Contents

Contents 2

1 Notes 3

2 Conceptual Scheme 4

2.1 Principles – Measured by V-Dem’s Democracy Indices 4

2.2 Aggregation Procedures 5

2.3 Components 6

2.4 Indicators 7

2.5 Summary 8

3 Data Collection 10

3.1 History of Polities 10

3.2 Coding and Variable Types 11

3.3 V-Dem Codebook Structure 12

3.4 V-Dem Datasets 13

3.5 Country Expert Recruitment 13

3.5.1 Historical V-Dem recruitment 14

3.6 Policy on Confidentiality 15

3.7 Expert Coding Process 16

3.8 Bridge- and lateral coding 17

3.9 Overlap coding 18

3.10 Anchoring Vignettes 18

3.11 Phases of the data collection 19

4 Measurement 21

4.1 The Questionnaire 21

4.2 Identifying, Correcting, and Quantifying Measurement Error 21

4.3 Measurement Models 21

4.4 Identifying Remaining Errors 23

4.5 Correcting Errors 24

4.6 Versions of C-Variables 25

5 Bibliography 27