In this article the authors introduce a new dataset called “The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset”, or Historical V-Dem for short, which contains about 260 indicators on political regimes and institutions covering 91 polities globally from 1789 to 1920.
The authors describe the data, coding process, and different strategies employed to cope with issues of reliability and validity and to ensure intertemporal and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset they describe patterns of democratization in the ‘long 19th century’, and investigate how interstate war relates to subsequent democratization.
Learn more on journals.sagepub.com