Ali Ahmida to serve as expert on Libya for online database of democracy around the world

Ali Ahmida, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of Political Science, has been invited to participate in the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project, an online database that provides a conceptualization and measurement of democracy in all counties of the world, from 1900 to the present.

With approximately 3,000 country experts, the V-Dem project seeks to collect data on over 300 indicators of various aspects of democracy that are tied to seven core principles of democracy:  electoral, liberal, majoritarian, consensual, participatory, deliberative and egalitarian.  Ahmida has been asked to serve as an expert on Libya.

The V-Dem database will be the largest of its kind, which will enable highly detailed, nuanced analysis of nearly all aspects of democracy in a country.  It will also allow for quick, summary comparisons between countries based on aggregated scores for the seven core principles of democracy.  All data will be downloadable from a public V-Dem website.

A pilot phase of the study, covering 12 countries, was completed in 2011.  A total of 462,000 data points were generated.

The V-Dem project is a collaboration among the Department of Political Science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden; the Kellogg Institute at the University of Notre Dame, USA; the Department of Political Science at Lund University, Sweden; and the Department of Political Science at Boston University, USA.