| dc.description.abstract | Social scientists and practitioners have been limited in their work by the paucity of data about subnational institutions and practices. Such data could help scholars refine regime typologies, improve theories of democratization and regime change, better understand subnational democracy, and illuminate issues of development, conflict, and governance. They could also enable democracy and development advocates to design more effective programs and officials to create better policies. This paper addresses the lack of data by introducing 22 subnational measures from a new dataset, Varieties of Democracy. Validity tests demonstrate that the measures’ strengths outweigh their weaknesses. The measures excel in covering all subnational levels for most countries, capturing different elements of subnational elections, and including a variety of dimensions of elections and civil liberties. The measures also offer unmatched global and temporal coverage. The paper demonstrates how these strengths can provide scholars and practitioners with the benefits described above. | sv |
| dc.description.sponsorship | I am grateful for comments on earlier versions of this paper from Brigitte Seim and Jan Teorell. This paper also benefited greatly Andrew Slivka’s review of existing work, Matthew Maguire’s assistance with the design and execution of the first convergent validity test, and Mark Patteson’s and Hayley Rassuchine’s research assistance. The development of the measures themselves benefited from discussions with V-Dem colleagues, particularly John Gerring and Jan Teorell, consultations with scholars of subnational democracy, and research assistance from Brandon Mordue. These measures would not exist were it not for the enormous amount of time and effort Michael Coppedge and Staffan Lindberg devoted to development and management of V-Dem. This research project was supported by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Grant M13- 0559:1, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; by Swedish Research Council, Grant C0556201, PI: Staffan I. Lindberg, V-Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Jan Teorell, Department of Political Science, Lund University, Sweden; and by Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation to Wallenberg Academy Fellow Staffan I. Lindberg, Grant 2013.0166, V- Dem Institute, University of Gothenburg, Sweden; ) and for V-Dem data collection and aggregation by the Swedish Research Council and the National Science Foundation (SES-1423944). We performed simulations and other computational tasks using resources provided by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing (CRC) through the High Performance Computing section and the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) at the National Supercomputer Centre in Sweden. We specifically acknowledge the assistance of In-Saeng Suh at CRC and Johan Raber at SNIC in facilitating our use of their respective systems. | sv |
