Contributing to the recent revival in studies of the effects of the biographical characteristics of leaders, this paper presents an attempt at the most complete description to date of the world’s current leaders. The Global Leadership Project (GLP) provides the first dataset offering...

A large literature addresses the impact of regimes on domestic policies and outcomes, e.g., education, health, inequality, redistribution, public spending, wages, infrastructure, volatility, productivity, and economic growth. We add to this literature by focusing on how regime type relates to...

Why is the exercise of political power highly concentrated in some polities and widely dispersed in others? We argue that one persistent causal factor is demographic. Populous polities are characterized by more concentrated structures of authority. To explain this relationship we invoke two...

This study argues that strong parties play a critical role in fostering economic development. The theory explores how parties broaden the constituencies to which policy makers respond and help politicians to solve coordination problems. These features ensure that politicians engage in better...

The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project is generating a new dataset of indicators for various facets of democracy. Although many of the indicators are quite useful by themselves, most users of V-Dem data probably require measures of democracy at a higher level of aggregation.This paper...

With Version 6, we are releasing new data for 113 countries covering 2013 and 2014, and for 76 of these countries data is also available for 2015 – in addition to the full data for all 173 countries from 1900-2012. The dataset now includes about 350 unique and disaggregated democracy...

For policymakers, activists, academics, and citizens around the world the conceptualization and measurement of democracy matters. The needs of democracy promoters and social scientists are convergent. We all need better ways to measure democracy. In the first section of this document we...

This document lists (a) every country in the eventual V-Dem database, (b) the years for which we have collect data or plan to collect data (in parentheses next to the entry); (c) the polities that comprise each country’s 20th century history (even if falling outside the time-period that we...

This study takes a new tack on the question of modernization and democracy, focused on the outcome of theoretical interest. We argue that economic development affects the electoral component of democracy but has minimal impact on other components of this diffuse concept. This is so because...