V-Dem Institute
The V-Dem Institute, founded by Staffan I. Lindberg in 2014, is an independent research institute that serves as the headquarters of the V-Dem Project, a database that seeks to conceptualize and measure democracy. V-Dem defines democracy using seven key principles that emphasize the concept of "rule of the people." As part of its work, it publishes a dataset known as the V-Dem Democracy Indices that is based on its key principles.
The headquarters of the project is based at the department of political science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Democracy indices
The V-Dem Institute publishes a number of high-profile datasets that describe qualities of different governments, annually published and publicly available for free. These datasets are used by political scientists, due to information on hundreds of indicator variables describing all aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators. Compared to other measures of democracy, the V-Dem Institute's measures of democracy are more granular and 2020 included "more than 470 indicators, 82 mid-level indices, and 5 high-level indices covering 202 polities from the period of 1789–2019". Political scientist Daniel Hegedus describes V-Dem as "the most important provider of quantitative democracy data for scholarly research".The V-Dem institute also republishes 59 other indicators and several other indices which are created, in part, with the assistance of V-Dem indices. The Digital Society Project is a subset of indicators on V-Dem's survey which asks questions about the political status of social media and the internet.