match to an ST-FIPS entity if an unambiguous match; only identified videos are then uploaded to the database. to identify the date of the meeting that the video captures, we first try to extract the date from the title, otherwise we try to extract the date from the description, otherwise it is discarded. Version 1.0 (2023-02) See publication for full details on methodology choices for the Version 1.0 database.

The European Representative Democracy data archive consists of cabinet-level data for 29 European democracies in post-WWII Europe. For each country it includes data for the cabinets that have formed after the introduction of the current democratic regime of parliamentary democracy (for Cyprus representative democracy). Included are cabinets that have formed before or on December 31 2010. Altogether, a total of 640 cabinets- -coalitions, single party and non-partisan- are included.

Purpose:

The purpose of the data archive project is to rectify a lack of comparable comprehensive data on the relation between citizens' and central actors of representative democracy's views of democratic values and attitudes, and systematic information on central political actors and the institutions in which they exist.

Despite the large amount of private and public resources spent on foreign education, there is no systematic evidence that foreign-educated individuals foster democracy in their home countries. Using a unique panel dataset on foreign students starting in the 1950s, I show that foreign-educated individuals promote democracy in their home country, but only if the foreign education is acquired in democratic countries. The results are robust to several estimation techniques, to different definitions of democracy, and to the inclusion of a variety of control variables, including democracy in trading partners, neighboring countries, level of income, and level and stock of education. (JEL D72, I21, O15, O17, P26)

France: Electoral democracy index: The latest value from 2023 is 0.877 index points, a decline from 0.879 index points in 2022. In comparison, the world average is 0.498 index points, based on data from 171 countries. Historically, the average for France from 1960 to 2023 is 0.859 index points. The minimum value, 0.753 index points, was reached in 1960 while the maximum of 0.895 index points was recorded in 2014.

Scholars have expressed concern over waning support for democracy worldwide. But what do ordinary citizens mean by the term “democracy," and how do their definitions of democracy influence their support for it? Using global cross-national survey data, this study demonstrates that individual variation in understanding of democracy is substantively linked to democratic support across countries and regime contexts. Namely, individuals who define democracy in terms of elections and the protection of civil liberties and those with greater conceptual complexity express higher support for democracy. This relationship between democratic conceptualization and support holds across diverse political contexts and alternative explanations. These results suggest that it is essential to take into account divergent conceptualizations of democracy—and how they may vary systematically—in analyzing popular opinions of democracy.

The data arose from an inquiry into liberal democratic performance, understood as the delivery of liberal democratic values, or how far liberal democratic governments achieve in practice the values to which they subscribe in principle. Normative inquiry established that liberal democracy is founded on the principles of liberty and equality, which are achieved in practice through the operation of eight values: the legal values of civil rights, property rights, political rights and minority rights; and the institutional values of accountability, representation, constraint and participation. Twenty-one quantitative indicators of liberal democratic performance from a variety of sources were selected as proxy measures for these eight values. Data were collected for 40 countries (both new and old liberal democracies) for the years 1970 to 1998. The disaggregated structure of the database aimed to provide a range of scores for each country across different liberal democratic values, rather than subsuming them into a single 'democracy index'. These data are being used to investigate four main issues: (1) the extent to which there has been a 'third wave' of democratisation; (2) the comparative performance of old, established liberal democracies; (3) the relationship between constitutional design and liberal democratic performance; (4) and the relationship between economic development and liberal democratic performance. The data were primarily used descriptively, rather than for causal analysis. In order to 'ground' the data and check its plausibility, the data were supplemented with more detailed qualitative material on particular countries and issues. Overall the research aimed to provide a global comparative depiction of liberal democratic performance.

The replication data consists of 5 files: 1) The Pew database 2) Replication code for the Pew database 3) The World Values Survey database 4) Replication code for the World Values Survey database 5) The population data used for weighting Instructions are contained inside the .do files Please contact the authors if additional questions arise.

Large majorities in nearly every country support democracy, according to studies of cross-national surveys. But many of these reports have treated as missing data persons who did not provide a substantive response when asked to offer an opinion about the suitability of democracy as a regime type for their country, which has led to substantial overestimates of expressed support for democracy in some countries. This article discusses the consequences of excluding such nonsubstantive responses and offers suggestions to improve the study of popular support for democracy.

The Democracy Index is based on 60 indicators, grouped into five categories: electoral process and pluralism, civil liberties, functioning of government, political participation and political culture. Countries are given a rating on a zero to ten scale, and the overall index is the average of the five total category scores. Each country is then grouped into four types of regimes, based on their average score: "full democracies", "flawed democracies", "hybrid regimes" and "authoritarian regimes". For additional details, please refer to: https://www.eiu.com/n/global-themes/democracy-index/ The data included in Data360 is a subset of the data available from the source. Please refer to the source for complete data and methodology details.

Despite waves of democratic backsliding over the last decade, most global citizens still claim to support democracy. On the other hand, many citizens become more supportive of specific anti-democratic actions when their preferred political side can benefit. How, then, do citizens justify their consistent “explicit support for democracy” with their more malleable support for the implementation of liberal democracy? This paper uses cross-national survey data from 66 countries and two methods—a standard cross-sectional analysis and a with-in country variation design—to show that a citizen’s conceptualization of democracy, or what democracy means to them, is subject to partisan-motivated reasoning. In other words, citizens are more likely to conceptualize democracy in illiberal terms, like emphasizing the need for obeying authority, when their preferred political party is in power. The findings suggest one’s conception of democracy can be a fluid attitude that citizens mold to match their partisan self-interest.