Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) represents a worldwide collaborative effort of 3,000 scholars and experts. It measures democracy with a new, multidimensional, point of view. V-Dem is headquartered at the V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg.
The focus of the Democracy Report 2018 is “Democracy for All?” for two reasons. First, citizens — not just the territorial unit in which they live — are central to democracy. In addition to the conventional averages across countries, the V-Dem Institute therefore analyzes liberal and electoral democracy across the world weighted by the size of each country’s population.
Second, even in democracies, some groups – women, social groups, and the poor – are systematically disadvantaged from access to political power.