Historical Varieties of Democracy Project

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Project Co-Directors: Professor Jan Teorell, Lund University (Sweden); Prof John Gerring, Boston University, Prof Svend-Erik Skanning, Aarhus University (Denmark), Prof Agnes Cornell, Aarhus University (Denmark), Prof Carl-Henrik Knutsen, Oslo University (Norway), Daniel Ziblatt (Harvard University)

The Historical Varieties of Democracy Project (Historical V-Dem) is an international effort to produce annual historical data based on new indicators of democracy and other political institutions for all countries for every year between 1800 and 1920. With historical measures of political institutions and democracy in great demand, our data collection project will provide the global community with the world’s most comprehensive, accurate, and detailed measures of political institutions for this period across nearly all countries in the world centered on five disaggregated dimensions of political institutions: contestation; rule of law; civil liberties, inclusion, and decentralization.