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Status: activeType: 🔬 researchCountry: Sweden Website: www.v-dem.net
Status active
Type 🔬 research
Country Sweden
Website www.v-dem.net
Contact contact@v-dem.net
Concepts Democracy Liberal Democracy Representative Democracy
Last activity 2026-09-16 dod
Site live; Democracy Report 2026 and press coverage current as of September 2026

V-Dem Institute

V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) is an independent research institute headquartered at the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. It conceptualises and measures democracy through five high-level principles — electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian — collecting data across hundreds of indicators covering more than 200 polities from 1789 to the present.1

What it does

The V-Dem Institute is "the executive management arm of V-Dem with responsibility for most aspects of the data collection efforts, management and coordination of several large research programs, and for most of the outreach, dissemination, and collaborations with policy/practitioners’ organizations."1 Its flagship annual publication, the Democracy Report, is released every March and is free to download alongside the underlying dataset, scientific articles, and working papers.

Democracy Report 2026

The 2026 edition, Unraveling The Democratic Era?, found that democratic backsliding is no longer confined to newer or fragile democracies. As the Institute's press release put it: "Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world."2 Six of the ten newly autocratising countries the report identified for 2025 were in Europe and North America, including Italy, the United Kingdom, and the USA.2

Why it's on our radar

V-Dem's Democracy Report is one of the measurement projects most frequently cited by organisations across the Democracy Landscape when framing the state of global democracy — including Folio Collective, whose September 2026 event on whether to "celebrate or reimagine" democracy opened by summarising the 2026 report's findings: "The Democracy Report 2026 by V-Dem Institute paints a gloomy global picture: democracy is ‘facing existential challenges around the world’."3 V-Dem doesn't design or advocate for governance reform itself, but its data is the evidentiary backbone much of the rest of the landscape's advocacy and reform work relies on.

See also

  1. "The V-Dem Institute is the executive management arm of V-Dem with responsibility for most aspects of the data collection efforts, management and coordination of several large research programs, and for most of the outreach, dissemination, and collaborations with policy/practitioners’ organizations." About ✓ Verified, V-Dem, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩↩

  2. "Democratic backsliding is now happening in well-established democracies. Democracy in the USA is deteriorating at unprecedented speed, and media and journalists are increasingly targeted across the world." "Democratic Backsliding Reaches Western Democracies, with U.S. Decline "Unprecedented"" ✓ Verified, V-Dem press release, 17 March 2026. ↩↩

  3. "The Democracy Report 2026 by V-Dem Institute paints a gloomy global picture: democracy is ‘facing existential challenges around the world’." Folio Collective's introduction to "Should we celebrate democracy today — or reimagine it for tomorrow?" ✓ Verified, accessed 16 September 2026. ↩

History