Staffan Lindberg et al. " V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy". Journal of Democracy, Vol.25, No.3 (2014): 159-169.

Staffan Lindberg et al. " V-Dem: A New Way to Measure Democracy". Journal of Democracy, Vol.25, No.3 (2014): 159-169.

• The enormous amounts of money spend by Western governments to promote democracy are undermined by the inability of Western governments to comprehensively and specifically gauge democracy. While benchmarks can be established, comparing levels of democracy within countries is even more difficult (159).
• This paper represents a new model for understanding and measuring democracy, through the 'Varieties of Democracy', abbreviated 'V-Dem', project. This project is comprehensive and measures the applicability of five democratic traditions to each nation: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian. Each state then also corresponds to a 'thin' or 'thick' version of each principle, representing the strength of that pillar (160).
• The group plans to expand the work done here to also measure majoritarian and consensual forms of democracy (160). A fuller plan of the work that will be undertaken and methods used to available from page 160 to page 163.
• The electoral concept measures the quality of electoral processes undertaken by that state, it is the only concept which is constitutive of a democracy, which cannot exist without elections; the liberal component measures the protection of individual and minority rights; the participatory component looks at the extend of citizen participation in governance, through the strength of civil society and direct democracy; the deliberative component measures the extent to which decisions are made through dialogue; and the egalitarian component looks at the equal distribution of economic, social, and political rights (160).
• While most indexes to measure democracy only look at electoral and liberal definitions of the concept, the V-Dem project includes a much more broad basis for measuring forms of democracy, and capturing each of its many permutations (161).
• The long timespan of the data used by the V-Dem project allows for better predictions and more accurate calculations within country-specific or regional trends. The example provided is that the democratic deficit in Sub-Saharan Africa is better explained through broader trends following decolonization. Moreover, the single value can be broken down into the components of democracy, allowing for closer observation of democratization (163-165).
• The differentiation of each component score into scores for individual indicators develops the different patterns for each reform clearly. This way the legislative or administrative changes which result in more or less democracy can be pinpointed to years or periods of specific time (166-168).
• Looking historically at the patterns of individual liberties or indicator changes can provide insights into potential paths for democratization and analysis common patterns of administrative decisions preceding democratic or authoritarian shifts in government (168).