Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Dataset

v-dem.net

Democracy indices for 200+ countries stretching back to 1789. The codebook and country reports are the pieces worth importing alongside the data.

With democracy indices for over 200 countries running back to 1789, this fits questions about how a country's institutions have changed over long stretches of time — judicial independence or press freedom, say, rather than just a headline democracy score. The codebook matters as much as the data, documenting exactly how country experts coded each measure, and is worth importing alongside any numbers used. Because the indices rely on expert coding rather than a hard count, checking the codebook's definition before treating a score as a plain fact is worthwhile.