Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) is a unique approach to conceptualizing and measuring democracy. V-Dem distinguishes between five high-level principles of democracy: electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, and collects data to measure these principles.
The V-Dem institute has lots of content: which parts of their research can we use illustrate our articles?
The V-Dem Dataset includes the world's most comprehensive and detailed democracy ratings. The latest version of the dataset and associated reference documents can be downloaded free of charge. NOTE: this only includes data of countries that have some form of democracy.
The V-Dem Institute publishes a number of high-profile datasets that describe qualities of different governments, annually published and publicly available for free.
The Democracy Indices by V-Dem are a dataset that describe qualities of different governments. Datasets include information on hundreds of indicator variables describing all aspects of government, especially on the quality of democracy, inclusivity, and other economic indicators.