A package to load, explore and work with the most recent (v9) V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) dataset.

V-Dem: Global Standards, Local Knowledge

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.

We are a team of over 50 social scientists on six continents. We work with more than 3,000 country experts and a truly global International Advisory Board. Read more about the work we do here.

The vdemdata R package

This package contains the most recent V-Dem dataset (v9) and provides some additional functions:

• vdem: Load the dataset
• fill_vdem: Load the dataset with filled election variables (observed only in election years, after filled with values of election years to facilitate country-year obs.)
• var_info: Print to the console basic information on a specific variable as given in the codebook
• find_var: Search variables via keywords

Data visualization

• plot_indicator: Plot V-Dem indicators for exploratory data analysis

Installation

# Install the development version of the vdemdata package 
# (since this package is still an ongoing project, 
# keep checking for updates, new functions, etc.!)

# First, you need to have the devtools package installed
install.packages("devtools")
# now, install the vdemdata package directly from GitHub
devtools::install_github("vdeminstitute/vdemdata")