Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Author | Haakon Gjerløw,Daniel Pemstein,Kyle L Marquardt,Agnes Cornell,Daniel Ziblatt,Jan Teorell,Svend-Erik Skaaning,Carl Henrik Knutsen,Tore Wig,Brigitte Seim,John Gerring |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343318823866 |
| Subject Matter | Special Data Features |
Special Data Feature
Introducing the Historical Varieties
of Democracy dataset: Political institutions
in the long 19th century
Carl Henrik Knutsen
a
, Jan Teorell
b
,
Tore Wig
a
, Agnes Cornell
b
, John Gerring
c
,
Haakon Gjerløw
a
, Svend-Erik Skaaning
d
,
Daniel Ziblatt
e
, Kyle L Marquardt
f
,
Daniel Pemstein
g
, and Brigitte Seim
h
Abstract
The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and
evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The datasetcovers 91 polities globally –
including mostlarge, sovereign states, as well as somesemi-sovereign entities andlarge colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for
many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers 1900 to the
present – together these two datasets cover the bulk of ‘modern history’. Historical V-Dem also includes several new
indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19th-century polities. We describe the data, coding process, and
different strategies employedin Historical V-Dem to copewith issues of reliabilityand validity and ensure intertemporal
and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we describe patterns of democratization
in the ‘long 19th century’. Finally, we investigate how interstate war relates to subsequent democratization.
Keywords
democracy, democratization, political institutions
Introduction
Although many datasets describe political institutions in
countries across the world, the Varieties of Democracy
(V-Dem) dataset (Coppedge et al., 2018a,b) is the most
wide-ranging, including several hundred indicators and
indices. While V-Dem’s country coverage is impressive,
historical coverage begins in 1900, omitting half of the
period commonly labeled ‘modern history’. This omis-
sion poses a hindrance to systematic comparative
description of institutional and political developments
during this era, but also implies that several theories of
political development lack the requisite data for testing.
The Historical Varieties of Democracy (Historical
V-Dem) dataset remedies this situation. Historical
V-Dem spans all major countries and several other
polities, globally, between 1789 and 1920, encapsulating
what Hobsbawm (1962, 1975, 1987) has called the
‘long 19th century’. With Historical V-Dem, most
a
University of Oslo
b
Lund University
c
University of Texas at Austin
d
Aarhus University
e
Harvard University
f
University of Gothenburg
g
North Dakota State University
h
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Corresponding author:
c.h.knutsen@stv.uio.no
Journal of Peace Research
2019, Vol. 56(3) 440–451
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0022343318823866
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