The second project is Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a large global collaboration using mostly expert coding to produce indicators of hundreds of attributes of all kinds of democracy for every country (and colony) in the world from 1900 to the present. V-Dem does use a very complex relational database and a custom-designed online coding interface and management tools. It also recruits and pays hundreds (eventually a few thousand) experts in almost every country. And it requires many kinds of aggregation and disaggregation: of expert ratings into summary ratings, of indicators into scales and indices measuring several levels of components and principles of democracy, of smaller countries into larger countries, and of bigger countries into splintered countries. I will make a presentation summarizing some lessons learned from these two projects for the new project collecting comprehensive data on party-system change.
