vdem-analysis

What problem does it solve?

This Skill turns large V-Dem democracy datasets into measurable democratic indices, identifies democratic backsliding episodes, and enables panel regression analyses linking institutional quality to economic outcomes.

Core Features & Use Cases

• V-Dem data loading at scale: Efficiently loads the V-Dem Country-Year CSV using selective columns and chunked reading, with optional year and country filtering.
• Backsliding detection: Flags country-years where a democracy index declines by a configurable threshold over a rolling window and ranks episodes by severity.
• Publication-ready visualization: Produces democracy trend plots for selected countries and regional comparison plots (e.g., distribution by region for a given year).
• Panel regression pipeline: Runs Fixed Effects, Random Effects, or Pooled OLS models with clustered standard errors and optional log transformation of key predictors (e.g., GDP per capita).
• Use case: Assess whether within-country changes in economic development (GDP per capita) are associated with changes in liberal democracy over time while also auditing where and when backsliding occurs.

Quick Start

Use the V-Dem Country-Year Core CSV to compute backsliding episodes and run a fixed-effects panel regression of liberal democracy on (log) GDP per capita for your chosen year range and countries.